Download or read book Medusa s Gaze written by Marina Belozerskaya and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-09-04 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Tazza Farnese is one of the most admired objects from classical antiquity. A libation bowl carved from banded agate, it features Medusa's head on its outside and, inside, an assembly of Egyptian gods. For more than two millennia, these radiant figures have mesmerized emperors and artists, popes and thieves, merchants and museum goers. In this, the first book-length account of this renowned masterpiece, Marina Belozerskaya traces its fascinating journey through history. That it has survived at all is a miracle. The Tazza's origins date back to Ptolemaic Egypt where it likely enhanced the power and prestige of Cleopatra. After her defeat by Emperor Augustus, the bowl began an amazing itinerary along many flashpoints in world history. It likely traveled from Rome to Constantinople. After that city's sack by crusaders in 1204, it returned west to inspire the classical revival at the court of Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II at Palermo. The Tazza next graced Tamerlane's court at Samarqand, before becoming an obsession of Renaissance popes and princes. It witnessed the rediscovery of Pompeii and Herculaneum, the turbulent aftermath of the French Revolution, and the birth of the modern Italian state. Throughout its journey, the Tazza aroused the lust of Greek, Roman, Byzantine, and Mongol rulers, consoled a heart-broken duchess, inspired artists including Botticelli and Raphael, tempted spies and thieves, and drew the ire of a deranged museum guard who nearly destroyed it. More than a biography of the world's most cherished bowl, Medusa's Gaze is a vivid and delightful voyage through history.
Download or read book Medusa s Gaze written by Marina Belozerskaya and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2012 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The long and intricate history of the beautifully carved Hellenistic style Egyptian bowl, from the days of Cleopatra to Constantinople, the French Revolution, and to near destruction by a deranged museum guard in 1925.
Download or read book Medusa s Gaze written by and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1991-03 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the central role of casuistry - the science of resolving problems of moral choice, known as 'cases of conscience' - in Elizabethan religious, political, and literary culture. In the process, that author develops a theory of casuistical hermeneutics in a synthesis of new historicist and post-structuralist methodologies, a synthesis made intelligible in terms applied within the discourses of ideological and epistemological crisis that late-sixteenth-century casuiatry both addressed and provoked. Casuistry gained unprecedented notoriety in the last two decades of Elizabeth's reign, emerging as an ambiguous practice that continued to be claimed as a heuristic procedure while it also came to function as a locus of moral and epistemological uncertainty. The author shows the equivocal nature of casuistry to be the effect of the inherently dialogic activity of the word 'conscience'. Believed to be a sacred repository of truth as well as a hermeneutic operation, conscience both embodied the culture's received norms and subjected to scrutiny the social and political negotiations that produced and maintained these norms. The author examines the application of casuistry in wide-ranging but interrelated documents: Elizabeth's two speeches to Parliament concerning the fate of Mary, Queen of Scots; representative manuals of casuistry; accounts of the secret movements of the English Catholic mission and Walsingham's intelligence network; the 'Siena Sieve' portrait of Spencer's The Faerie Queene. The author establishes casuistical hermeneutics as a central organizing principle of Spenserian narrative and charts the connection between Spenserian narrative and novelistic discourse (in Bakhtin's sense of the term). These documents yield new insights into the politics of ambiguity and misreading in the Elizabethan period, variously exploiting the casuistical doctrines of equivocation, 'honest dissimulation', and mental reservation, as well as what the author calls the rhetoric of inviolability, which was associated with the voice of conscience and appropriated by monarch and dissidents alike. That rhetoric depended on a politic self-censorship that proved indispensable to the maintenance of the culture's norms, producing narrative structures that represent scandalous - and theoretically unrepresentable - insights. Reading the text of casuistry in the Renaissance illumines the pivotal, complementary processes of reading and writing the texts through which Elizabethan culture defined itself - its texts of power, its hierarchy of values and norms, its taboos, and its tacit or naturalized protocol for determining canonical texts and 'good' readings.
Download or read book The Medusa Gaze in Contemporary Women s Fiction written by Gillian M. E. Alban and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2017-08-21 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Medusa Gaze offers striking insights into the desires and frustrations of women through the narratives of the impressive contemporary novelists Angela Carter, Toni Morrison, Sylvia Plath, Margaret Atwood, A.S. Byatt, Iris Murdoch, Jeanette Winterson, Jean Rhys and Michèle Roberts. It illuminates women’s power and vulnerability as they construct their own egos in opposition to their hostile alter egos or others facing them in their mirrors, and fixes a panoptic gaze on the women stalking its pages, as they learn how to deflect the menacing gaze of others by returning their look defiantly back at them. Some stare back and win assurance; others are stared down, reduced to psychic trauma, madness and even suicide. The book shows how Freud’s, Sartre’s and Lacan’s androcentric views define the Medusa m/other as monstrous, and how the efforts of mothers to nurture may be slighted as inadequate or devouring. It presents Medusa and other goddess figures as inspirational, repelling harm through the ‘evil eye’ of their powerful gaze. Conversely, it also shows women who are condemned as monstrous Gorgons, trapped in enmity, rivalry and rage. Representing English, American and African American, Canadian and Caribbean writing, the works explored here include realistic, social narrative and magical realist writings, in addition to tales of the past and dystopian narratives.
Download or read book Medusa s Gaze and Vampire s Bite written by Matt Kaplan and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-10-23 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Giant animals : Nemean lion, Calydonian boar, Rukh, King Kong -- Beastly blends : chimera, griffon, cockatrice, Sphinx -- It came from the earth : Minotaur, Medusa -- The mysterious fathoms : Charybdis, Leviathan, giant squid, Jaws -- Of flame and claw : dragons -- Hauntings : demons, ghosts, spirits -- Cursed by a bite : vampires, zombies, werewolves -- The created : The Golem, Frankenstein, HAL 9000, Terminator -- Terror resurrected : dinosaurs -- Extraterrestrial threat : aliens.
Download or read book Caribbean Perspectives on Modernity written by Maria Cristina Fumagalli and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2009-11-02 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taking up the challenge of redefining modernity from a Caribbean perspective instead of assuming that the North Atlantic view of modernity is universal, Maria Cristina Fumagalli shows how the Caribbean's contributions to the modern world not only provide a more accurate account of the past but also have the potential to change the way in which we imagine the future. Fumagalli uses the myth of Medusa's gaze turning people into stone to describe the way North Atlantic modernity freezes its "others" into a state of perpetual backwardness that produces an ethnocentric narrative based on homogenization, vilification, and disempowerment that actively ignores what fails to conform to the story it wants to tell about itself. In analyzing narratives of modernity that originate in the Caribbean, the author explores the region's refusal to succumb to Medusa's spell and highlights its strategies to outstare the Gorgon. Reflecting a diversity of texts, genres, and media, the chapters focus on sixteenth-century engravings and paintings from the Netherlands and Italy, a scientific romance produced at the turn of the twentieth century by the king of the Caribbean island Redonda, contemporary collections of poetry from the anglophone Caribbean, a historical novel by the Guadeloupean writer Maryse Condé, a Latin epic, a Homeric hymn, ancient Egyptian rites, fairy tales, romances from England and Jamaica, a long narrative poem by the Nobel Prize winner Derek Walcott, and paintings by artists from Europe and the Americas spanning the seventeenth century to the present. Caribbean Perspectives on Modernity offers an original and creative contribution to what it means to be modern.
Download or read book Medusa written by Stephen R. Wilk and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2007-11-15 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Medusa, the Gorgon, who turns those who gaze upon her to stone, is one of the most popular and enduring figures of Greek mythology. Long after many other figures from Greek myth have been forgotten, she continues to live in popular culture. In this fascinating study of the legend of Medusa, Stephen R. Wilk begins by refamiliarizing readers with the story through ancient authors and classical artwork, then looks at the interpretations that have been given of the meaning of the myth through the years. A new and original interpretation of the myth is offered, based upon astronomical phenomena. The use of the gorgoneion, the Face of the Gorgon, on shields and on roofing tiles is examined in light of parallels from around the world, and a unique interpretation of the reality behind the gorgoneion is suggested. Finally, the history of the Gorgon since tlassical times is explored, culminating in the modern use of Medusa as a symbol of Female Rage and Female Creativity.
Download or read book Medusa written by David Leeming and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2013-06-01 with total page 130 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With her repulsive face and head full of living, venomous snakes, Medusa is petrifying—quite literally, since looking directly at her turned people to stone. Ever since Perseus cut off her head and presented it to Athena, she has been a woman of many forms: a dangerous female monster that had to be destroyed, an erotic power that could annihilate men, and, thanks to Freud, a woman whose hair was a nest of terrifying penises that signaled castration. She has been immortalized by artists from Leonardo da Vinci to Salvador Dalí and was the emblem of the Jacobins after the French Revolution. Today, she’s viewed by feminists as a noble victim of patriarchy and used by Versace in the designer’s logo for men’s underwear, haute couture, and exotic dinnerware. She even gives her name to a sushi roll on a Disney resort menu. Why does Medusa continue to have this power to transfix us? David Leeming seeks to answer this question in Medusa, a biography of the mythical creature. Searching for the origins of Medusa’s myth in cultures that predate ancient Greece, Leeming explores how and why the mythical figure of the gorgon has become one of the most important and enduring ideas in human history. From an oil painting by Caravaggio to Clash of the Titans and Dungeons and Dragons, he delves into the many depictions of Medusa, ultimately revealing that her story is a cultural dream that continues to change and develop with each new era. Asking what the evolution of the Medusa myth discloses about our culture and ourselves, this book paints an illuminating portrait of a woman who has never ceased to enthrall.
Download or read book The Medusa Reader written by Marjorie Garber and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-11 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fascinating and terrifying, the Medusa story has long been a powerful signifier in culture with poets, feminists, anthropologists, psychoanalysts, political theorists, artists, writers, and others. Bringing together the essential passages and commentary about Medusa, The Medusa Reader traces her through the ages, from classical times through the Renaissance to the pop culture, art, and fashion of today. This collection, with a critical introduction and striking illustrations, is the first major anthology of primary material and critical commentary on this most provocative and enigmatic of figures.
Download or read book Mesmerism Medusa and the Muse written by Anne DeLong and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2012-04-26 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mesmerism, Medusa, and the Muse: The Romantic Discourse of Spontaneous Creativity explores the connections among the Romantic discourse of spontaneous literary creativity, the nineteenth-century cultural practice of mesmerism, and the mythical Medusa as an icon of the gendered gaze. An analysis of Medusan mesmerism in the poetry of Mary Robinson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Letitia Elizabeth Landon (L.E.L.) and the prose of Mary Shelley reveals that these Romantic-era writers equate the enraptured state that produces spontaneous literary creation with the mesmeric trance. These writers employ Medusan imagery to portray both the mesmerist and the mesmerized subject, a conflation of subject/object positions that complicates issues of agency, subjectivity, and gender. Images of Medusan mesmerism ultimately work to deconstruct Romantic ideological dichotomies of self/other, female/male, muse/artist, and sublime/beautiful. In contrast to a traditional, masculinized Romantic discourse that emphasizes self-possession, this study uncovers a feminized, improvisational, Romantic discourse, characterized “Other-possession,” an assumption of the mesmerized subject position that enhances subjective fluidity. This study interrogates the Romantic discourse of spontaneous literary creativity through an examination of Romantic poetry, prose, and theory that utilizes mesmeric and Medusan metaphors to suggest creative inspiration.Building on recent scholarship about improvisational poetics, the subversive potential of mesmerism, and Medusa as a feminist icon, this work suggests that the mesmeric Medusan muse not only enables creativity for women writers but also provides a mirror in which they view (and through which they give voice to) their own societal oppression. The mesmeric Medusan muse in Romantic-era literature—from the Ancient Mariner and the Frankenstein monster to the tragic, abandoned Sapphic poetess—often represents the face of oppression, an unwelcome and monstrous truth in nineteenth-century British society. For women writers in particular, braving the stare of the Medusan muse enhances empathy, and therefore inspiration and literary productivity.
Download or read book Medusa s Curse written by A. J. Hunter and published by . This book was released on 2017-10-10 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When geology-mad Sam goes to stay with her American cousin, Trey, neither of them have any idea what adventures they're about to unleash. They bring together two pieces of The Heart of Light and whoosh! they're thrown back into Ancient Greece, where
Download or read book Global Powers of Horror written by Francois Debrix and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-19 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Global Powers of Horror examines contemporary regimes of horror, into horror’s intricacies, and into their deployment on and through human bodies and body parts. To track horror’s work, what horror decomposes and, perhaps, recomposes, Debrix goes beyond the idea of the integrality and integrity of the human body and it brings the focus on parts, pieces, or fragments of bodies and lives. Looking at horror’s production of bodily fragments, both against and beyond humanity, the book is also about horror’s own attempt at re-forming or re-creating matter, from the perspective of post-human, non-human, and inhuman fragmentation. Through several contemporary instances of dismantling of human bodies and pulverization of body parts, this book makes several interrelated theoretical contributions. It works with contemporary post-(geo)political figures of horror—faces of concentration camp dwellers, body parts of victims of terror attacks, the outcome of suicide bombings, graphic reports of beheadings, re-compositions of melted and mingled remnants of non-human and human matter after 9/11—to challenge regimes of terror and security that seek to forcefully and ideologically reaffirm a biopolitics and thanatopolitics of human life in order to anchor today’s often devastating deployments of the metaphysics of substance. Critically enabling one to see how security and terror form a (geo)political continuum of violent mobilization, utilization, and often destruction of human and non-human bodies and lives, this book will be of interest to graduates and scholars of bio politics, international relations and security studies.
Download or read book The Poetics of Fear written by Chris Erickson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2010-05-05 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Poetics of Fear looks at how fear is used for political purposes, focusing on the binary logic of 'this is the way things are, and there is nothing (else) you can do about it' -- a logic that underlies the realist tradition in international relations theory. The Shield of Achilles from Homer's Iliad is used as metaphorical analysis to look at what the politics of fear is, how it works, and how it can be resisted. It aims to provide a human response to human security matters. The work first shows how the Shield works to paralyze its audience. How can it be resisted? One response is to offer a warning about the hazards of bearing the Shield. After looking at thinkers such as Plato, Baudrillard, and Nietzsche, the work concludes with an examination of ekphrasis as a critical tool.With a unique and fresh perspective, The Poetics of Fear will be relevant to those interested in security studies and critical theoretical approaches to political science.
Download or read book The Science of Monsters written by Matt Kaplan and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-10-08 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Previously published as Medusa's gaze and vampire's bite by Scribner"--Title page verso.
Download or read book Medusa written by Rosie Hewlett and published by Silverwood Books. This book was released on 2021-04-30 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gorgon. Killer. Monster. Victim. Survivor. Protector. Medusa breathes new life into an ancient story and echoes the battle that women throughout millennia have continued to wage.
Download or read book Medusa Tells All written by Rebecca Fjelland Davis and published by Capstone. This book was released on 2014 with total page 33 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Introduces the concept of point of view through Medusa's retelling of the classic Greek myth 'Medusa'"--
Download or read book Athena s Child written by Hannah Lynn and published by Sourcebooks Landmark. This book was released on 2023-09-26 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For readers of Madeleine Miller and Natalie Haynes comes the story of the most infamous monster of Greek mythology: Medusa. First, they loved her. Then, they abused her. Finally, they made her a villain. Gifted and burdened with stunning beauty, young Medusa seeks sanctuary with the Goddess Athena. But when she catches the eye of the lecherous but mighty Poseidon, she is beyond protection. Powerful men rarely answer for their actions, after all. Meanwhile, Perseus embarks on a seemingly impossible quest, equipped with only bravado and determination... Medusa and Perseus soon become pawns of spiteful and selfish gods. Faced with the repercussions of Athena's wrath, blamed for her assault, Medusa has no choice but to flee and hide. But can she do so without becoming the monster they say she is? Medusa's truth has long been lost. History tells of conquering heroes, of men with hearts of gold. Now it is time to hear the story of how history treats women who don't comply.
