Rewinding and Unwinding: Art and Justice in Times of Political Transition

The purpose of this article is to theorize the relationship between art and justice in times of transition so that a broader spectrum of political possibilities and their implications can be imagined. The aim is to offer a way to think about, and to render visible, the web of relationships that constitute this bond. By undertaking a close analysis and narrative investigation of the art installation REwind: A Cantata for Voice, Tape and Testimony, I use the artwork to elucidate four key ideas relating to paradigms, agency, encounters and space which make art relevant and meaningful to transitional justice. These four ideas frame two central arguments. First, I argue that an account of transitional justice without aesthetic dimensions is insufficient, precisely because transitional justice ‘acknowledges itself as a process inseparable from feelings of justice.’ Artworks can fill out affective topologies in ways that facilitate or stimulate recognition and a ‘feeling of being there.’ Secondly, I contend that art plays an important role in animating and activating individual narratives so that they take on collective importance. In doing so, the past can be shared so that a new political future can be imagined

"It may or may not be true. It does not matter": (Magic) Realism and Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion

Zadanie pt. „Digitalizacja i udostępnienie w Cyfrowym Repozytorium Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego kolekcji czasopism naukowych wydawanych przez Uniwersytet Łódzki” nr 885/P-DUN/2014 dofinansowane zostało ze środków MNiSW w ramach działalności upowszechniającej nauk

The Logic of Spectacle c. 1970

This paper examines the site plan and theme exhibit of the Osaka Expo of 1970, together with a week-long protest staged in the Tower of the Sun, which was the main element of the Theme Exhibit. Attempts to communicate a critical account of contemporary society and so transform the visitor were undercut by the Expo's ability to accommodate diverse interests and investments and to account for almost anything that was exhibited or staged on site. The Expo thus suggests that we need to supplement our understanding of spectacle as communication with an analysis of spectacle as a system

The Pandemic Event : Notes from the Venice Film Festival 2020

The essay aims to explore the conditions under which the Venice Film Festival was held in 2020. This is a crucial historic moment in which the international festival system sees some events converted into a completely online version, others postponed to a later date, and still others articulated in a hybrid way, depending on the evolution of the pandemic in progress. Among these emergency solutions, discussed in the impalpable digital body of online culture, what are the choices adopted by the Venice Film Festival? While the exhibition reduces the glamorous aspects to reflect on the ways of organising and showing oneself, of protecting the spectators and giving them an idea of normality, the emphasis on the “ways of doing” of this edition is the subject of unprecedented media attention. By recording the tremors of contemporary history like a seismograph, the Venice Film Festival becomes a testing ground both for the Italian “country system”, in the idea of more general rebirths, and for the most innovative trends in film curatorship, confirming its role as a privileged witness of changes, adaptations and reflections in institutional policies linked to culture and its diffusion

Venice as No-Place: Liminality and the Modernist Interpretation of the Myth of Venice

This thesis examines the traditional concept of a literary myth of Venice and argues how a significant change in the modernist understanding of place effectively re-imagines the city of Venice in a variety of non-geographical ways. Tracing this re-imagining by modernist authors, I focus first on the Henry James novella, "The Aspern Papers," addressing the specific Venetian symbolism James employs to reveal his interpretation of the city's stage-like setting and how James, as a forerunner to the modernism movement, used the stage to mimic each character's consciousness. Then, in using Thomas Mann's "Death in Venice," I explore the evolution of the use of Venice by modernist authors by considering Mann's incorporation of the illusionary and decadent reputation of the city to heighten the modernist trope of double vision. Lastly, in a treatment of Ernst Hemingway's final novel, Across the River and Into the Trees, I conclude the theory of an evolving use of Venice as setting in modernist fiction by examining Hemingway's concept of liminality and memory, and address how he relies on the city's unique history to serve as a reflection of the mental state of the Western world following the end of World War II.English Departmen

Swivelling the spotlight: stardom, celebrity and ‘me’

Celebrity studies critiques the ways in which celebrity culture constructs discourses of authenticity and disclosure, offering the cultural and economic circulation of the ‘private’ self. Rarely, however, do we turn the spotlight on ourselves as not only scholars of stardom and celebrity, but also part of the audience. Autoethnography has become increasingly important across different disciplines, although its status within media and cultural studies is less visible and secure, not least because the emphasis on personal attachments to media forms may threaten the discipline’s still contested claim to cultural legitimacy. The study of stars and celebrities has often found itself at the ‘lower’ end of this already debased continuum, perhaps making such tensions particularly acute. Based on three personal narratives of engagements with stars and celebrities, this co-authored article explores the potential relationships between autoethnography and celebrity studies, and considers the personal, intellectual, and political implications of bringing the scholar into the celebrity frame

Finding Home for Poetry in a Nomadic World: Joseph Brodsky and \uc1gnes Leh\uf3czky

This new line of research has been suggested to me by the life and work of the Russian poet and essayist Joseph Brodsky, who, after his exile from the Soviet Union in 1972, moved to the United States, to lead a culturally \u2018nomadic\u2019 existence, which culminated, in his last years, in the abandonment of the mother tongue for the full adoption of his second language, both for prose and poetry. Departing from Brodsky\u2019s last production and following the steps that directed him to approach and then elect English as his privileged means of expression \u2013 necessary for his personal and artistic evolution \u2013 I have examined his work focused on the urban environment, namely the one located in Venice. I have then tried to see if displacement and repeated cultural travels can be considered a \u2018sought-after\u2019 status of the contemporary writer, starting from the reading of some guiding texts, as Nomadic Subjects by Rosi Braidotti (1994), Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto by Stephen Greenblatt (2010), and Culture in a Liquid Modern World (2011) by Zygmunt Bauman, drawing from the interdisciplinary and rapidly evolving field of Migration Studies. After presenting a quick but exhaustive overview of Brodsky\u2019s work located in Venice, I addressed my research to contemporary English poetry, to which Brodsky was considered to belong, to look for a correspondence with a new author, who also focuses on cultural nomadism, displacement, and the adoption of English as vehicle of artistic creation and I found a thematic resonance in the recent work of \uc1gnes Leh\uf3czky, essayist and poet, Hungarian by birth, and British by adoption, who belongs to the cultural movement of the \u2018British Poetic Revival.\u2019 The focus of my research has then been the investigation of Leh\uf3czky\u2019s \u2018post-avant-garde\u2019 poetry \u2013 still unpublished in Italian \u2013 to highlight some affinities in the works of the two authors, who, although belonging to two generations and two essentially different stylistic registers, find similar ways to explore the reality around them. Leh\uf3czky's texts offer new visions of the urban spaces in the cultural crossroads offered by today's technologized cities, where global relationships and the coexistence of multiple languages contribute to the creation of new identities, but where history must also become a fundamental element in understanding the present. Space, time and language play the main role in building her original, \u2018holistic\u2019 and at the same time \u2018palimpsestic\u2019 view of the world. It is a vision that, while recognizing in the mobility of contemporary man the traces of a nomadism which has always existed, finds in Leh\uf3czky's poems a correspondence in the perspectives of the lyrical observer, to offer the readers visions that span in horizontality and in verticality, for instance from the top of a hill in Budapest, to the catacombs of an English gothic cathedral, according to the principles of 'psychogeography.' English, far from being simply a lingua franca, absorbes the influences of the authors\u2019 mother tongues \u2013 \u2018phagocyting\u2019 in some way these latter \u2013 and is thus enriched with new features, becoming not only a new language, but a \u2018space in-between\u2019 that protects and welcomes the nomadic writers, and forges their new identities. Faced with the impossibility of defining the boundary of language and identity, because of the fluid and nomadic nature of language itself, these authors suggest if not answers, new richer languages and modalities, to extend the boundaries of contemporary literary expression

The Time and Space of Greek-Cypriot Cinema: A Deleuzian Reading

This study traces the emergence of Greek-Cypriot Cinema in Cyprus since 1974, arguing that it is the product of a historical moment. 1974 marks a watershed in the island’s protracted political conflict which culminated in ethnic violence, a coup and war. Whilst the war has been the subject of wide ranging scholarly research its impact in forging a distinctive national cinema remains unexamined. This thesis attempts to re-address this absence. My approach is interdisciplinary, drawing on historiographical studies as well as Film Studies, Cultural Theory and Film Philosophy. Primary research includes extensive dialogues with filmmakers. All of the films examined deal explicitly with facets of space, time and memory in connection to the experiences of the war. In view of these prevalent themes the thesis makes the case for reading Greek-Cypriot Cinema through the cinema work of French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, whilst holding the films’ cultural and national contexts in view. It proposes that Cinema 1:The Movement-Image (1983) and Cinema 2:The Time-Image (1985) explore the interconnection between real spaces outside of cinema and the creative spaces inside, through the categories of time and space. Centring on the conceptual shift in these volumes from a cinema of movement to a cinema of time and memory I argue that Deleuze’s paradigm offers a conceptual engagement with the distinctiveness and complexities of Greek-Cypriot Cinema; as it negotiates the real and abstract time and spaces which are imagined, reflected and visualised on the screen. Part one conceptualises Greek-Cypriot Cinema within existing studies of cinema and nation, examining Deleuze’s descriptions of modern and political cinema. Part two examines time and recollection-images in the films of Georgiou, Florides and Nicolaides, Tofarides and Koukoumas. Part three scrutinises how the changes in the political landscape after 2003 are reflected in films which imagine a new dynamic between time and spaces, creating new cinematic images in works by Farmakas, Stylianou and Danezi-Knutsen

Poetics of the Heartland: The Lyric Voices of James Wright and Stanley Plumly

James Wright and Stanley Plumly were both born in Belmont County in the Ohio River Valley. Wright’s home of Martins Ferry is a mill town on the river, a part of the industrial community of Wheeling, West Virginia. Plumly, on the other hand, grew up 40 miles from the river in the hills and farm country. Although Wright was born a decade before Plumly, each poet developed a distinctive and influential lyric voice, as well as a unique vision of American experience. Comparison of these two poets invites us to search for strands of an Ohioan past in their poems, and also to relate their stylistic methods. Both poets tend towards the surreal in their depiction of experience, often articulating vivid imagery in dream-like setting. The differences and affinities in their evocations of heartland experience emerge through a thorough study of these poets’ works. Examining two books from each poet, the thesis attempts to delineate and analyze connections between the poets’ methods and achievements. Wright’s “The Branch Will Not Break”(1963) and “Shall We Gather at the River”(1968), and Plumly’s “Out-of-the-Body Travel”(1977) and “Summer Celestial”(1983) are the collections that both poets produced at roughly the middle of their respective careers. Studying sequential books reveals the poets’ developing voices, and how the poetry of these books also exemplifies both poets’ initial and most concerted effort towards evoking home and grappling with past

Joan Jonas's Imagist Poetics

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