Showing papers on "The Imaginary published in 1980"

The logic of practice

Abstract: Preface. Part I: Critique of Theoretical Reason. Foreword. 1. Objectifying Objectification. 2. The Imaginary Anthropology of Subjectivism. 3. Structures, Habitus, Practices. 4. Belief and the Body. 5. The Logic of Practice. 6. The Work of Time. 7. Symbolic Capital. 8. Modes of Domination. 9. The Objectivity of the Subjective. Part II: Practical Logics. 1. Land and Matrimonial Strategies. 2. The social uses of kinship. 3. Irresistible Analogy. Appendix. Bibliography. Index.

The Dictionary of Imaginary Places

Abstract: Throughout the ages, writers have created an astonishing diversity of imaginary places, worlds of enchantment, horror and delight. This guidebook takes the reader on a tour of more than 1200 imaginary cities, islands, countries, and contintents, from Homer to the late 1990s. Places visited include Atlantis, Dracula's Castle, Middle Earth, Baskerville Hall, Utopia, and Earthsea. The inspiration comes from writers as diverse as Lewis Carroll, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Sir Arthur Conan doyle, L. Frank Baum, C.S. Lewis, John Lennon, Gilbert & Sullivan, and Graham Greene.

Executing the Model: Painting, Sculpture, and Romance-Writing in Hawthorne's The Marble Faun

Abstract: The recent fashion of applying sophisticated theoretical models-linguistic, psychoanalytic, anthropological-to the study of literature has led to a corollary theoretical preoccupation with these models themselves. Critics as diverse as Michel Foucault and Fredric Jameson have devoted a great deal of attention to the problematic use of models constructed to analyze and approximate the way we think. Amidst all of this self-conscious discussion of modes of representation' and metacommentary,2 however, critics tend to forget that writers too have a great deal to say about the models they employ to help them forge their fictions. In his last completed romance, The Marble Faun, Nathaniel Hawthorne suggests the role artistic models play in his writing by presenting a living model who is murdered at a crucial moment in the narrative. The Model's destruction not only sheds light on the creative activity of painting and sculpture which takes place within the novel, but also illuminates Hawthorne's own creative act, the process of plotting the romance itself. By transforming the metaphor "to execute a model" into the central event of the novel, Hawthorne turns his romance into a self-interpreting confession that compels the reader to participate in the fiction. In the preface to The Scarlet Letter Hawthorne suggests that the romance-writer must conjure up "a neutral territory, somewhere between the real world and fairy-land, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each imbue itself with the nature of the other."3 In his preface to The Marble Faun, Hawthorne locates the distinction between "the Actual and the Imaginary" in terms of the difference between America and Italy:

The Class Position of Goffman’s Sociology: Social Origins of an American Structuralism

Abstract: All social theory is class-based. Any theoretical system or problematic expresses the imaginary relation of a class or class-fragment to the real relations of production that characterise a social formation in a particular historical conjuncture. The sociology it produces contains, in a form stamped by its class position and more or lass transfigured or obscure, a semblance of the structures and processes constituted by each of the levels of the social formation — the economic system, the political system, and the cultural-ideological system — and of the personality system of its agent (‘theorist’), each of which exercises some determination on the theoretical system.1 As an imaginary construction, a theoretical system enjoys a certain degree of autonomy from its material base such that it can reflect earlier or anticipated later stages in the history of the social formation.2

A Phenomenological Approach to the Theatrum Mundi Metaphor

Abstract: was . .. committed?"' His parenthetical correction points up relationships between life and the stage that have maintained a powerful theatrical appeal throughout Western literature. The tent is a stage within a stage. Fitzpatrick, then, is drawing a parallel between tent and stage, the contractor Ewbank's celebration and the playwright Storey's play. The correspondence Fitzpatrick highlights is, of course, not only a particular commentary on modern theatrical conventions but also an evocation of the perennial theatrumn mundi metaphor.' The theatrum mundi metaphor constitutes, of course, a complex of relations that involve what might be distinguished as other metaphors. If the stage, taken at face value, is an untrue, unreal, or fictional reflection of life itself, then in Platonic terms any such "pale" imitation of reality is analogous to the stage. Thus stage and dream-the two most pervasive manifestations of the imaginative, imaginary, subjective, ideal dimension, as opposed to the actual and material -become easily linked as metaphors and implicitly invoke each other. It would be possible to expand consideration of plays to another reflection of the real-unreal or real-ideal dialec-

Complete shorter fiction

Abstract: For the first time in one volume, this complete collection of all the short fiction Oscar Wilde published contains such social and literary parodies as "Lord Arthur Savile's Crime" and "The Canterville Ghost;" such well-known fairy tales as "The Happy Prince," "The Young King," and "The Fisherman and his Soul;" an imaginary portrait of the dedicatee of Shakespeare's Sonnets entitled "The Portrait of Mr. W.H.;" and the parables Wilde referred to as "Poems in Prose," including "The Artist," "The House of Judgment," and "The Teacher of Wisdom."

Hawthorne and the Province of Romance

Abstract: To read in order Hawthorne's four completed novels is to witness the progress of an increasingly difficult, increasingly desperate, literary enterprise. The "neutral territory" of romance, the circumscribed meeting ground of actuality and imagination that "The Custom House" invokes, simply emblematizes the mental attitude that, for Hawthorne, enables and legitimates the act of writing. It is an attitude rendered less secure by each successive work and less confidently restored in each successive preface; Hawthorne's constant need to revise his definition of romance, to reformulate the relation between the actual and the imaginary, itself betrays the instability of that relation, the turmoil within the "neutral territory." Neither alienation from actuality nor failure of imagination, but rather the mounting apprehension that their meeting is mutually violative, precipitates this turmoil and constitutes this threat to romance. Hawthorne's anxious prefatory equivocations-his concern with the property rights of The House of the Seven Gables, his mingled affirmation and denial that Blithedale recreates Brook Farm, his simultaneous confession of imagination's impotence against the actual and boast of the criminal expropriations of The Marble Faun-all bespeak his ambivalence toward the very assemblage of his art's components, his resistance to his own creative impulse, his peculiar refusal to authorize the power that he claims and wields. The power of romance, wielded by Hawthorne in aesthetic triumph and moral horror, is its capacity to blur the territorial and even to challenge the ontological border between actuality and imagination. With increasing structural tension, the major works both insist on and recoil from this challenge. But the dialectic that inheres in each is first developed and fully represented in the early sequence of frame narratives, "Legends of the Province-House," a work that, like the novels, enacts the imaginative retrieval and reconstruction of ostensible historical materials and events. These four relatively neglected tales at once epitomize the informing principle of Hawthorne's art and curiously prefigure the course of his novelistic career.

Comments on Orientalism . Two Reviews: Representation and Authority

Abstract: Gilbert Durand, the theorist of the imaginary, is fond of saying that the study of human beings is “like being in a room and watching yourself go by in the street:” what is said of the object is always applicable to the subject. That is why the discourse of academic disciplines concerned with humans is peculiarly vulnerable. If you produce a theory of the imaginary, like Gilbert Durand, that theory will also be applicable to the discourse which produces it, immediately relativizing the theory as an imaginary product. If you study a culture or group of cultures having the character of the “Oriental,” your study, as Edward Said's book points out, is itself open to analysis as a manifestation of “Western” culture. A book which indicates, as his does, that “Western” representations of the East (beginning with the notion of the East itself) have purposes which relate to purely Western needs and projects can be seen in its turn as a representation of Orientalism having purposes of its own, such as the furtherance of Arab politial causes. A review which points these things out is itself asking to be reviewed in terms of its own representations and purposes. And so on.

The Filmic Dream and Point of View

Abstract: Examination of dreams in film suggests that limiting the point of view to a completely subjective camera in dreams or in any filniic narrative is undesirable Most "dream sequences" we can think of employ a mixture of subjective point of view shots and objective shots of the dreamer precisely because a dream as captured in film is a filmic dream- a psychic mirror of memory and desire I shall try to explain my position by discussing Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries (1957) and Buster Keaton's Sherlock, Jr (1925) I want to begin, though by considering a film which is not a "dream," one which tried to effect a subjective point of view and, in the opinion of most, failed as a film, even if it managed to achieve partially its aim : Robert Montgomery's The Lady in the Lake (1946) Those familiar with the film will recall that after an introduction in which we see Montgomery explain what will ensue (we're to watch the events exactly as the hero, Philip Marlowe, experienced them), we then enter a world presented to us through the limited point of view of the subjective camera, seeing as if from the eyes of the hero As he moves, we move-thanks to the camera actually strapped to Montgomery; as he smokes, the smoke appears to come from the center of vision; a hand that belongs to this center of vision holds a phone to the screen; when the hero is socked in the face, and in an auto accident, the camera reels and shakes, the image going out of focus to indicate his loss of consciousness We see Montgomery -Marlowe as an objective image only in mirrors, at least until the end of the film But we should note that within the subjective sequence, at one point we see him in a mirror reflection which he cannot be said to witness, thus breaking the consistency of the subjective camera Several comments by critics on the film bear noting First, Christian Metz observes that, in effect, the project was a hopeless one to begin with: "What happens ordinarily in films, and is sometimes called 'identification,' is in reality a temporary association, an act of projection whereby the spectator momentarily mentally accompanies the character (on condition that he has at other moments seen him from outside) Thus in his desire to achieve a total identification ![Montgomery] in fact inhibited that partial association which other films enjoy"1 Metz cites Albert Laffay's comment: "By pursuing an impossible perceptual assimilation, the film in fact inhibits symbolic identification"2 Jean Mitry raises an equally suggestive objection He notes that when he reads a first person narrative, he does not experience the events described as "immediate sensations" Rather: "I incarnate the T into a being which is myself I integrate recollections of ideas which are suggested by the words I compose therefore an imaginary in which I am the actor, but it is born of me, constituted of me" On the other hand, "subjective impressions in the cinema are given to me"; subjective cinema "communicates impressions which do not originate from me"3 I have begun with reference to The Lady in the Lake and to these critics because, as far as I have been able to determine, no one directly acknowledges that in the point of view section with the subjective camera, we have possibly the most sustained equivalent in film of a genuine dream I ask the reader to reflect a moment on the manner in which he or she dreams My experience, as well as those of a large number of people I have queried on this matter, is that in a real dream one is a spectator-participant: one for whom the events occur as experienced in real life; that is, the dream goes through my mind in a way such that I know my own body as part of me, rather than as disembodied or as a being distinct from me as on a stage or screen My investigations into Sigmund Freud's writings on dreams have yielded nothing; as far as I know, he is silent on the issue of point of view in dreams* What Montgomery did, in trying to present the equivalent of a literary first person point of view was- I believe unwittingly-to duplicate the conditions of a dream …

The Possibilities of Nonfiction: A Writer's View.

Abstract: Presented at the Drexel University and Free Library of Philadelphia Conference on Nonfiction, March 21, 1979. When John McPhee's book about the Alaskan wilderness was published, it excited national at tention. One critic said that McPhee "is a journalist who writes of fact with that full measure of literary distinction that some associate only with fiction or poet ry ." Coming Into The Wilderness was praised for its author 's "Balzacian zest for detail" and his "gift for portraiture that enables him to capture real people as memorably as any novelist does his imaginary one." Another critic said that McPhee "is above all a craftsman . . . a reporter who makes art. He writes pieces that are as complex as novels, as meticulous as scholarship . . . in prose that is humorous , elegant, economical ."