ICI Berlin
Refine
Document Type
- Part of a Book (24)
Language
- English (24)
Has Fulltext
- yes (24)
Is part of the Bibliography
- no (24)
Keywords
- Rezeption (24) (remove)
Structural anthropology remains a hidden influence in Frantz Fanon's theory of the 'sociogenesis' of mental illness. This chapter outlines how Fanon's belief in the therapeutic capacity of 'socialization' critically absorbs Claude Lévi-Strauss's examination of the link between 'madness' and the symbolic structure of society. These innovations, Chamberlin argues, pushed Fanon to institute 'semihospitalization' as a radically dialectical method of treatment in his final role as a clinician at the Neuropsychiatric Day Centre in Tunis (1958–60).
A small, blind-tooled volume sits on a table covered in green baize: one clasp is open, the other is closed; and a slip of paper emerges from it reading 'Veritas odium parit' ('truth breeds hatred'). This detail occurs in the foreground of a portrait by Hans Holbein of a young man identified as the Cologne patrician Hermann von Wedigh III (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). A study of the physical features of the book and of the history of the brief text - actually an ancient and then Erasmian adage - leads to a new interpretation of the painting in the context of humanist friendship. The book is seen to be a multivalent simile for the work of art authored by the artist as well as for the sitter himself, raising questions about the implications for these of a medium that can be opened and closed. The half-open condition of the book is understood to reflect the complementary pressures of openness and closedness, accessibility and intimacy, that characterized the Renaissance republic of letters.
Practices of rewriting and mouvance are central to medieval culture, but have been neglected by contemporary scholarship. This paper highlights how collaborative forms of writing such as religious song engage with complex theological thought, opening up a discourse from which the laity had previously been excluded. Using forms which defy conventional author-based aesthetic norms, these songs explore poetic practices which are both collective and inclusive.
Reversion: lyric time(s) II
(2019)
Is a 'history' of the lyric even conceivable? What would a 'lyric' temporality look like? With a focus on Rainer Maria Rilke's decision not to translate, but rather to rewrite Dante's "Vita nova" (1293–1295) in the first of his "Duineser Elegien" (1912), the essay deploys 'reversion' (as turning back, return, coming around again), alongside 're-citation', as a keyword that can unlock the transhistorical operations of the lyric as the re-enactment of selected gestures under different circumstances.
In this brief excursion into the poetry of Dante and Montale, Rebecca West suggests some approaches to only a few issues that emerge out of the creation of both the primary beloveds of Dante and Montale and of those feminine figures that have been characterized as ostensibly 'antitranscendental' and more secondary in their roles and meanings. As regards Montale's primary feminine figure, Clizia, West argues that she is, to use Teodolinda Barolini's term for Beatrice, a 'hybrid' poetic character, and ultimately exceeds the limits of the poetic beloved as traditionally conceived and read, not only in the courtly tradition upon which she is modelled but well beyond it. In the case of the so-called secondary 'other women' in Dante's and Montale's poetry, West seeks to show that they are much less separable from the primary feminine figures than such binaries as major/minor, transcendent/erotic, soul/body, and traditional/experimental may lead us to believe. Lastly, West considers specifically the wife-figure, in her conspicuous absence from Dante's corpus and in her late appearance in Montale's. For both poets, there are complex intertwinings, interferences, and non-dualistic patterns that form a densely textured poetic weave, in which both the primary and the secondary feminine figures provide "fili rossi" as well as not so easily graspable dangling threads of meaning. These threads have to do with the preoccupation of both poets with the possible integration of immanence and transcendence, embodiment and abstraction, and with the very limits of poetic language. West's topic is also motivated by a feminist-oriented search for modes of deciphering the figure of the feminine beloved in lyric poetry that are not conditioned exclusively by the traditional emphasis on the male poet-creator, but which allow for a shift in focus onto the female figure who is, of course, the creature of the poet's imagination and skill, but who also often takes him into regions in which the excesses (commonly associated with the female) of non-binary thought and the mysteries of alterity - the feminine symbolic sphere, in short - do not so much allow the emergence of neatly squared-off meanings as the evolution of more oblique, circular conduits of potential significance. As a specialist of modern literature, Rebecca West concentrates on Montale more than on Dante, mainly noting the Dantesque aspects of the former's poetry.
Even if the title of Wolfgang Koeppen's last novel, "Der Tod in Rom", alludes quite obviously to Thomas Mann's novella, "Der Tod in Venedig", Koeppen's text must be understood first and foremost as a response to Mann's most controversial novel, "Doktor Faustus". The novels of Mann and Koeppen rank among the most well-known literary examinations of National Socialism but stand in a complementary relation to each other. "Doktor Faustus", published in 1947, analyses the cultural and intellectual origins of German fascism, while "Der Tod in Rom", published only seven years later in 1954, criticizes the continuity of National Socialist ideologies in post-war Germany. Both authors focus their analyses of fascism on fictional avant-garde composers who seem at first glance detached from any political context. [...] The actual starting point of Florian Trabert's paper, however, is the fact that both novels are preceded by epigraphs taken from Dante's "Inferno". Trabert begins by commenting on the references to Dante in "Doktor Faustus" and then continues by analysing the allusions to the "Commedia" in Koeppen's novel, which constitute, as Trabert demonstrates, a complex constellation among the three texts.
Dante's "Inferno" and Walter Benjamin's cities : considerations of place, experience, and media
(2011)
When Walter Benjamin wrote his main texts, the theme of the city as hell was extremely popular. Some of his German contemporaries, such as Brecht or Döblin, also used it. Benjamin was aware of these examples, as well as of examples outside Germany, including Joyce's "Ulysses" and Baudelaire's "poetry". And he was - at least in some way - familiar with Dante's "Inferno" and used it, and in particular Dante's conception of hell, for his own purposes. Benjamin's appropriation of the topos of the Inferno has been seen as a critique of capitalism and as a general critique of modernism by means of allegory. In the following analysis, Angela Merte-Rankin takes a slightly different approach and, despite Benjamin's status as an expert on allegory, considers hell in its literal sense as a place and examines the issues of implacement that might follow from this standpoint.
'Perhaps the sodomites should be written out of Dante's "Inferno"', Jarman wrote in his journal on 1 August 1990: 'I'll offer myself as the ghostwriter.' What does he mean by 'ghostwriter' here? How queer is this odd speech-act? What is he offering to do to the homophobic landscape of the "Inferno", that forbiddingly sealed textual prison, with his Hollywood pitchman's casual bid to 'write out' the sodomites as if they were a slight embarrassment to the divine justice system? Is he speaking in jest as a writer of gay satires and sacrilegious memoirs, or in deadly earnest as an activist who had renounced the middle-class pretensions and frivolities of the pre-AIDS gay world? [...] Jarman counters the trope of homosexual theft visually with the triumphant figure of Man with Snake. The Dantesque merging of snake and thief is replaced by an erotic dance in which the gilded youth raises his phallic partner above his head and seductively kisses it on the mouth. Whereas Dante would have us notice the grotesque parody of the Trinity played out in the seventh bolgia - with the unchanging Puccio as God the Father, the two-natured Agnello-Cianfa as Christ, and the fume-veiled Buoso receiving his forked tongue from the serpent Francesco in a demonic replay of the gift of tongues from the Spirit - Jarman clears away all overdetermined theological meanings to revel in the purely aesthetic impact of the phallic dancer. All the ghosts from Dante's snakepit are conjured away in the film and replaced with the solid presence of a single gorgeously spotlit male body. Ghostwriting Dante, for Jarman, meant more than a mere appropriation of homoerotic scenes from the "Inferno" into his screenplay. It meant a complete reimagining of their aesthetic significance within the filmscape of his Dantean transformations.
The 1935 Fox Films "Dante's Inferno" (directed by Harry Lachman) traces the rise and fall of an entrepreneur. Its protagonist, Jim Carter (played by Spencer Tracy), begins the story as a stoker on a cruise liner. The narrative opens with a burst of flames from the ship's boiler, and the ensuing scene goes on to show the protagonist competing at shovelling coal for a bet in the sweltering engine-room. Interspersed are shots of the superstructure directly above with a number of elegant and vapid passengers following the game below. This initial sequence thus concisely conveys the main features of the film's social agenda through imagery that anticipates that of two of its later 'infernal' sequences. [...] Spectacular admonition and concern about the ruthless pursuit of wealth are the main features which link this "Inferno" of the thirties to the one that had appeared some six hundred years earlier. Wealth and avarice were, of course, demonstrably serious concerns for Dante: as Peter Armour, for example, has shown, there is a recurrent and pervasive concern with money, its meaning, and its misuse throughout the "Commedia". So it is not surprising that the "Inferno" should also have been appropriated by social critics some hundred years before the 1935 Hollywood fable. [...] Some of the narrative and visual patterns in "Dante's Inferno" imply an uneasy underlying vision of the movie industry and its practices. Other productions, publicity, and journalism of the time reinforce suggestions of such a metafictional approach to movies, morality, and the market in the 1935 "Dante's Inferno".
Between 1816 and 1821, the philologist François Raynouard (1761–1836) published a "Choix des poésies originales des troubadours". His connections with Madame de Staël's cultural circle at Coppet determined the construction of the myth of courtly love as a forerunner of Romantic love. [...] Acording to this cultural tradition, Dante is an intermediate (although pre-eminent) step in the history of Western desire, a process begun in medieval Provence and revitalized by European Romanticism. When Lacan approaches Dante, it is therefore one Dante - this Dante - that he is approaching. The present essay, in which Fabio Camilletti analyses three tightly interwoven texts, explores some of the reverberations of this encounter. In 1958, Lacan published in "Critique" an article entitled 'La jeunesse d'André Gide, ou la lettre et le désir'. This text, later included in Lacan's "Écrits", was meant to be a review of a biography of the young Gide published in 1956 by Jean Delay, entitled "La jeunesse d'André Gide". In comparing Gide's life with his works of youth, Delay notably focused on Gide's novel of 1891, "Les Cahiers d'André Walter", the third text on which Camilletti focuses his inquiry. These three texts evoke in various ways the relationship between Dante and Beatrice, using it as a cultural allusion through which specific problems of sexuality (or, better, of the absence of sexuality) are conveyed. This essay aims therefore to be a study in the rhapsodic and subterranean presence of Dante and the "Vita Nova" between the end of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, as well as in the relationship between literature and psychoanalysis through the quartet Dante-Gide-Delay-Lacan.