On the first page of The Right to Look, Nicholas Mirzoeff claims that “the right to look is the right to the real”– in other words, looking and being looked at in such a way that the autonomy of both parties is emphasized, and their existence is mutually acknowledged. In explicit dialogue with Frederic Jameson’s… Continue reading Nicholas Mirzoeff, The Right to Look
Tag: denson
WJT Mitchell, Picture Theory
Mitchell argues that we are experiencing a “pictoral turn” which is actually a return to pictures as an interplay between people, institutions, and looking. It is the realization that spectatorship is as important as reading, and that images are not subservient to text. He believes that the best way to combat growing surveillance and propaganda… Continue reading WJT Mitchell, Picture Theory
A Disputation Between the Body and the Worms
This is one primary text I am using that doesn’t contain an explicit mention of sorrow or melancholy. I am mainly interested in it because of its associations with earth and the extended descriptions of decomposition it contains. I am interested in these things because the first is intimately tied together with melancholy in the… Continue reading A Disputation Between the Body and the Worms
Generations of Feeling, Barbara Rosenwein
In her book Generations of Feeling, Barbara Roswenwein is interested in providing a history of emotions that crosses the medieval/modern divide, giving us a genealogy of different ways of conceptualizing emotions. While she explicitly wants to follow this over the medieval/early modern divide, in order to show that concepts like rationality have a much longer… Continue reading Generations of Feeling, Barbara Rosenwein
Lisa H. Cooper, “Agronomy and Affect in Duke Humphrey’s On Husbondrie”
I am really excited about this article, because it brings together several things I want to write about more: labor, ecological/material viewpoints on literature, and affect. This essay’s project is to examine the poetics of this commissioned manual, “On Husbondrie”, and how its translation into Middle English from Latin affected its affect (ha). Cooper argues… Continue reading Lisa H. Cooper, “Agronomy and Affect in Duke Humphrey’s On Husbondrie”
Susan Sontag, On Photography
Sontag’s essays on photography revolve around the question of what photography is, and what it does. While photographs seems like reality, they are actually more like paintings: they don’t reflect reality, they reflect the “real”, or the interpretation of reality that their photographer has shaped and captured. Unlike other forms of art, photos are only… Continue reading Susan Sontag, On Photography
Rufus of Ephesus, On Melancholy
Some of them [melancholics] imagine that they do not have a head. We saw something of the sort close to the city of Kairouan. We burdened his [the patient’s] head with a qalansuwa (tiara) which we made of lead and put on his head in place of a helmet. Then he realised that he had… Continue reading Rufus of Ephesus, On Melancholy
Torok and Abraham, Introjection vs. Incorporation
Building on Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia”, “Introjection vs. Incorporation” critiques Freud and Melanie Klein by exploring the origin of “fantasy”, which they define as the opposition to reality. There are two broad ways of dealing with fantasy: Introjection is “casting inside”, the subconscious replication of attitudes or beliefs, and/or the development of metaphors to understand… Continue reading Torok and Abraham, Introjection vs. Incorporation
The Melancholy Assemblage by Drew Daniel
In The Melancholy Assemblage, Drew Daniel claims that melancholy in the early modern period constitutes an epistemological-affective assemblage, a collection of factors that is always plural; it emerges in individuals and yet is also a “social and material assemblage of bodies being together” (15). In being both interior and exterior, melancholy can be recognized but… Continue reading The Melancholy Assemblage by Drew Daniel
Discorrelated Images by Shane Denson
This book was my first (purposeful) departure into cinema studies since reading Lynda Nead in undergrad. It is also a book about new media (useful for my other work as a freelancer writing about new media), and about the affective and aesthetic potential of invisibilized technology. Its central focus is how the move from cinema… Continue reading Discorrelated Images by Shane Denson
