Search Results

This chapter shows that many of Bowen’s female characters have curious relationships with inanimate objects, endowing them with special powers or personal attributes. The pattern of these relations, in which certain objects obtain an unusual significance to their possessors, even, in some cases, to the extent of being preferred over relationships with other people, is obvious in Bowen’s works, yet it eludes the usual definitions of fetishism. Critics attempting to theorize female fetishism have tended to rely on paradigms articulated by Freud (ie erotic) or Marx (ie consumerist). Neither of these constructs, however, adequately describe the relationships with objects that possess overwhelming importance to many of Bowen’s characters and, through these attachments, lead often lead to perverse consequences. Recently, however, German theorist Hartmut Böhme has postulated that fetishism is an entirely European concept, one crucial to our understanding of Modernism. Using Böhme’s axioms of fetishism and Modernism as well as insights from anthropological and theological sources, this chapter explores female characters’ ‘object relations’ (not necessarily in the Freudian sense of the term) in Bowen’s works.

The problem of philosophical aesthetics may be formulated in a double sense: What justifies the privileged access of art to truth? What constitutes the historicity of art’s “configurational” status? The limitations of a principal component of the aesthetic tradition, namely, its basis in an immutable human nature, are all too evident. What historical approach to the social collective today can underwrite the consensual principle underlying Kant’s idea of taste? And, to take up another tenet of his aesthetic theory, what remains of the reflective judgment in an era when, as Benjamin put it, technology has subjected "the human sensorium to a more complex type of training’? The chapter situates Benjamin’s thought in relation to three strands, focusing in each case on one of Benjamin’s writings. Regarding the linkage of art and philosophy, what may be termed the ontological status of art, it draws on the essay on The Elective Affinities. Regarding the political-pedagogic function of art, it examines ’The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility.’ And regarding the question of beauty and Schein, it focuses on the issue of commodity fetishism as treated in The Arcades Project.

French Impressionist Cinema, explained as fetishized version of the way filmic meaning was expected to “emerge” from moving photography, focusing on Abel Gance's 1922 film La Roue as well as works by Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Jean Renoir.

Chapter 2 shifts the focus from tragedy to a new literary and artistic form, parody. Although tragedy continued to be a popular genre among townspeople, parody became a more prevalent form of literary and artistic practice from the middle of the eighteenth century. I argue that Edo’s distinctly urban atmosphere of fluid and heterogeneous social interactions gave rise to the predominant status of parody in popular art and literature, for the dialogical form of parody— engendering new and surprising perspectives by juxtaposing and melding incongruities such as high and low, old and new— could encapsulate the dynamic of the emerging social formations. To show this dynamic, the chapter also explains the social space of literary and print culture through which a coterie of cultural producers was formed and the reading public emerged.

This chapter addresses the difficult relationship between words and images, as religiously encoded in the Second Commandment (“You shall not make for yourself a graven image”) and as inscribed at the heart of art history as the clash between logos and icon, meaning and image. A discussion of two paintings by Nicholas Poussin (1594–1665) that depict scenes of idolatry leads to the argument that Poussin's dilemma exemplifies the central problem of art history: How are we to make use of visual representation without lapsing into meaningless idolatry? Poussin's solution, it is suggested, is to focus not merely on what idolaters and iconoclasts believe (or are believed to believe by their adversaries) but also on what they actually do to one another-particularly acts of violence inflicted on alleged idol worshippers.

Chapter 2 lays out the various dimensions of Karl Marx’s conceptualization of alienation that are used in the analysis of the pre–Civil War people of the Great Dismal Swamp. It is argued that the concept of alienation is far more important to understanding modern history than most archaeologists give it credit for being. Detailing various central elements of Marx’s alienation, such as people are alienated from themselves, their labor, other people, the real world around them, and their awareness of their interconnectedness to all things in the real world around them, this discussion centers upon how alienation appears and changes in modern history. Specific issues, like commodity fetishism, are also discussed in detail and my new concept, “the charismata of commodities,” is also developed. Finally, throughout the chapter, sections that briefly discuss how specific issues related to alienation will be shown to connect directly with the historical people of the Great Dismal Swamp.

This chapter analyzes Disney's full-length features to illustrate how Disney develops mutual affection-images as interfaces for the mode of animistic mimesis. It is in these mutual affection-images where viewers were most likely to feel wonder. The chapter then argues that such images entice and instruct in a different mode of consumerism, one closer to fetishism than the lifestyle consumer promoted by classical Hollywood. Disney contributes uniquely to consumer culture by making newly visible a daydreaming consumer oriented towards their own fantasies, not towards the views or opinions of others.

This chapter explores the inclusion of graphic sexual content in post-millennial cinema. Art films have increasingly incorporated scenes of unsimulated, hardcore sex acts—traditionally associated with pornography—into their narratives in recent years. Arousal, perhaps more so than any of the other themes explored in Extreme Cinema, wields the potential for affective dissonance. In these films, sexual transgression and eroticism might turn towards disgust, signifiers of pain might be confused for signifiers of sexual arousal, or morally objectionable content might elicit sensual arousal—at the intersection of violence and fetishism. The films discussed in this chapter include: Wetlands, Nymphomaniac Volumes I and II, 9 Songs, Helter Skelter.

Viridiana is a critically acclaimed film directed in 1961 (made with special permission by Franco himself) by world-renowned director Luis Buñuel. Buñuel’s film was the official entry representing Franco’s Spain at the International Cannes Film Festival, where it was awarded the Palme d’Or. Vigorously denounced by the Vatican’s newspaper as blasphemous, the film was immediately banned in Spain until Franco’s death. This chapter reads Viridiana allegorically as a film that undermines Francoist kitsch aesthetics from within. By means of its intricate mise-en-scène of the gothic, decadent mansion of its perverse protagonist, a subtle portrayal of Franco himself, the film insightfully depicts Francoism as a rarefied ideology, as a sublimated space suspended in a kitsch melancholy bubble lost in time and space.

Shakespeare’s Folio continues to take centre stage in this chapter. The book has become a modern fetish, not only of the book as such (the most studied individual edition in history) but of authorship and of subjectivity. The theory of the fetish is traced from Marx’s Kapital to William Pietz. The chapter also considers the history of the word by way of European colonialism, and links this to the colonial presence of Shakespeare in Africa, China, and elsewhere. The argument then transfers to artistic representation of book fetishism in modern China, before suggesting that the ‘cult of the book’ has found a modern home in commodification and digitization. As books move from sacred to secular, they also move into a world of ambiguous economic value in which, like art works, they are modern relics.