Cosmopolitanism and Affect in Henry James’ The Ambassadors

This essay explores the interplay between cosmopolitanism and affect in Henry James’ The Ambassadors. It reads the novel’s protagonist, Strether, as an embodiment of the cosmopolitan flâneur and examines how he complicates and challenges this identity as conceptualised by Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin. Due to his evasive cosmopolitan identity, Strether fails to maintain affective bonds with other characters. As such, The Ambassadors challenges James’ own sense of cosmopolitanism by staging various iterations of affect, most notably grief, guilt and loss, as undermining the cosmopolitanism the novel at first seems to promote. I conclude that Strether’s acute emotional responses can be read as a critique of the cosmopolitan flâneur who possesses a level of detachment that is not desirable. The novel levels a critique against cosmopolitanism’s seeming universalism. This tends to promote an abstract ideal that disregards the cosmopolite’s individual emotions and sensations – in The Ambassadors, cosmopolitanism is a fundamentally unethical way of living

Contesting the Prescriptibility of Emotion through Affective Encounters in Lucy Prebble’s The Effect (2012)

This paper explores how Lucy Prebble’s The Effect (2012) dramatises the subversive potentialities of affective encounters as an antidote to the isolating, profit-minded forms of posthumanisation prescribed by modern psychiatry. It argues that the play poignantly unveils how the convergence of the psychopharmaceutical industry with advanced capitalism and neoliberal ideology shape popular discourse around mental illnesses and the necessity of medically induced (self-)regulation of emotion. It also investigates how Prebble mingles crisis with hope in the piece by portraying the autonomy and unpredictability of affective bodily responses, which evade being translated into bio-data and destabilise biopsychiatry’s totalizing view of emotions as utterly controllable through the brain. My analysis utilises Rosi Braidotti’s theorisation of the posthuman subject as both susceptible to exploitation and control and as the site of resistance and ongoing transformation, as presented in her work The Posthuman (2013). It also employs Stefan Herbechter’s theories, as expressed in his book Posthumanism: A Critical Analysis (2013), on how biotechnological developments, advanced capitalism and ideology converge, facilitating new forms of self-governmentality. Finally, it refers to Brian Massumi’s conceptualisation of affect, prevalent in his work “The Autonomy of Affect” (1995) as an intense autonomic bodily response which resists processes of control and manipulation. Ultimately, I argue that The Effect highlights the transformative potential of affective encounters and interconnectedness, functioning as resistance to modern psychiatry’s isolating prescription of emotional self-governance through self-medication

“Couldst thou not watch with me?”: Queer Orientation and Unresponse in Swinburne’s ‘A Wasted Vigil’

In his 1866 review of A.C. Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads, John Morley expresses anxieties regarding the poet’s capacity for queer reorientation – his ability to bring transgressive erotic desires within his reader’s field of vision. The following year Swinburne published ‘A Wasted Vigil’, a lyric address to a beloved incapable of “watching with” the poem’s speaker. How does Swinburne address queer reorientation and the affective community between himself and his reader in his poetry? Using a phenomenological approach, this essay brings Swinburne into dialogue with Sara Ahmed’s work on affect studies and queer theory in order to examine the way in which ‘A Wasted Vigil’ articulates compulsory heterosexuality and queer possibility

Alberto Breccia’s Parody of Futurist Paintings in Modern Bande Dessinée: Resisting Transatlantic Fascism

During wars, art and culture often develop a “culture of camouflage” (Ojeda 68) to invite the reader to decipher hidden meanings as a form of political subversion. In Argentina, the ‘Golden Age’ of comics emerged in the 1940s in response to the rise of Fascist sentiments originating from the Futurist leader Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s transatlantic propaganda and flourished in the following decades. During and following the ‘Process of National Reorganisation’ from 1976 onwards, illustrator Alberto Breccia used graphic narratives as a form of counter-censorship as he appropriated Futurist aesthetics and the conventions of the modern bande dessinée. He considered this method as being able to allow “artistry and imagination [take] over from logical progressions” (Grove 25). Using this form, he encouraged the public to reflect on Argentina’s changing transatlantic landscape. This paper examines to what extent Breccia’s Le Coeur Révélateur: Et Autres Histoires Extraodinaires d’ Edgar Poe (1995) borrows Futurist visuality and makes use of the flexibility of the settings in Poe’s stories. This is done to recreate the haunting figures of history as they “turn away from the original work” to “conceive new forms of storytelling that explore the medium-specific properties of the host medium” (Baetens 7). This paper employs an interdisciplinary approach as, in addition to reading Poe’s original texts, this article also discusses Breccia’s appropriation of Futurist techniques, including “Divisionism, the use of threadlike brush strokes,” uniform application of colours according to their “precise tone and luminosity” (Rainey 9), and the dynamic sensation (Boccioni 46)

Resisting Transhistorical Violence: Fringe and Art Activism

Between 1587 and 1589, Netherlandish artist Jan van der Straet engraved a series of plates entitled New Inventions of Modern Times. One, Allegory of America, portrays an Indigenous woman in a feathered headdress and skirt eagerly welcoming Florentine explorer Amerigo Vespucci as he steps onto land. Van der Straet’s work occupies space in a long history of male European artistic depictions of Indigenous women, but the white colonial gaze evident in Allegory has not gone unchallenged. In 2007, Rebecca Belmore (Anishinaabe) responded to transhistorical violence against Indigenous women and girls with a billboard instalment entitled Fringe. Although originally displayed as a direct response to the Pickton murders in Vancouver, Fringe transcends a single event or story. Belmore’s billboard reimagines controlling images that construct Indigenous women as sexually available conquests. She strips the image of the icons that artists have used to represent Indigenous women. By placing the billboard in a crowded metropolitan area, Belmore forces the viewer to confront the still-present reality of Indigeneity alongside the concomitant brutality of settler colonialism. Belmore’s art functions on multiple levels to convey a sense of survivance in the face of systemic attempted genocide. Fringe is a fully realised, modern, and powerful piece of art activism that transforms visual culture. In this paper, I analyse the transhistorical effects of art as a tool of colonisation, as seen in van der Straet’s work. I then theorise Fringe as a vibrant piece of art activism (artivism) that subverts the white male colonial gaze

Translating Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse into Surrealist Art

Virginia Woolf often crosses the boundaries between literature and painting in her writing, masterfully combining these two realms. However, her novels are only ever read within a post-Impressionist framework. In this essay, I aim to challenge this well-established notion by translating To the Lighthouse into the terms of surrealist art. Firstly, I compare automatic writing used by surrealists and Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness technique and free indirect discourse, also reflecting on their significance in Lily Briscoe’s painting. Then, I explore the concept of the surreal house and space in both surrealism and To the Lighthouse. Lastly, I develop the notion of Mrs Ramsay as a ghost and her influence on Lily’s final piece of art. To justify my translation, I return to Freudian psychoanalysis, which was fundamental for surrealists and equally significant for Woolf, although in a less immediate way. It is essential to note that existing scholarship does not associate Woolf with surrealism at all, and, accordingly, I am not going to argue that Woolf considered herself a surrealist, nor that To the Lighthouse is representative of the movement. Instead, I plan to challenge the form of Woolf’s novel, redirecting our transfixed gaze towards new possible dimensions of this well-known, extensively interpreted text, and assist in merging the realms of literature and painting

NOTES ON RITUAL AS HAUNTING // RITUAL AS HEALING

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“Passion, Salomé”: Decadent Transformations and Transgressions of Feminine Sensuality in Huysmans, Wilde, and Strauss

Representations of Salomé have been hued in the paradoxical characterisations of the beautifully seductive and evil femme fatale. While some artists closely aligned their depictions to this Pandorian stereotype in collusion with narrative traditions of the oppressive male gaze, others challenged it through inventive reimaginations of Salomé, unveiling glimpses of the character’s complex emotive, psychological, and sensual universe that still manages to leave spectators ambivalent and discombobulated today. This article explores the transformations of Salomé in artistic representations of the Decadence across a range of media through a comparative reading of Huysmans’ novel À Rebours (1884), Wilde’s play Salomé (1891) and Strauss’ opera Salomé (1905). The interpretive changes in her characterisations – the femme fatale par excellence, the tragically fated heroine, the transgressive Decadent artist, the self-fulfilled hedonist – uncover a weaponisation of Salomé, transforming her oppressive patriarchal environmental conditions and the sexually objectifying male gaze that have often confined her, to reveal an empowered aesthetic of Decadent transgression that questions and subverts traditional gender and power dynamics, gender identities, and sensual feminine subjectivities

Turning Up the Volume on Translation: Transforming Narratives in the Work of Mercè Rodoreda

This paper considers literary translation as a process that is both transformative and disruptive. Translation engenders movement, not only across languages, but it moves ideas from the centre to the periphery, and from the periphery to the centre. I argue that the translation of literature facilitates the movement and transfer of social narratives between languages and cultures, and in doing so, the very nature of these narratives is altered. Defining social narratives as “the stories we tell ourselves, not just those we tell other people, about the world(s) in which we live” (Baker 19), this paper considers how the properties of such narratives are transformed when translated for new audiences and readerships. Using the vocabulary of sound and volume, I identify and label social narratives on a spectrum of quiet and loud, moving away from previously used binary descriptions, in order to describe the power dynamics at play within world literature. I argue that the interaction between narratives in translation can be discussed in terms of amplification, muting, or silencing, in particular when considering the position and status of source and target languages. To demonstrate this new means with which to describe this process in translation, I take as a case study twentieth-century Catalan author Mercè Rodoreda’s novel La mort i la primavera (1986), and its English translation Death in Spring (2017), identifying how narratives interact and function across cultures, and how they may be made quieter or louder, in order to resonate with, or be ‘heard’ by new audiences

Ageing and Death: A Focus on How to Transcend Diseases for Transhumanist Movements

The concept of transhumanism is based on a specific understanding of human limitations that should or could be transcended. Among them, the question of overcoming our own corporeality through the delaying of ageing or death is of major importance for a new understanding of human plasticity and fluidity when shaping ourselves and our environment. As transhumanism advocates for human enhancement through technological means, it considers ageing and death as diseases and criticizes their necessity in the human evolutionary process. In light of this transhumanist question, this article discusses ageing and death as diseases for which there must be technological solutions. It underlines that a philosophical approach is necessary to highlight how correlated and interrelated those subjects are and tries to go beyond humanist dichotomies to make clearer how major notions (health, enhancement, etc.) are intertwined with each other and consequently shape our socio-political subjectivities. Given this context, this article discusses the fact that medicine is traditionally structured on a limit that seems to be more and more plastic to pave the way for new debates, such as human enhancement, morphological freedom, and biocultural capital. It then discusses how transhumanism tries to transcend what is considered human structures by examining death as a fatal degeneration that could be overcome through biological amortality and informational immortality