Download or read book Descriptions of physiognomies in English fiction from realism to modernism written by Mirjam Marits and published by GRIN Verlag. This book was released on 2003-11-28 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Diploma Thesis from the year 2003 in the subject Didactics for the subject English - Literature, Works, grade: very good, University of Graz (Institute for Anglistics), language: English, abstract: 1. Introduction: Descriptions of physiognomies in (English) literature and their significance It is a fascinating phenomenon, that whenever we meet another person for the first time, we unconsciously and immediately judge him or her by merely looking at the person’s face. Although we may call ourselves the most tolerant people free of prejudices, we cannot help thinking a person likeable or not right away by the first visual impression we get, without ever having talked to him or her. Even though we know that a correspondence of physiognomic and ‘inner’ traits has never been convincingly or scientifically proved, it is unquestionable that most of us are impressed and influenced by visual data we receive from our fellow human beings’ faces. In the course of history (and thus, of literature), people have repeatedly tried to come to terms with this phenomenon and to find explanations as well as definitions that may help to ‘face’ and deal with physiognomy in everyday life. Apparently, it has always been, and still is, people’s wish to ‘read’ in other faces so as to facilitate contact and to know how to judge characters. That this desire is not new can be seen by the fact that even (Pseudo-)Aristotle set up (very questionable, highly racist and sexist) rules according to which one could ‘categorise’ faces and thus know what kind of character is hidden behind the surface. Today, nobody relies on his writings anymore, which categorised people, among other factors, by establishing an analogy between animals and human beings. According to the author, those who had certain traits that were seen as resembling certain animals were considered to have the respective animal’s ‘inner’ traits as well, as in the following examples. “Die [Menschen] mit dicken Lippen, wobei die obere weiter vorsteht als die untere, sind dumm; siehe die Esel und Affen. [...] Die eine kleine Stirn haben, sind ungebildet; siehe die Schweine.“1 In (English) literature, the question of whether there is an indexical or arbitrary connection between inner and outer traits has been approached in many different ways which cannot be analysed in detail here. In a large number of older texts, descriptive passages containing physiognomic hints were not included, which points to a certain disinterest in this field of explanations (as well as in visual details in general). [...] 1 [Pseudo-] Aristoteles (~ 300v.Chr./1999). Physiognomica. Übers. u. kommentiert von Sabine Vogt. Berlin: Akademie Verlag. 26f.
Download or read book Realism After Modernism written by Devin Fore and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The human figure made a spectacular return in visual art and literature in the 1920s. Following modernism's withdrawal, nonobjective painting gave way to realistic depictions of the body and experimental literary techniques were abandoned for novels with powerfully individuated characters. But the celebrated return of the human in the interwar years was not as straightforward as it may seem. In Realism after Modernism, Devin Fore challenges the widely accepted view that this period represented a return to traditional realist representation and its humanist postulates. Interwar realism, he argues, did not reinstate its nineteenth-century predecessor but invoked realism as a strategy of mimicry that anticipates postmodernist pastiche. Through close readings of a series of works by German artists and writers of the period, Fore investigates five artistic devices that were central to interwar realism. He analyzes Bauhaus polymath László Moholy-Nagy's use of linear perspective; three industrial novels riven by the conflict between the temporality of capital and that of labor; Brecht's socialist realist plays, which explore new dramaturgical principles for depicting a collective subject; a memoir by Carl Einstein that oscillates between recollection and self-erasure; and the idiom of physiognomy in the photomontages of John Heartfield. Fore's readings reveal that each of these "rehumanized" works in fact calls into question the very categories of the human upon which realist figuration is based. Paradoxically, even as the human seemed to make a triumphal return in the culture of the interwar period, the definition of the human and the integrity of the body were becoming more tenuous than ever before. Interwar realism did not hearken back to earlier artistic modes but posited new and unfamiliar syntaxes of aesthetic encounter, revealing the emergence of a human subject quite unlike anything that had come before.
Download or read book Vision and Character written by Eike Kronshage and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-11-15 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As readers, we develop an impression of characters and their settings in a novel based on the author’s description of their physical characteristics and surroundings. This process, known as physiognomy, can be seen throughout history including in the English Realist novels of the 19th and 20th centuries. Vision and Character: Physiognomics and the English Realist Novel offers a study into the physiognomics and aesthetics as presented by some of the best known authors in this genre, like Virginia Woolf, Joseph Conrad, Charles Dickens and Jane Austen. In this highly original approach to the issues of representation, visuality and aesthetics in the nineteenth-century realist novel, and even the question of literary interpretation, Eike Kronshage argues that physiognomics has enabled writers to access their characters’ inner lives without interfering in an authoritative way.
Download or read book Vital Signs written by Lawrence Rothfield and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 1994-12-12 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vital Signs offers both a compelling reinterpretation of the nineteenth-century novel and a methodological challenge to literary historians. Rejecting theories that equate realism with representation, Lawrence Rothfield argues that literary history forms a subset of the history of discourses and their attendant practices. He shows how clinical medicine provided Balzac, Flaubert, Eliot, and others with narrative strategies, epistemological assumptions, and models of professional authority. He also traces the linkages between medicine's eventual decline in scientific and social status and realism's displacement by naturalism, detective fiction, and modernism.
Download or read book The Chatter of the Visible written by Patrizia C. McBride and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2016-03-22 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Chatter of the Visible examines the paradoxical narrative features of the photomontage aesthetics of artists associated with Dada, Constructivism, and the New Objectivity. While montage strategies have commonly been associated with the purposeful interruption of and challenge to narrative consistency and continuity, McBride offers an historicized reappraisal of 1920s and 1930s German photomontage work to show that its peculiar mimicry was less a rejection of narrative and more an extension or permutation of it—a means for thinking in narrative textures exceeding constraints imposed by “flat” print media (especially the novel and other literary genres). McBride’s contribution to the conversation around Weimar-era montage is in her situation of the form of the work as a discursive practice in its own right, which affords humans a new way to negotiate temporality, as a particular mode of thinking that productively relates the particular to the universal, or as a culturally specific form of cognition.
Download or read book Major Realist Film Theorists written by Aitken Ian Aitken and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2016-05-31 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the 1910s to the emergence of structuralism and post-structuralism in the 1960s, the writings of John Grierson, Siegfried Kracauer, Andre Bazin and Georg Lukacs dominated realist film theory. In this critical anthology, the first collection to address their work in one volume, a wide range of international scholars explore the interconnections between their ideas and help generate new understandings of this important, if neglected, field. Challenging preconceptions about 'classical' theory and the nature of realist representation, and in the process demonstrating how this body of work can be seen as a cohesive theoretical model, this invaluable collection will help return the realist paradigm of film theory to the forefront of academic enquiry.
Download or read book The Antinomies Of Realism written by Fredric Jameson and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2013-10-08 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Antinomies of Realism is a history ofthe nineteenth-century realist novel and its legacy told without a glimmer of nostalgia for artistic achievements that the movement of history makes it impossible to recreate. The works of Zola, Tolstoy, Pérez Galdós, and George Eliot are in the most profound sense inimitable, yet continue to dominate the novel form to this day. Novels to emerge since struggle to reconcile the social conditions of their own creation with the history of this mode of writing: the so-called modernist novel is one attempted solution to this conflict, as is the ever-more impoverished variety of commercial narratives – what today’s book reviewers dub “serious novels,” which are an attempt at the impossible endeavor to roll back the past. Fredric Jameson examines the most influential theories of artistic and literary realism, approaching the subject himself in terms of the social and historical preconditions for realism’s emergence. The realist novel combined an attention to the body and its states of feeling with a focus on the quest for individual realization within the confines of history. In contemporary writing, other forms of representation – for which the term “postmodern” is too glib – have become visible: for example, in the historical fiction of Hilary Mantel or the stylistic plurality of David Mitchell’s novels. Contemporary fiction is shown to be conducting startling experiments in the representation of new realities of a global social totality, modern technological warfare, and historical developments that, although they saturate every corner of our lives, only become apparent on rare occasions and by way of the strangest formal and artistic devices. In a coda, Jameson explains how “realistic” narratives survived the end of classical realism. In effect, he provides an argument for the serious study of popular fiction and mass culture that transcends lazy journalism and the easy platitudes of recent cultural studies.
Download or read book Africa after Modernism written by Michael Janis and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-05-13 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Africa after Modernism traces shifts in perspectives on African culture, arts, and philosophy from the conflict with European modernist interventions in the climate of colonialist aggression to present identitarian positions in the climate of globalism, multiculturalism, and mass media. By focusing on what may be called deconstructive moments in twentieth-century Africanist thought – on intellectual landmarks, revolutionary ideas, crises of consciousness, literary and philosophical debates – this study looks at African modernity and modernism from critical postcolonial perspectives. An effort to sketch contemporary frameworks of global intersubjective relations reflecting African cultures and concerns must resist taking modernism as a term of African periodization, or master-narrative, but as a constellation of discursive and subjective forms that obtains upon the present moment in African literature, philosophy, and cultural history. Africa after Modernism argues for a philosophical consciousness and pan-African multiculturalist ethos that operate, after the deconstruction of Eurocentrism, beyond self/other paradigms of exoticism or West/Africa political ideologies, in dialogue with postcolonial approaches to cultural reciprocity.
Download or read book English Fiction and the Evolution of Language 1850 1914 written by Will Abberley and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-05-21 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores how Victorian fiction and science imagined the evolution of language, from primordial noise to modern English.
Download or read book How to Do Things with Affects written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-04-09 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How to Do Things with Affects develops affect as a highly productive concept for both cultural analysis and the reading of aesthetic forms. Shifting the focus from individual experiences and the human interiority of personal emotions and feelings toward the agency of cultural objects, social arrangements, and aesthetic matter, the book examines how affects operate and are triggered by aesthetic forms, media events, and cultural practices. Transgressing disciplinary boundaries and emphasizing close reading, the collected essays explore manifold affective transmissions and resonances enacted by modernist literary works, contemporary visual arts, horror and documentary films, museum displays, and animated pornography, with a special focus on how they impact on political events, media strategies, and social situations. Contributors: Ernst van Alphen, Mieke Bal, Maria Boletsi, Eugenie Brinkema, Pietro Conte, Anne Fleig, Bernd Herzogenrath, Tomáš Jirsa, Matthias Lüthjohann, Susanna Paasonen, Christina Riley, Jan Slaby, Eliza Steinbock, Christiane Voss.
Download or read book Adventures in Realism written by Matthew Beaumont and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2008-04-15 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Adventures in Realism offers an accessible introduction to realism as it has evolved since the 19th century. Though focused on literature and literary theory, the significance of technology and the visual arts is also addressed. Comprises 16 newly-commissioned essays written by a distinguished group of contributors, including Slavoj Zizek and Frederic Jameson Provides the historical, cultural, intellectual, and literary contexts necessary to understand developments in realism Addresses the artistic mediums and technologies such as painting and film that have helped shape the way we perceive reality Explores literary and pictorial sub-genres, such as naturalism and socialist realism Includes a brief bibliography and suggestions for further reading at the end of each section
Download or read book Orhan Pamuk and the Poetics of Fiction written by Umer O. Thasneem and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2019-07-08 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume marks an exhilarating tour through the mesmerizing and labyrinthine fictional world of the Nobel Prize-winning Turkish author Orhan Pamuk. Despite being ranked alongside Marquez, Cortazar, Calvino, Borges and Eco, Pamuk is yet to receive due critical attention in the Anglophone world, where he has millions of readers. This book takes the reader on a fascinating ride through Pamuk’s novels from The Silent House, written in the early Eighties, to the recently published The Red Haired Woman. The nine novels that form the focus of this study straddle a period of more than three decades that witnessed the emergence of Pamuk as Turkey’s foremost novelist and a master fabulist. The book details the chemistry of the thematics and architectonics of Pamuk’s craft in a style shorn of dry pedantry and jargon trotting. Examining the intricate pattern of his creative topography in the light of theories ranging from psychoanalysis to spectral criticism, it represents a timely and illuminating contribution to the study of contemporary fiction.
Download or read book The Cambridge History of Modernism written by Vincent Sherry and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2017-01-11 with total page 1579 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Cambridge History of Modernism is the first comprehensive history of modernism in the distinguished Cambridge Histories series. It identifies a distinctive temperament of 'modernism' within the 'modern' period, establishing the circumstances of modernized life as the ground and warrant for an art that becomes 'modernist' by virtue of its demonstrably self-conscious involvement in this modern condition. Following this sensibility from the end of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth, tracking its manifestations across pan-European and transatlantic locations, the forty-three chapters offer a remarkable combination of breadth and focus. Prominent scholars of modernism provide analytical narratives of its literature, music, visual arts, architecture, philosophy, and science, offering circumstantial accounts of its diverse personnel in their many settings. These historically informed readings offer definitive accounts of the major work of twentieth-century cultural history and provide a new cornerstone for the study of modernism in the current century.
Download or read book Habit in the English Novel 1850 1900 written by S. O'Toole and published by Springer. This book was released on 2013-11-07 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers new perspectives on the concept of habit in the nineteenth-century novel, delineating the complex, changing significance of the term and exploring the ways in which its meanings play out in a range of narratives, from Dickens to James.
Download or read book American Book Publishing Record written by and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 996 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Postcards written by David Prochaska and published by Penn State University Press. This book was released on 2010 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines postcards as images that are carriers of text, and textual correspondence that circulate images across boundaries of class, gender, nationality and race. Discusses issues concerning the concrete practices of production, consumption, collection and appropriation.
Download or read book Faces on Screen written by Alice Maurice and published by EUP. This book was released on 2022-05-31 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines the face on screen from a variety of critical and historical perspectives
