The Routledge Companion to Travel Writing

........................................................................................................................................... ii Acknowledgments ......................................................................................................................... iii Table of Contents .......................................................................................................................... iv List of Figures ................................................................................................................................. vi Preface ............................................................................................................................................ vii 1	   Introduction: Speaking of Ghosts ........................................................................................... 1 1.1	   Purpose, Method, Definitions ......................................................................................... 1 1.2	   Talking Ghosts: On Ghost Stories and Criticism ....................................................... 26 2	   How to Tell A Ghost Story .................................................................................................... 45 2.1	   Field Survey: A Brief History of Ghost Stories and the Theatre ............................... 45 2.2	   Major Argument: About Telling Ghost Stories .......................................................... 52 2.3	   Speaking of Ghosts: Conor McPherson’s The Weir ................................................... 61 2.4	   An Irish Gothic: Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats... ................................................. 76 2.5	   Staging South African Photography and the Ghost of Sizwe Banzi ......................... 90 2.6	   A Haunting Machine: Theatrical Technologies and Samuel Beckett’s Shades ..... 108 2.7	   Haunting Oceans, Mourning Languages: J.M. Synge and Derek Walcott ............ 135 3	   Witness to Ghosts ................................................................................................................. 155 3.1	   Field Survey: Transnational Poetics and the Globalgothic ..................................... 155 3.2	   Major Argument: Voice, Medium, Rhythm, and the Poetry of Dead Metaphors162 3.3	   Eavan Boland and the Haunted Chorus .................................................................... 187 3.4	   Breyten Breytenbach and the Afrikaans Gothic ....................................................... 209 3.5	   Nohow On from Here: Samuel Beckett’s Worsening Writings .............................. 235 3.6	   Scholia on a Case Study: Imagining the Zong ........................................................... 259

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About Telling: Ghosts and Hauntings in Contemporary Drama and Poetry

Degree Doctor of Philosophy Program Comparative Literature Supervisor Călin Mihăilescu Abstract Aristotle famously asked the question: why are extraordinary people so often melancholics? “Problem XXX,” written by Aristotle or one of his disciples, speculates that black bile, the humour once believed to cause melancholy, can promote a form of genius, a profound intellectual power. Walter Benjamin and Charles Baudelaire are two writers for whom this theory was true: though they suffered from gloominess and despondency, they also recognized that in the interior of sadness, and even madness, is a kernel of aesthetic, artistic, and philosophical truth. Melencolia illa heroica – whose theory was authoritatively formulated by Ficino, taking after Aristotle’s Problems and Plato’s theory of divine madness – emerged in the Renaissance and established a melancholy, understood as a virtue, rather than a vice, such as acedia [sloth]. This virtuous melancholy – which Benjamin referred to as “sublime melancholy,” and others as “heroic(al) melancholy” – is always flanked by its counterpart, the “splenetic melancholia.” This conception of a positive melancholy underwent a variety of transfigurations – by the path set, in part, through Dürer’s “Melencolia I,” Milton’s pastoral poems, and Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy – and turned into the “melancholy malcontent” stereotype prevalent in Hamlet and Le Misanthrope. Later, become the Romantic theory of genius, melancholy enjoyed a significant return via the writings of Blake, Keats and Kierkegaard. With Baudelaire, and the advent of modernity, melancholy is put into correspondance with spleen – classically understood as the site of black bile – with astonishing results. In the first instance, Baudelaire was able to get closer to a vision of melancholy through the relationship between spleen and idéal; in the second, he crafted an interior correspondance of spleen with(in) itself. Benjamin, in his early career, influentially reinterprets the Renaissance melancholy tradition, and its impacts on the Baroque Trauerspiel [mourning play]. Later, as his work turns to Baudelaire, Benjamin’s form of melancholy as philosophical method reaches its acme. This work holds, as its main conclusion, that the interior, dialectical complementarity of opposites, which melancholy exemplifies all along the line, is a necessary mechanism to the productions of literature and philosophy. Recommended Citation Godbout, Kevin, "Saturnine Constellations: Melancholy in Literary History and in the Works of Baudelaire and Benjamin" (2016). Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository. 4291. https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd/4291  Download

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Saturnine Constellations: Melancholy in Literary History and in the Works of Baudelaire and Benjamin

This thesis focuses on two case studies to stake a challenge to the subordinate status of decoration in architectural scholarship. The four architectural works studied are the Painted Stair and Great Chamber at Knole, and the Lay Brothers’ Choir and Great Cloister at the Certosa di San Martino. Long cast as excessive or inessential, architectural decoration has recently begun to be reassessed. The present study aligns with this emerging field and endeavours to open up new avenues through a multidisciplinary study of the functioning of ornament in architecture. By focusing on Baroque Naples and Jacobean England – both treated as marginal in traditional art-historical scholarship – I question the scholarly categories that cast these field as insurmountably separate and draw out the insights of their productive tension. 
The thesis offers extended analyses of four artworks, which directly question metanarratives imposed by the works’ place within the scholarly landscape: device, didacticism and moral naivety; the iconographical ‘meaning’ of nature; celebratory, functional state rooms; the symbolic signification of a cloister. Close visual analysis of artworks is coupled with readings of poetry and literature, political and gender studies, anthropology, devotional writings, guidebooks as well as recent critical theory. I examine two cases studies of illusionistic painted decoration, demonstrating how the painted surface can question, extend and problematize architecture. Carved surfaces, sculpture and relief studied in the complementary chapters provide a counterpoint, as the arresting and unsettling effects of sculptural presence are explored. Ultimately, I demonstrate that decoration is riven with tensions, paradoxes, stoppages and evasions that play a fundamental part of architecture.

The Problem of Ornament in Early Modern Architecture

The objective of this thesis is to develop a methodology for examining a large dataset of visual materials coming from social media in a nuanced, historical fashion. Iconography is a qualitative methodology originating in the history of art that identifies, categorises, and interprets works of art, placing the result in historical perspective. This thesis develops a mixed methodology that unites iconography with approaches common in social media studies in order to give the analysis of imagery on social media historical depth and nuance. The method incorporates social media commentary, which provides insights into users’ interpretations of the pictures they share, in a level of detail that traditional iconography rarely achieves. An adapted iconographical method
can provide evidence for why the pictures users share are interpreted as they are, and why some are shared more than others.

I demonstrate iconography’s usefulness with a case study, centring upon an historically important dataset: the most-shared tweets containing pictures of Alan Kurdi and other refugees during a two-week period beginning when Alan was found on 2 September 2015. Reaction to pictures of Alan shared on Twitter spilled into the real world and led to global demonstrations on behalf of, and increased support for, refugees. This thesis explores the mechanisms by which these pictures crystallised popular sympathetic reactions for refugees at an important point in contemporary geopolitics.

To aid in the iconographic analysis of this data, I have created a digital tool called a “datasheet” (https://doi.org/10.23634/MMUDR.00621172) to help analyse visual and textual patterns. Working in tandem with data analytics software, the datasheet provides other forms of otherwise difficult-to-discern “top-down” insights. By using these tools, it is possible to uncover pictorial preferences, waves of sharing over time, cross-cultural interpretative patterns, and longstanding interpretative themes such death as sleep, children as angels, oversized monumentality, standard representations of refugees, the fixing of ambiguous imagery through anchoring text, and hostile representations of refugees as threats. Many of these themes returned after the time of data collection as the political climate surrounding refugees soured in 2016. The iconographic approach and the organisation of this datasheet provide a foundation for future analyses of imagery shared on social media.

Algorithmic iconography: intersections between iconography and social media image research

Depositions: scenes from the late medieval church and the modern museum

Michael Ann Holly offers a lyrical paean to the History of Art in her recent book, The Melancholy Art. Feeling that the “specialness” (xi) of the history of art sets it apart from the other humanit...

The Melancholy Art

Extrapolating from the feminist concept of the male “gaze,” Nizar Hermes asks the compelling question “Can the Oriental ‘gaze’?” (1), when discussing the pertinent—especially for today—subject of t...

The [European] Other in Medieval Arabic Literature and Culture: Ninth-Twelfth Century AD

comings” (xvii–xviii). The book consists of two parts: Part1 “The Language of Mind” and Part 2 “Consciousness.” Part 1 is divided into four chapters and eleven parts circulating around the possibility that “a close analogue of natural selection of species... could control goaldirected behaviour” (81). Thus Dennett puts a Darwinian spin on the philosophy of mind and cognitive science and, from there, he develops his so-called centralist solution to the Cartesian dilemma. For Dennett, “to relate meanings to events... involves expressing the content of events, since content cannot be described” (92). Centralist explanations must not match “Intentional explanations that... are nothing more than the rather imprecise opinions we express in ordinary language” (95). Hence, since “no rigorous predictive way of ascribing content is possible... no longer should [the Intentional thesis] have the effect of suggesting an unbridgeable gap between the mental and the physical—whether this is construed as a radical dualism of phenomena or of sciences, or of modes of description or explanation” (99). In Part 2, with ten chapters, Dennett scoffs at “the little man in the brain” (111) while fleshing out centralism. Dennett denies “that the mental experience or thought is what is reported when the content of a certain cerebral state is expressed” (126). For Dennett, there is no room for a concept of awareness that “would apply only to people and rule out all imaginable machines” (136). Instead, he looks for “survival value in... [connections that] essentially contributed to the human activity of (verbal) teaching and learning” (140). He brings order “out of chaos, but only by abandoning the conviction that ordinary usage here is conceptually sound” (146). Reasoning or thinking, thus, is an “apparently internal process... [akin to] digestive processes” (165). Finally, Dennett acknowledges that he does “not intend to present a ‘solution’ to the problems of responsibility and free will” (198). Rather, he concludes that the “problem of mind is not to be divorced from the problem of... what a person does, feels, thinks, experiences” (213). STANLEY SHOSTAK University of Pittsburgh, USA sshostak@pitt.edu © 2014, Stanley Shostak http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10848770.2014.927241

The Dancing Word: An Embodied Approach to the Preparation of Performers and the Composition of Performances

A lyrical journey on a sunbeam, David S. Herrstrom’s volume is short but ambitious. He takes us through the ages—from the Paleolithic to that of the Roman Classicists—attempting to delineate the hu...

Light as Experience and Imagination from Paleolithic to Roman Times: by David S. Herrstrom, Madison, WI, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2017, vii + 181 pp., $85.00/£100 (cloth)

Lora Sigler

Papers

Depositions: scenes from the late medieval church and the modern museum

The Melancholy Art

The [European] Other in Medieval Arabic Literature and Culture: Ninth-Twelfth Century AD

The Dancing Word: An Embodied Approach to the Preparation of Performers and the Composition of Performances

Light as Experience and Imagination from Paleolithic to Roman Times: by David S. Herrstrom, Madison, WI, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2017, vii + 181 pp., $85.00/£100 (cloth)