Search Results

Ephemerality

in Interacting with Print: Elements of Reading in the Era of Print Saturation

This chapter considers ephemeral print: tickets, handbills, playing cards, periodicals unlikely to be reread, crude woodcuts, completed or blank forms. Unlike durable print, ephemeral print can be ... More

This chapter considers ephemeral print: tickets, handbills, playing cards, periodicals unlikely to be reread, crude woodcuts, completed or blank forms. Unlike durable print, ephemeral print can be used and tossed away (or repurposed as wrapping paper or to line trunks). While durable print is manufactured with higher-quality materials, ephemeral print is made out of whatever is cheap and closest to hand. As a means of organizing the world, these distinctions have exerted tremendous power. But like most binaries, they are based on questionable assumptions. While not abandoning the distinction altogether, this chapter moves from the idea of ephemera to ephemerality, to foreground new kinds of historical insight. It argues that, far from being an inherent quality of certain genres or the inevitable consequence of particular manufacturing techniques or materials, ephemerality is a potential condition into which all mark-bearing paper can enter. By considering ephemerality as a condition that can be imputed to an artifact, this chapter shows how particular sorts of use could effectively protect it from becoming waste paper.Less

Moss (Stifter)

Samuel Frederick

in The Redemption of Things: Collecting and Dispersal in German Realism and Modernism

This chapter analyzes Adalbert Stifter's late story “Der Kuß von Sentze” (The kiss of Sentze, 1866). In the story, moss collecting offers an escape from the self-defeating impasse of collecting ... More

This chapter analyzes Adalbert Stifter's late story “Der Kuß von Sentze” (The kiss of Sentze, 1866). In the story, moss collecting offers an escape from the self-defeating impasse of collecting naturalia. If the ephemeral life of the plant must be sacrificed to collect and preserve it (as opposed to cultivating it in a garden, for instance), then moss is exempt from this problem: though effectively killed by drying and storing, it can be brought back to life with a drop of water. The implications of this storable ephemerality—known to German and Austrian moss collectors of the day—as well as moss's unusual cryptogamic reproduction—which was only discovered in the decade and a half before Stifter wrote this novella—provide the tale with biological models that bypass sexual contact without sacrificing the perpetuation of the family line. Nonetheless, even though strategic moistening (of the kissing lips or the desiccated plant) may allow for the continued flourishing of the collected organism in question, it also importantly re-exposes that now living thing to the possibility of dispersal and decay.Less

The Photographic Instant (Fischinger)

Samuel Frederick

in The Redemption of Things: Collecting and Dispersal in German Realism and Modernism

This chapter discusses a visual work of modernism that illustrates the degree to which collecting as poesis is not limited to the literary realm. At stake is the collectability of the experiential ... More

This chapter discusses a visual work of modernism that illustrates the degree to which collecting as poesis is not limited to the literary realm. At stake is the collectability of the experiential instant, which for Susan Sontag is made possible in the tangible object of the photographic print. The photograph, however, fixes what is essentially fleeting. The moving, cinematic image may instantiate that ephemerality, but it cannot be “held on to” (and therefore cannot be collected) as can the photograph. In closely examining a short film from 1927 by Oskar Fischinger (Walking from Munich to Berlin), the chapter proposes a way in which this dilemma is overcome. For this experiment in cinema is a work on the border between animation and live action that succeeds in making palpable the ephemeral instant—made matter in the single celluloid frame—even as it slips by. The chapter concludes with a brief foray into postmodernism by way of Swiss American musician and artist Christian Marclay's Record without a Cover (1985), in which the materiality of the artwork itself performs ephemerality by storing the medium's own gradual deterioration.Less

Transmission, from the Movie-Drome to Vdrome

Erika Balsom

in After Uniqueness: A History of Film and Video Art in Circulation

Chapter 8 revisits the utopian moment of exhibiting experimental film and video art on television in light of contemporary efforts to develop authorized platforms for the distribution of artists’ ... More

Chapter 8 revisits the utopian moment of exhibiting experimental film and video art on television in light of contemporary efforts to develop authorized platforms for the distribution of artists’ moving image on the Internet. This chapter turns to the life and legacy of the late-night programs Screening Room (1971–81) and Midnight Underground (1993–97), comparing and contrasting the broadcasting model with the recent narrowcasting initiative Vdrome, www.vdrome.org, which shows a single artists’ video for a limited period of time, usually ten days.Less

Unknown Publics

Susan Zieger

in The Mediated Mind: Affect, Ephemera, and Consumerism in the Nineteenth Century

The conclusion reviews the five central components through which the book has posited connections between nineteenth- and twenty-first century habits of media consumption. It shows how “addiction” ... More

The conclusion reviews the five central components through which the book has posited connections between nineteenth- and twenty-first century habits of media consumption. It shows how “addiction” still serves as a descriptive metaphor for the consumption of information, now networked and constantly refreshing itself; how the fantasy of infinite mental retention still governs fantasies of mastering information overload; how playback has only continued to conflate memory with information storage, resulting in programmable subjects and information as a super-commodity; how digital media reproduction and circulation ironically still creates the aura of mass live events; and finally, how the media consumer’s dilemma of establishing authenticity has only become more aggravated in an era of self-branding on social media.Less

Mirror: Traces and Transfiguration

Matilda Mroz

in Temporality and Film Analysis

This chapter argues that Tarkovsky's Mirror encourages a fascination with its own process of cinematic imaging, in which images of everyday objects and nature are aesthetically transfigured through ... More

This chapter argues that Tarkovsky's Mirror encourages a fascination with its own process of cinematic imaging, in which images of everyday objects and nature are aesthetically transfigured through camera movements, filters and disjunctive editing. Sound is also transfigured, often isolated from habitual sources and modes of hearing sound, evoking a kind of cinephilia of sound, an audiophilia. The film's movements through a series of episodes linked together through rhythm, thematic association, and patterning, reduces the importance of narrative and draws awareness to a heterogeneous temporality. As the film's narrator expresses his desire to re-enter the memories or dreams of his childhood, Mirror makes clear the fragility and creativity of memory, which can never access a ‘pure’ past. Temporality destabilizes the corporeal and gives the film's textures an ephemeral dimension that is nevertheless powerfully affective. This chapter considers how a conceptualization of time can be undertaken through the long-take and through editing. Montage sequences within the film, in which archival footage is edited together, tends to present a notion of time as a series of perceptual shocks; the long-take, on the other hand, evokes a thematic awareness of nostalgia while questioning the irretrievability of the past.Less

Re-Membering Herstory and the Transephemeral Performative

Jessica Nydia Pabón-Colón

in Graffiti Grrlz: Performing Feminism in the Hip Hop Diaspora

This chapter examines how the relatively new phenomenon of graffiti subculture’s online activity affects graffiti grrlz’ “herstorical” presence in the production of the subcultural archive. Through ... More

This chapter examines how the relatively new phenomenon of graffiti subculture’s online activity affects graffiti grrlz’ “herstorical” presence in the production of the subcultural archive. Through the example of Brazil’s first all-grrl crew Transgressão Para Mulheres (TPM), the chapter interrogates the social and political potential of a digital existence for those who have literally been written out of history at the same time that it offers “transephemerality” as a conceptual tool describing the ontological condition of an ephemeral art form that remains present in the digital world. TPM’s “real life” inactivity is countered by their activity online, a digital presence that reaches across time and space. Without their graffiti images existing online as transephemeral objects the historical impact of TPM to graffiti history might be forgotten, whereas now it is made available to a wider public capable of re-membering TPM’s herstory despite their “disappearance.”Less

Kinetic Tropes, Comedic Turns: Dancing To the Lighthouse

Janet Winston

in Contradictory Woolf

This chapter offers a kinetic reading of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse inspired by dance. More specifically, it discusses the ways that To the Lighthouse depends upon movement for its effect, ... More

This chapter offers a kinetic reading of Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse inspired by dance. More specifically, it discusses the ways that To the Lighthouse depends upon movement for its effect, thereby making it a “kinetic art.” To the Lighthouse deals with ephemerality and shares a preoccupation associated with dance. A focus on what Randy Martin calls “the kinesthesia of daily life” reveals Woolf's reliance on descriptions of movement to delineate character, create narrative tension, and construct ontological and epistemological oppositions that underlie To the Lighthouse. The chapter explores To the Lighthouse's concern with “temporal movement” in relation to the movement of the thinking mind. It considers descriptions of body language and locomotion as characters go about their business, as well as the characters' and the reader's sensate experience of motion achieved by Woolf's use of imagery and metaphor, and by changes in prose tempo—a kind of literary kinesthesia.Less

‘That love-enraptured tune’: Eros and Art(ifice)

Kostas Boyiopoulos

in The Decadent Image: The Poetry of Wilde, Symons, and Dowson

This chapter enquires into a selection of poems by Oscar Wilde, examining ways by which eros is inscribed in the decorative surface of poetry. It highlights Wilde’s borrowed idea of ‘impossible eros’ ... More

This chapter enquires into a selection of poems by Oscar Wilde, examining ways by which eros is inscribed in the decorative surface of poetry. It highlights Wilde’s borrowed idea of ‘impossible eros’ (‘l’amour de l’impossible’). Tinkering with the juxtaposition of permanence and transitoriness in descriptions of seasonal and natural beauty, Wilde frames death as taking place within a larger framework of a perpetual recycling of life. Within this framework, demonstrated by his poem ‘Panthea’ (1881), he accommodates a diffused and impersonal sensuality. The chapter then examines the ephemeral, impressionistic artificiality mostly of Wilde’s city lyrics. In the last section, the ideas explored in ‘Panthea’ inform ‘The Harlot’s House’ (1884).Less

Epigrams in print

James Doelman

in The Epigram in England, 1590-1640

This chapter describes the dynamics of print publication of epigrams: their typical printed format, their place in the print market-place and the sequencing of large numbers of epigrams. Poets ... More

This chapter describes the dynamics of print publication of epigrams: their typical printed format, their place in the print market-place and the sequencing of large numbers of epigrams. Poets offered a variety of rationales for print publication (including appeals to the precedent of Martial) and often manifest anxiety about appearing in this more public medium. The ephemeral quality of so many epigrams also raised doubts about the appropriateness of publication. The licentious and at times libellous quality of epigrams sometimes led to censorship, as in their inclusion in the Bishops’ Ban of 1598. The generally ‘low’ nature of the genre complicated appeals to patronage in the dedications of printed epigram books. These concerns and challenges are explored through case studies involving Charles Fitzgeffry, Thomas Freeman and Ben Jonson.Less

Conclusions

Floris Bernard

in Writing and Reading Byzantine Secular Poetry, 1025–1081

In the concluding chapter, the preceding observations are critically reconsidered in the framework of paradoxical oppositions. The tension between irrelevance and Sitz im Leben is explained as a ... More

In the concluding chapter, the preceding observations are critically reconsidered in the framework of paradoxical oppositions. The tension between irrelevance and Sitz im Leben is explained as a consequence of a double reading standard of Byzantine readers, intent on both ritual occasion and intellectual display. The opposition between ephemerality and preservation is viewed against the background of the peculiar nature of poetic collections, preserving poems as ‘snapshots’ of a past without foreknowledge of the future. The different assessments of poetry, both as puerile and as precious, are also taken into consideration. Finally, this chapter examines the special qualities of poetry in contrast to prose, bringing to the fore the elements of charis, metron, poikilia, and iambikè idea.Less

Ephemerality: The Cranford Papers

Talia Schaffer

in Novel Craft: Victorian Domestic Handicraft and Nineteenth-Century Fiction

This chapter examines Elizabeth Gaskell's novel Cranford as a representation of women's domestic handicraft and as a meditation on ephemerality during the Victorian period. It also considers how the ... More

This chapter examines Elizabeth Gaskell's novel Cranford as a representation of women's domestic handicraft and as a meditation on ephemerality during the Victorian period. It also considers how the novel tackles the confrontation between the new paper finance and the older craft paradigm. By focusing on craft, the chapter analyzes the status of Gaskell's collection of sketches and her anxieties about the novel which are reflected in Cranford's signature craft, the making of paper candlelighters.Less

Armature and Experience

Swati Chattopadhyay

in Unlearning the City: Infrastructure in a New Optical Field

This chapter discusses the performative possibilities of street space. It explains that if the street, as armature, sets the stage for experience, it also provides an opportunity to think of the ... More

This chapter discusses the performative possibilities of street space. It explains that if the street, as armature, sets the stage for experience, it also provides an opportunity to think of the street in terms of its ephemeral properties. It states that the game of cricket, as cultural performance, foregrounds the link between ephemerality and performativity. The chapter concludes that cricket played on the found space of the street generates conjunctural spaces where pleasure and politics might come together to create performative anchors and enlarge the imagination of public space.Less

The Problem of Lost Works

Anna Pakes

in Choreography Invisible: The Disappearing Work of Dance

Chapter 11 considers what it means for a dance work to be lost and under what conditions loss occurs. It argues that (1) lack of performance, (2) lack of documentation, and (3) disintegration of the ... More

Chapter 11 considers what it means for a dance work to be lost and under what conditions loss occurs. It argues that (1) lack of performance, (2) lack of documentation, and (3) disintegration of the background practice in whose context the work was initiated all contribute to loss, but that (3) is the most significant. The chapter also examines how dance work loss can and should be understood ontologically, exploring how various ontological positions account for it. The question is addressed of whether, and when, loss implies that a work has ceased to exist or been destroyed. Issues raised in Chapter 6 about the putative eternality of abstracta are taken up again, along with the question of how the norms of action constituting choreographic works are grounded. The discussion is framed by consideration of Katherine Dunham’s (1951) work Southland, discussed at the end of the chapter as vividly illustrating the negative consequences of dance work loss, in contrast to dance discourse that celebrates ephemerality.Less

Introduction

Katharine Ellis

in French Musical Life: Local Dynamics in the Century to World War II

A folk-music competition of 1895 sets the scene for an exploration of the problem of French music historiography in relation to the provinces between the 1830s and World War II. Key terms ... More

A folk-music competition of 1895 sets the scene for an exploration of the problem of French music historiography in relation to the provinces between the 1830s and World War II. Key terms (“decentralization,” “deconcentration,” “regionalism”) are defined and explained in relation to Republican concepts of cultural unity that long discouraged regional difference in music and reinforced the soft and hard power of the capital as the nation’s cultural boiler house: power relations turned the provinces into an “internal exotic,” but the “colonies” of mainland France had their own often distinctive local dynamics relating to professional and amateur music-making. The narrative arc of the book is sketched out: from the dynamics of provincial musical life to the challenges of musical regionalism as it manifests in new composition. Finally, methodological reflections are offered on the project’s archival source-base, on the problematic ephemerality of musical life as a subject of diachronic musicological study, on music as an object of local memorialization, and on the geographical patterns of both decentralist and regionalist French musical life as showing particular density at the edges at the expense of the center.Less

Oscar Wilde’s Ephemeral Form

Gage McWeeny

in The Comfort of Strangers: Social Life and Literary Form

Through Wilde, ephemeral sociality emerges as a full-fledged aesthetic project. Taking up the epigram, Wilde’s miniature signal literary form, this chapter shows how what Wilde calls the “burden” of ... More

Through Wilde, ephemeral sociality emerges as a full-fledged aesthetic project. Taking up the epigram, Wilde’s miniature signal literary form, this chapter shows how what Wilde calls the “burden” of other people gives rise to innovative social and literary modes of deferring their claims. Often passed over even by Wilde’s best critics as too slight or too embarrassingly catchy to bear critical weight, the epigram functions as a rhetorical crystallization of social transience, the means of inoculating the individual against the expansive forces of social determination Wilde’s work registers so vividly. At the heart of the passing exchanges central to Wilde, the epigram is image and instrument of both engaging the social and evading the more enduring forms of social life, thus also offering an emblem of the book’s intertwined formal and social concerns. Rather than dissolve social bonds altogether, however, Wilde’s work posits forms of association drained of their obligatory dimensions, new forms of promiscuous relationality that help the reader rethink social theory’s place in some queer theoretical work. Wilde underscores aestheticism’s affinity with what Georg Simmel terms “sociability,” the “play form of sociation,” and the epigram’s unexpectedly socializing function.Less

Introduction

Anna Pakes

in Choreography Invisible: The Disappearing Work of Dance

This chapter introduces the topic of the book, explaining how the nature of dances presents a number of philosophical puzzles. Connections and distinctions between the concepts invoked by the count ... More

This chapter introduces the topic of the book, explaining how the nature of dances presents a number of philosophical puzzles. Connections and distinctions between the concepts invoked by the count nouns “dance,” “dance work,” and “choreographic work” are identified, and Part 1’s argument about the historical emergence of the work-concept in Western theatre dance is outlined. The resistance within some dance discourse and practice to conceptualising dance in terms of work-objects or things is acknowledged, along with recent challenges to the idea of the dance work. The chapter also describes the analytic philosophical resources (on dance, music, and art) on which the book’s approach draws and explains key metaphysical issues raised by dance works. It situates the arguments in relation to current methodological debates about the relation between art ontological enquiry and arts practice, particularly with regard to this book’s concern with dance historical change.Less

Representation and Ephemerality in Olfaction

Cain Todd

in Perceptual Ephemera

Many philosophers have claimed that, unlike vision and audition, olfaction either fails to be representational or is, in various respects, representationally impoverished. In particular, some have ... More

Many philosophers have claimed that, unlike vision and audition, olfaction either fails to be representational or is, in various respects, representationally impoverished. In particular, some have argued that olfaction cannot by itself, without being supplemented by other sensory or recognitional capacities, represent material objects and is at best confined to the representation of odours. Construed phenomenologically, I argue that these claims are false, at least for some olfactory experiences and some types of olfactory object. I also suggest that the requirements placed on representation by an implicit or explicit focus on vision should be challenged. Finally, I show how the temporality, ephemerality, and valence that characterize much olfactory experience actually contribute to its representational richness and uniqueness.Less