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Anthony David Nuttall 1937–2007

Laurence Lerner

in Proceedings of the British Academy, Volume 161, Biographical Memoirs of Fellows, VIII

Anthony David Nuttall (1937–2007), a Fellow of the British Academy, was born on April 25, 1937, and grew up in Hereford. He attended Hereford Grammar School and then Watford Grammar School, where he ... More

Anthony David Nuttall (1937–2007), a Fellow of the British Academy, was born on April 25, 1937, and grew up in Hereford. He attended Hereford Grammar School and then Watford Grammar School, where he received a thorough, old-fashioned classical education. Nuttall then went to Merton College in the University of Oxford, where he met his lifelong friend Stephen Medcalf. In 1962, he was appointed lecturer in English at the new University of Sussex, rising to professor ten years later, and in 1978 he became Pro-Vice-Chancellor. After twenty-two years teaching at Sussex, Nuttall applied for a fellowship at New College, Oxford. Common Sky (1974) was the book in which he emerged as a critic with a distinctive and compelling way of looking at literature. Another book, Overheard by God (1980) is about George Herbert's poetry, but its first, riveting sentence displays the brilliance of its immodesty. In New Mimesis (1983), Nuttall discusses the present state of literary theory. He also wrote Essay on Man (1984), The Alternative Trinity (1998), and The Stoic in Love (1989).Less

The Rhythms of Character in Katherine Mansfield’s ‘Miss Brill’

Helen Rydstrand

in Sounding Modernism: Rhythm and Sonic Mediation in Modern Literature and Film

This chapter investigates the ways that Katherine Mansfield’s ‘Miss Brill’ is constructed through textual rhythms. Specifically, it argues that the story is distinguished by an arrhythmic duality ... More

This chapter investigates the ways that Katherine Mansfield’s ‘Miss Brill’ is constructed through textual rhythms. Specifically, it argues that the story is distinguished by an arrhythmic duality created largely by the way that Miss Brill’s resolutely cheerful voice, which reaches us via free indirect discourse, is repeatedly undercut by a discordant undertone of melancholy. This contributes to a pattern of self-deception repeated at multiple levels of the story, culminating in a fantasy about her everyday life being part of a theatrical production. Mansfield’s mimetic use of rhythm serves a profoundly ethical purpose, using rhythm to sympathetically portray the depth of its subject’s loneliness and to expose the social structures that lead to it. The story also shows the influence on modern prose style of the relatively new field of psychology in its exploration of consciousness, emotion, and the relation between the self and the world. Beyond its ethical concerns, Mansfield’s experiment with rhythms for mimetic purposes also aims to deepen our understanding of the subtle cadences and confluences of inner and outer experience. In this, she contributes to the broader ontological and aesthetic conversations surrounding rhythm in her time.Less

Boccaccio's Auerbach: Holding the Mirror up to Mimesis

Albert Russell Ascoli

in A Local Habitation and a Name: Imagining Histories in the Italian Renaissance

This chapter, like the previous one, interrogates the use of a single text or author to define a major break in Western cultural and especially literary history, in this case Auerbach's reading in ... More

This chapter, like the previous one, interrogates the use of a single text or author to define a major break in Western cultural and especially literary history, in this case Auerbach's reading in Mimesis of a single story of the Decameron (IV.2, the story of “Frate Alberto”) to define a break between the allegorical figuralism of Dante's Commedia and the supposed “realism” and “naturalism” of Boccaccio's style. The chapter argues that Auerbach, while he may have been correct to assert that Boccaccio contributes to the development of a mimetic style in the western literary tradition, misses fundamental aspects of the story he analyses, and the day in which it is situated, particularly its intricate reflections on the problem of representing “the real” in literature and on the presumptuousness of Dante's claims to bear witness to the truth of human life after death.Less

A feeling for things: objects, affects, mimesis

Simon Mussell

in Critical Theory and Feeling: The Affective Politics of the Early Frankfurt School

Chapter 3 looks at how an affective politics underpins critical theory’s engagement with the world of objects. The chapter begins by outlining the recent upsurge in theoretical writing on ... More

Chapter 3 looks at how an affective politics underpins critical theory’s engagement with the world of objects. The chapter begins by outlining the recent upsurge in theoretical writing on objects/things, especially within the much-hyped field of ‘object-oriented ontology’ or ‘speculative realism’. After drawing attention to the major social and political deficiencies of these contemporary approaches to objects, the chapter offers an account of early critical theory that draws out a more philosophically viable and socio-politically engaged orientation toward the object world. To make the case, the author recovers elements of Siegfried Kracauer’s materialist film theory, before exploring two complementary concepts from Adorno’s work, namely, the preponderance of the object, and mimesis. Offering a staunch critique of Habermas’s rejection of mimesis, the chapter considers critical theory’s emphasis on a political and affective aesthetics as playing a crucial part in how one conceptualizes and experiences objects. As a result, a key distinction is drawn between today’s avowedly post-critical, non-humanist ontologists on one side, and the critical proto-humanism that motivates the early Frankfurt School on the other.Less

Dissimulating Blackness: The Degenerative Satires of Paul Beatty and Percival Everett

Christian Schmidt

in Post-Soul Satire: Black Identity after Civil Rights

This chapter provides a reading of three novels – Paul Beatty’s The White Boy Shuffle and Slumberland and Percival Everett’s A History of the African American People [Proposed] by Strom Thurmond as ... More

This chapter provides a reading of three novels – Paul Beatty’s The White Boy Shuffle and Slumberland and Percival Everett’s A History of the African American People [Proposed] by Strom Thurmond as Told to Percival Everett and James Kincaid – that engage in degenerative satire, which complicates the mimetic representation of satiric texts. This chapter argues that these novels satirize not only clichéd tropes of blackness but also the presumption that blackness can or should be represented. Ultimately, this chapter shows how these novels destabilize the very notion of blackness.Less

The saving face of death: anthropology and the scene of knowing

Paul Carter

in Beyond text?: Critical practices and sensory anthropology

This chapter develops a speculative account of the role that listening and architecture may have in reconfiguring the desire of anthropology to know the other through the face-to-face encounter. It ... More

This chapter develops a speculative account of the role that listening and architecture may have in reconfiguring the desire of anthropology to know the other through the face-to-face encounter. It stages three heterogeneous scenes of listening: the libretto and scenography for Luciano Berio's music theatre work, La Vera Storia, the staging of the conditions of self-knowing in the Phaedrus and some miscellaneous speculations about the visagéité of the wall. Through these scenes the wall is explored as a site of whispering, a gathering place of echoes and the place where it is proposed that anthropological insights may be had in recognizing that listening is always a matter of listening in and overhearing and being overheard.Less

The Psyche in Late Capitalism I: Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and the Crisis of Internalization

Benjamin Y. Fong

in Death and Mastery: Psychoanalytic Drive Theory and the Subject of Late Capitalism

Employs the drive theory developed in the first three chapters toward a reinterpretation of the culture industry thesis of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer.

Dante

Gian Maria Annovi

in Pier Paolo Pasolini: Performing Authorship

In chapter Two, I examine the thematization of authorial performance in La Divina Mimesis (Divine Mimesis, 1974). Composed over the course of several years, Divine Mimesis is Pasolini’s attempt to ... More

In chapter Two, I examine the thematization of authorial performance in La Divina Mimesis (Divine Mimesis, 1974). Composed over the course of several years, Divine Mimesis is Pasolini’s attempt to rewrite Dante’s Comedy and is comprised of drafts, working notes, tentative paratexts, and photographs. In it, Dante emerges as one of the most persistent and complex Pasolinian authorial personae, a model not only for his early realism, but also for his use of autobiography. Previous criticism of Divine Mimesis considered it a literary failure, or, at best, a metaphor for the shattering of authorial subjectivity. However, I argue that it is a pivotal work within Pasolini’s oeuvre, skillfully reinforcing the idea of an author in control of his work and even its reception. Divine Mimesis introduces us to an interpretative system in which authorship and the performance of an author failing in producing a cohesive text become central and explicit, producing a conception of identity as fluid, unfinished, or in the making.Less

La ciénaga: distanciation and embodiment

Deborah Martin

in The cinema of Lucrecia Martel

Chapter 1 argues that in La ciénaga, her first feature film, Lucrecia Martel effects an important challenge to the aesthetic codes which have defined intellectual and resistive cinema. It shows La ... More

Chapter 1 argues that in La ciénaga, her first feature film, Lucrecia Martel effects an important challenge to the aesthetic codes which have defined intellectual and resistive cinema. It shows La ciénaga to be a highly reflexive film which uses many of the distancing and defamiliarising techniques associated with political and counter cinemas. Yet the film’s aesthetics also function to challenge a disembodied intellect, or Cartesian viewing subjectivity by forming a transgressive material relationship between the viewer’s body and the sticky, swampy body of the film. Attending to the film both as a text with meaning, but also as a ‘body that performs’ (Kennedy), the chapter shows how the digetic experiments of child characters, and the filmic experiments which accompany them, work to counter the stagnation of the body and the domestication of perception associated with dominant cinematic forms. The chapter also shows how the processes of defamiliarisation in which the film engages are countered by its tactile and sensorial aesthetics, which it undertands as a form of refamiliarisation, a bringing into bodily proximity, of that which is abjected and excluded by the social order.Less

Presenting the unpresentable: the modernity of Burke’s Enquiry

Hélène Ibata

in The challenge of the sublime: From Burke's Philosophical Enquiry to British Romantic art

Chapter 2 furthers the argument that Burke’s Enquiry presented a challenge to visual artists by focusing on its contribution to theories of artistic representation. It places Burke’s views on ... More

Chapter 2 furthers the argument that Burke’s Enquiry presented a challenge to visual artists by focusing on its contribution to theories of artistic representation. It places Burke’s views on painting’s representational inadequacy within a broader reflection about the artistic medium, mimesis, and the presentation of the unpresentable. After arguing that the Enquiry outlines a shift from a mimetic conception of art to one which emphasises the artistic medium and, ultimately, the process of production of the artwork, the chapter examines the relevance of the Enquiry to modern aesthetics, by viewing it from the perspective of recent theories of the sublime (Lyotard’s in particular). This approach makes it possible to see in Burke’s conception intimations of what could be called an aesthetics of endeavour, in which the sublime becomes an immanent event of artistic production.Less

Turner: from sublime association to sublime energy

Hélène Ibata

in The challenge of the sublime: From Burke's Philosophical Enquiry to British Romantic art

This final chapter concludes the study with another major figure of British art, Joseph Mallord William Turner. Turner’s lifelong ambition to emulate the powers of poetry is shown to have led him to ... More

This final chapter concludes the study with another major figure of British art, Joseph Mallord William Turner. Turner’s lifelong ambition to emulate the powers of poetry is shown to have led him to provide one of the most adequate pictorial responses to the challenge initiated by Burke’s Enquiry. After examining the various channels through which eighteenth-century theories of the sublime reached Turner, the argument focuses on his radical transformation of the pictorial medium, as a means to overcome the mimetic limitations of visual representation and articulate the presentation of the unpresentable. His art is understood as the culmination of the reflection about the artistic medium which had been set in motion by the quest for the sublime, and by the growing awareness of inadequacies inherent to mimetic pictorial representation. It may be seen as the place where the aesthetics of the Enquiry were taken to their radical conclusion, leading to a resolute change of paradigms in visual representation.Less

A Theory of Comparison

M. David Litwa

in How the Gospels Became History: Jesus and Mediterranean Myths

This chapter presents a positive program of comparison. In doing so, it criticizes the method and presuppositions of mimesis criticism (spearheaded by Dennis Ronald McDonald). Mimesis criticism ... More

This chapter presents a positive program of comparison. In doing so, it criticizes the method and presuppositions of mimesis criticism (spearheaded by Dennis Ronald McDonald). Mimesis criticism compares texts on the basis of assuming direct genetic causations. A better theory vouches for polymorphous influence based on dynamic cultural interaction. Also treated is the notion of gospel genre, the identity of the evangelists, the themes of their gospels, and brief biographies of five contemporary Greco-Roman historians who serve as major sources of data: Diodorus of Sicily, Plutarch, Suetonius, Philostratus, and Iamblichus.Less

Introduction

Leigh Wilson

in Modernism and Magic: Experiments with Spiritualism, Theosophy and the Occult

The chapter places the argument of the book in relation to the most important work on the relation between modernism and the occult over the last 20 years. In challenging the conclusions of much of ... More

The chapter places the argument of the book in relation to the most important work on the relation between modernism and the occult over the last 20 years. In challenging the conclusions of much of this work, the chapter argues that occult discourses need to be seen as engaging with the idea of magic, and that a particular reading of magical ideas in the late 19th and early 20th centuries can open up a new way of thinking about modernist uses of occult discourses. The chapter also introduces new ways of thinking both of the idea of experiment and of mimesis, concepts that will be central to the argument in the rest of the book, and argues that modernists needed magical mimesis in order to construct their experiments.Less

Two Trauma Communities: A Philosophical Archaeology of Cultural and Clinical Trauma Theories

Vincenzo Di Nicola

in Trauma and Transcendence: Suffering and the Limits of Theory

While the goal of both clinical work and cultural research generally is the transformation and transcendence of trauma, these communities struggle to characterize trauma as a unified discourse even ... More

While the goal of both clinical work and cultural research generally is the transformation and transcendence of trauma, these communities struggle to characterize trauma as a unified discourse even within one discipline. This chapter makes three proposals that provide order for the concept of trauma through conceptual dichotomies that divide their discourses: first, the term has accrued a supplementarity or excess, which helps explain the variation between the clinical use of trauma and its cultural avatar; second, theorists must separate the ways the word trauma deployed within the trauma process; third, trauma must be separated radically from Event, which is the subtext of a cultural trauma theory. This philosophical archaeology offers keys of translation between these competing cultural and psychiatric trauma theories, calls to deactivate the desubjectivation associated with trauma, and opens new prospects for interdisciplinary research in these intersecting fields based on the possibilities of the Event.Less

“Has this thing appeared again tonight?”: Deus Ex Machina and Other Theatrical Interventions of the Supernatural

Freddie Rokem

in Things: Religion and the Question of Materiality

The appearance of the supernatural on the theatrical stage as well as on the movie screen, in particular through a deus ex machina, but also in the form of ghosts or dybbuks, is still, even after the ... More

The appearance of the supernatural on the theatrical stage as well as on the movie screen, in particular through a deus ex machina, but also in the form of ghosts or dybbuks, is still, even after the declaration of God's death a frequent phenomenon in modern and contemporary art. The stage can be seen as a utopian site, an aesthetic ‘no-place’, where the supernatural can appear, even if the audience does not necessarily ascribe to the religious belief-systems this kind of appearance implies. The chapter explores the interactions between the ‘language’ of performance, through which a certain dynamics is activated in the space we call the stage, on the one hand, and religious discursive practices or belief-systems, on the other, creating a discursive encounter where the religious things (alluding to the ghost in Shakespeare's Hamlet as the thing that appears again tonight) enter and even invade the aesthetic sphere of the performance.Less

Rituals of Hegemonic Masculinity: Cinema, Torture, and the Middle East

Viola Shafik

in Speaking about Torture

This chapter relates mass-mediated abuses against Arabs and Muslims in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantánamo to relevant U.S.-American films since the 1980s and to Middle Eastern films in order to show ... More

This chapter relates mass-mediated abuses against Arabs and Muslims in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantánamo to relevant U.S.-American films since the 1980s and to Middle Eastern films in order to show how such cultural representations are tied to the international power structure and what ideological premises underpin them. It argues that while depictions of physical abuse in U.S. and Middle Eastern films are interdependent and cross-referential, the two sets of film differ substantially in their choice of genres and modes of representation. Moreover, while characterizations of ethnic difference vary according to the particular political and racialized agenda being espoused, those relating to sexual difference follow a more uniform set of codifications. Emphasis on physical traits, such as weakness, passivity, and penetrability, are crucial to delivering a gendered political message that links recourse to torture to a drive for absolute power and gender domination.Less

Development as Cosmogony: Ritual and Materialization

Diana Espírito Santo

in Developing the Dead: Mediumship and Selfhood in Cuban Espiritismo

This chapter contains some of the book’s most central arguments, namely, those pertaining to the nature of knowledge, materiality, performance and mimesis in relation to the constitution, experience, ... More

This chapter contains some of the book’s most central arguments, namely, those pertaining to the nature of knowledge, materiality, performance and mimesis in relation to the constitution, experience, and expansion of particular selves (both of mediums and spirits). It is argued that “developing” is a paradoxical cosmogonic process in that it brings into existence that which already exists, a world of spirits, one that nevertheless wills its instantiation in matter and body in order to achieve presence and effect. The chapter further explores the mechanics and functions of espiritismo’s bread-and-butter ritual, the misa espiritual, and discusses notions of “education” and “materialization” relative to the dead and to the experience of spiritual differentiation and communion.Less