Journal ArticleDOI
Double-Distancing: An Attribute of the "Post-Modern" Avant-Garde
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In the early 20th century, the concept of "psychical distance" was defined as the separation of personal affections, whether idea or complex experience, from the concrete personality of the experience as mentioned in this paper.Abstract:
In his classic essay "'Psychical Distance' as a Factor in Art and as an Aesthetic Principle," 1 Edward Bullough described the operation of distance as the quality through which expression achieves aesthetic validity: "Distancing means the separation of personal affections, whether idea or complex experience, from the concrete personality of the experience." 2 He also coined the terms over-distanced (e.g. melodrama for the sophisticated) and under-distanced (e.g. melodrama for the un-sophisticated) to describe a quality in unaesthetic work. Consciously or not, Bullough himself was responding to what have come to be known as "Modernist" works, reacting to modernist procedures at about the same time James Joyce was trying to explain modes of perceiving within the modernist optic. During the post-Flaubertian post-Jamesian early 20th century, Joyce's view, like Bullough's, was characteristically fresh but on its way to becoming scrupulously orthodox. In his frequently misunderstood theory of distance, Joyce distinguished crudely but effectively between "kinetic" and "static" art: "The feelings excited by improper art are kinetic, desire and loathing. Desire urges us to possess, to go to something; loathing urges us to abandon, to go from something. The arts which excite them are improper arts. The aesthetic emotion (I use the general term) is therefore static. The mind is arrested and raised above desire and loathing." 3 Neglecting "over-distancing," Joyce is describing attributes of under-distancing and enunciating Bullough's requirements for a work of art. We may proceed from there to describe certain contemporary works which, while seemingly breaking Bullough's rules and bending Joyce's, are still both "static" and properly distanced. Conventional modernism is characterized by fine-tuned and delicately balanced ironic productions which make the kinetic virtually impossible as a response by embodying motion in the artifact and refusing both definition and conclusion. Empathy and even antipathy are not banished from modernist texts where it is possible, even desirable, for the implied reader to discover himself and momentarily identify with the persona's predicament. For this seeming violation or imbalance to be viable, however, the text must impose an extra measure of distance by such means as humor, irony, symbolism and allegory. It is through irony in fact that distance is most readily achieved, through a device, that is,read more
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Book ChapterDOI
A Critical Introduction
TL;DR: Berman as discussed by the authors showed that we cannot interpret the international law of the interwar period without understanding it as a site of Modernist cultural construction and contestation -rather than as a mere adjunct to, or reflection of, cultural developments external to it.
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'You Are About to Begin Reading': the Nature and Function of Second Person Point of View in Narrative.
Abstract: This study asserts that second person point of view functions as a distinct category of point of view, which has been discounted by critical theorists. Second person point of view is defined in this study as a particular use of the second person pronoun. The "you" in second person point of view texts generates an alternating pattern of identification and displacement that constructs an intersubjectivity among narrative elements—narrator, actant, and narratee(s). Therefore, common uses of the "you" to refer only to the reader (narratee) of a text or to the actant in a text do not constitute second person point of view texts. The theory of second person point of view developed in this study argues that second person point of view issues challenges to traditional concepts of narrative subjectivity and authority. The rejection of the traditional sign of subjectivity and authority—the stated or implied " I " — combined with the proposition of an alternative—the multiple "you"—expresses the particular challenges of second person point of view. The challenges to narrative subjectivity and authority issued by second person point of view indicate the postmodern impulse of second person point of view. By exposing, undermining, and revising traditional concepts of
Life parodying art: exemplarity and verisimilitude in ramon j. sender's
TL;DR: In this article, the authors of En la vida de Ignacio Morel, which garnered the highly prestigious Premio Planeta in 1969, examine how exemplariness is a function of the narrative structure, which, as will be shown, is intimately related to Sender's ideas and practices concerning the complex problem of verisimilitude.