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A Jamesian State: The American Scene and “the Working of Democratic Institutions”

Lisi Schoenbach

in Pragmatic Modernism

Abstract in production.

Narrative

Gary D. Rhodes and Robert Singer

in Consuming Images: Film Art and the American Television Commercial

To explore these issues in-depth, Chapter 2 covers narrative, specifically examining how television commercials operate in terms of Scene, Genre, Cross-Genre, and the Remake. This chapter contends ... More

To explore these issues in-depth, Chapter 2 covers narrative, specifically examining how television commercials operate in terms of Scene, Genre, Cross-Genre, and the Remake. This chapter contends that the narrative framework for producing the television commercial is arguably, shot by shot, second to second, as frequently creative as a full-length feature film. Some commercials utilize cinematic narrative forms of Hollywood; others diverge from the same. The product and its “message” might be realistic or wholly fantastic; nevertheless, the TV commercial is indeed a narrative, a critically substantial formation, whether it unfolds in the form of a slice-of-life story or a presentational style pitch.Less

Blowup Beijing: The City as a Twilight Zone

Paola Voci

in The New Chinese Documentary Film Movement: For the Public Record

This chapter examines the Beijing of the New Documentary Movement. Its title reflects two main traits of Beijing documentaries: their tendency ... More

This chapter examines the Beijing of the New Documentary Movement. Its title reflects two main traits of Beijing documentaries: their tendency to blow up or highlight the city's marginal inhabitants while also emphasizing their often barely visible locations. With allusions to Michelangelo Antonioni and the eponymous television series of the 1960s, the discussion examines an arguably central feature of Chinese documentaries: their tendency to highlight the barely visible locations of Beijing's marginal inhabitants. By focusing on Swing in Beijing (1999), Night Scene (2004), and Paper Airplane (2001), it analyzes the relationship between performance and dissent and the development of contested realism as the visual mode for the unfitting. Unlike the conventional images of Beijing, these films make accessible an unofficial, unconventional, and unlikely Beijing.Less

Ezra Pound's American Scenes: Henry James and the Labour of Translation

Daniel Katz

in American Modernism's Expatriate Scene: The Labour of Translation

This chapter stresses the significance of the precedent of Henry James for Ezra Pound's own insufficiently studied attempts at auto-ethnography, and for his sense of American cultural identity. ... More

This chapter stresses the significance of the precedent of Henry James for Ezra Pound's own insufficiently studied attempts at auto-ethnography, and for his sense of American cultural identity. Examining how James's The American Scene provides a model for Pound's ‘Patria Mia’, it concentrates on Pound's qualification of James's importance as lying above all in what he dubs a ‘labour of translation’ in his crucial essay devoted to the author. Pound's 1918 article ‘Henry James’, a long homage to and running commentary on the author, who had died two years previously, is well known. ‘Patria Mia’ echoes The American Scene in various ways – notably, both texts place a good deal of emphasis on New York City and its architecture, burgeoning immigration and the American fascination with business. Already in 1918, Pound saw James's fate as encapsulating the destiny he so actively courted.Less

The Physiology of Sensation and Literary Style: Desperate Remedies and The Rescue

Hugh Epstein

in Hardy, Conrad and the Senses

This chapter pairs two formative, but often disregarded novels, Desperate Remedies and The Rescue, on the basis of their shared interest in sensation. Also showing that sensation is a fundamental ... More

This chapter pairs two formative, but often disregarded novels, Desperate Remedies and The Rescue, on the basis of their shared interest in sensation. Also showing that sensation is a fundamental consideration in contemporary physiology, the chapter explores a correlation between popularised studies of nerve transmission and energy circulation and the way that the two novelists construct scenic events in their fiction. The enforced solipsism which Walter Pater embraces is distinguished from the necessary participation in a medium which the characters in the wider physics of the novels of Hardy and Conrad undergo. Through an examination of a number of highly sensory scenes, both novels are shown to dramatize the threat of passivity and the requirement of activity.Less

The Ascension Scene in the Apse of the Church at Dayr Qubbat al-Hawa: A Comparative Study

Mary Kupelian

in Christianity and Monasticism in Aswan and Nubia

This chapter focuses on the dominant scene that appears in the apse composition of the church of Qubbat al-Hawa at Aswan. It carefully examines this scene and compares it with similar surviving ... More

This chapter focuses on the dominant scene that appears in the apse composition of the church of Qubbat al-Hawa at Aswan. It carefully examines this scene and compares it with similar surviving scenes found in other apse compositions elsewhere. It challenges the widely held view regarding the classification of such a scene and proves that this scene is either an ‘Ascension’ scene or a ‘Second Coming’ scene rather than a ‘Christ in Majesty’ scene as commonly believed.Less

Into the Roaring Twenties: Vanity Fair and New Yorker

Robert L. Gambone

in Life on the Press: The Popular Art and Illustrations of George Benjamin Luks

This chapter narrates George Luks’s foray into publications like Vanity Fair and New Yorker. While he was still working at the Verdict, Luks found time to undertake freelance drawings for Broadway ... More

This chapter narrates George Luks’s foray into publications like Vanity Fair and New Yorker. While he was still working at the Verdict, Luks found time to undertake freelance drawings for Broadway Magazine, a popular journal laced with images of leggy chorines along with more staid reviews of dramas and interviews with leading stars. Although he only contributed three drawings, each of these three highlighted a unique aspect of his talent and gave further evidence of his abilities and wide-ranging interests. Among these drawings, the first, Night Scene in Herald Square, Broadway and Thirty-fourth Street (March 1899) remained the most interesting. This was just the beginning. The rest of the chapter narrates the events that transpired and led up to Luks increased interest in modern art and his journey into participating in its world.Less

James: Testimony without Life

Shari Goldberg

in Quiet Testimony: A Theory of Witnessing from Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Although his tendency has not often been taken seriously, Henry James persistently portrays ordinarily inanimate entities—from hotels to corpses to candles—as speaking. This chapter argues that James ... More

Although his tendency has not often been taken seriously, Henry James persistently portrays ordinarily inanimate entities—from hotels to corpses to candles—as speaking. This chapter argues that James inherits Emerson’s assumption that the world testifies, and that he develops a related premise that written images, representations, and metaphors become part of the world of expressive things. James’s images of the dead become, in turn, not simply a way of figuring death, but a conduit that ties dead to living, allowing the dead to participate in the language of life. With readings of The American Scene, The Wings of the Dove, “The Friends of the Friends,” and “The Altar of the Dead,” as well as James’s non-fiction writings on death and life after it, this chapter offers an alternative to the critical tendency to view James as primarily occupied by loss.Less

Introduction: Shared-Separation (Decision, Between, Us)

John Paul Ricco

in The Decision Between Us: Art and Ethics in the Time of Scenes

The Introduction provides an overview of the entire book and each of its chapters through a theoretical articulation of the principal terms of the book's title. In the first part, the conceptual ... More

The Introduction provides an overview of the entire book and each of its chapters through a theoretical articulation of the principal terms of the book's title. In the first part, the conceptual valences of the terms “decision,” “between,” and “us” are deconstructed by locating the force and form of shared-separation at the core of each of them. Next, the book's theorization of the inextricable relation between art and ethics is introduced, along with the post-Duchampian concept of the already-unmade (original to this study). In the third and final section, a philosophical genealogy of the notion/phrase “the time of scenes” is traced from an exchange between French philosophers Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe on the “scene,” back to Aristotle's Poetics. Descriptions of the six chapters of the book, and their relations to each other, are also presented in this section of the Introduction. Finally, Maurice Blanchot is given the last word by way of a quotation from his book, The Infinite Conversation, that provides a rather remarkable condensation of the language with which Ricco himself will theorize incommensurable and neutral forms of aesthetic and ethical interruption and separation, as the time and scene of the decision between us.Less

Prologue

John Fletcher

in Freud and the Scene of Trauma

The Prologue considers two cases, from Freud’s correspondence with Wilhelm Fliess, of sexual abuse and their consequent symptoms (January 24th and December 22nd 1897) on either side of his ... More

The Prologue considers two cases, from Freud’s correspondence with Wilhelm Fliess, of sexual abuse and their consequent symptoms (January 24th and December 22nd 1897) on either side of his repudiation of is seduction theory (September 21st 1897). It considers especially the December case as the most elaborate presentation and analysis of such material in Freud’s work as a structure of scenic repetition, which compels Freud to re-affirm “the authenticity of infantile trauma” and its transmission in the face of his own previous objections. The Prologue establishes Freud’s concern with the power of scenes and his elaboration of a scenography that maps these scenes in detail.Less

Picture this: Virginia Woolf in the British Good Housekeeping!? or Moving Picture This: Woolf’s London Essays and the Cinema

Leslie Kathleen Hankins

in Virginia Woolf and Her Female Contemporaries

This chapter assesses the illustrations for Virginia Woolf's London Scene essays as they were first published in the British Good Housekeeping magazine, 1920–32. Are etchings, paintings, or ... More

This chapter assesses the illustrations for Virginia Woolf's London Scene essays as they were first published in the British Good Housekeeping magazine, 1920–32. Are etchings, paintings, or photographs adequate for capturing Woolf's kinetic prose? No, but moving pictures are, such as the Wonderful London and Open Road series of cinema shorts from 1924.Less

The End of the Sixties

in A Gallery to Play to: The Story of the Mersey Poets

In 1968, the Mersey Poets were often compared with one another. Roger McGough had become a regular on ABC's The Eleventh Hour and was performing numerous gigs with the Scaffold band. In a poem ... More

In 1968, the Mersey Poets were often compared with one another. Roger McGough had become a regular on ABC's The Eleventh Hour and was performing numerous gigs with the Scaffold band. In a poem dedicated to Bob Kane and local band the Almost Blues, he brought out Adrian Mitchell and the spirit of the counter-culture. Concluding Adrian Henri's Love Night at the Everyman, the poem became the ‘Bat-Rave’ featuring everyone concerned and eventually led to the first gig for the Liverpool Scene. Whereas Brian Patten kept his ‘Little Johnny’ poems separate, Henri used everything published in The Mersey Sound to come up with his own book, Tonight At Noon. Published in 1968 by Rapp & Whiting, it established him as a force to be reckoned with in British poetry.Less

Finding a Rhyme for Alphabet Soup: An Interview with Roger McGough

Deryn Rees-Jones

in Writing Liverpool: Essays and Interviews

This chapter presents an interview with poet Roger McGough, who was born in Litherland in 1937. McGough published his first volume of poetry, Summer with Monika, in 1967 and two collections with ... More

This chapter presents an interview with poet Roger McGough, who was born in Litherland in 1937. McGough published his first volume of poetry, Summer with Monika, in 1967 and two collections with Adrian Henri and Brian Patten, The Liverpool Scene and The Mersey Sound. He continues to write poems for adults and children, while also developing a successful career in TV and radio. The interview covers topics such as what being a writer who comes from Liverpool means to him; how he feels about being thought of as a Liverpool poet; and whether he thinks poets occupy a special place.Less

Henry James, Race, and Empire

Sara Blair

in A Historical Guide to Henry James

This chapter examines three facets of Henry James's canon to underscore his views about a rapidly changing transatlantic modernity: his travel writings, his fictional studies of the American Girl, ... More

This chapter examines three facets of Henry James's canon to underscore his views about a rapidly changing transatlantic modernity: his travel writings, his fictional studies of the American Girl, and his culture-making project in The American Scene. As a travel writer, James conjured up national identity “as a deeply imbricated fact of blood…and as a matter of self-conscious…choice.” Using his portraits of compatriots abroad, he probed American character in flux. This chapter also analyzes James's fictional treatment of race, citizenship, femininity, and the United States as modern empire.Less

Shakespeare and the Quarrel Scene in Arden of Faversham

MacDonald P. Jackson

in Determining the Shakespeare Canon: Arden of Faversham and A Lover's Complaint

In English drama of the late 1580s and early 1590s the Quarrel Scene (scene 8) between Alice Arden and her lover Mosby in Arden of Faversham is unsurpassed for its combination of theatrical ... More

In English drama of the late 1580s and early 1590s the Quarrel Scene (scene 8) between Alice Arden and her lover Mosby in Arden of Faversham is unsurpassed for its combination of theatrical effectiveness and poetic merit. This chapter uses a critical appreciation of the scene to introduce basic facts about the play and the problem of its authorship. The electronic database Literature Online is then employed to search for rare phrases and collocations, carefully defined, that the scene shares with no more than five plays of 1580–1600. By far the largest number of such links is found to be with plays in the Shakespeare First Folio, especially those most nearly contemporary with Arden of Faversham. Clusters of images that the scene shares with Shakespeare early narrative poems are also explored.Less

The Embedded View

Nico Orlandi

in The Innocent Eye: Why Vision Is Not a Cognitive Process

The aim of this chapter is to present the view that the book defends (the Embedded View) and to discuss it in relation to models of vision in perceptual psychology. The embedded view emerges from ... More

The aim of this chapter is to present the view that the book defends (the Embedded View) and to discuss it in relation to models of vision in perceptual psychology. The embedded view emerges from understanding visual processes as situated in a structured environment, and from keeping separate functional states and features of the visual apparatus from representational states and features. We should distinguish, in particular, a perceptual bias from an encoded assumption, and a state that tracks from one that represents. The chapter discusses two recent research paradigms in perceptual psychology. Natural Scene Statistics is an approach that is explicitly supportive of the embedded view, while Bayesian models of vision are typically classified as constructive. The chapter provides a non-inferential interpretation of Bayesian models and argues for integrating the insights of such models with the embedded view.Less

Independence: Skyscrapers, subways, and train lights play no part in the music I write

Barbara B. Heyman

in Samuel Barber: The Composer and His Music

This chapter focuses on Barber’s earliest involvement of the performer in the creative process of a composition, in this case the Cello Sonata, premiered by Orlando Cole. The two would meet ... More

This chapter focuses on Barber’s earliest involvement of the performer in the creative process of a composition, in this case the Cello Sonata, premiered by Orlando Cole. The two would meet regularly, with Cole offering suggestions for improvements to the music. This fresh new take in composing music was instantly recognized by friends and audience alike. The founder of the Curtis Institute, Mary Bok, made further efforts in advancing Barber’s and also Gian Carlo Menotti’s careers by conducting auditions with music publishers. This resulted in publications of Barber’s work by G. Schirmer, as well as national radio performances where he was recognized as a pianist, composer, and singer. The chapter also describes Barber’s second large orchestral work, Music for a Scene from Shelley. He also wrote incidental music for a play by Mary Kennedy, One Day of Spring, presented at the Annie Russell Theater in Winter Park, Florida.Less