Irreconcilable cross-modalities
Вот тут я буду:
Nineteenth-Century Aetiologies, Exoticism, and Multimodal Aesthetics
University of Liverpool, 2-4 April 2013
Of illness and exotic curatives, one hardly escapes solidago odora, ass’s milk, juice of millipedes, senna, horse dung, and snake oil. Medical narratives during the nineteenth century manifest somewhat irreconcilable cross-modalities of enthusiasm and fear with ‘otherness’. Drawing inspiration from early Greek philosophy, the post-Enlightenment art flourished with a focus on various modes of otherness; debating determinism, slavery, forgiveness, and nationalism while bringing together concepts that play major roles in our contemporary pedagogical approaches. Though it is not often emphasized, modes of eroticism in prose, poetry, and painting, whether of metaphorical or mythological conceptualisation, communicate certain entanglements with ‘otherness’. Given that today, multimodal normativity in aesthetics has moved in part a considerable distance from the concept of individualism, but not necessarily from egotism, how can it be read on account of mere ‘embodiment’? Multimodality, then, having been acclaimed with much achievement in current scholarship of literature and linguistics, is indebted to a prominent array of historical theories and practices mainly expanding on historiographies of otherness and aetiology.
И расскажу о еще одном случае экзотического лекарства для томящихся европейцев 19 века: японские картинки.
In the Eye of the Beholder: Ugliness, Beauty and Exoticism in the Orientalist Quest for Otherness
The proposed paper will offer the understanding of the 19th c. Orientalism as a European form of the quest for cultural difference and
for molding the notion of the otherness. I’ll begin from a little-known episode of a tragicomic encounter of a European naval officer Vasilii Golovnin, a Russian who for about five years was on the service in the British Royal Navy, with Japanese art. It occurred in 1812 while Golovnin was in captivity in Japan for an accidental entering the closed country. The benign warden brought him pictures of “women in rich garments” (most probable prints of beauties by Utamaro and other contemporary artists), but the Russian Westerner said that they “were depicted in such an ugly way that they could not produce any feelings besides laughter and repugnance - at least in Europeans.” Half a century later these very pictures made an uproar in Europe and inspired Japonisme as well as an aesthetic revolution of Impressionism and Art Nouveau. What was changed during these years? - The mode of perception that was provoked by the search for otherness. I suggest that European Orientalism in arts and letters is methodologically fruitful and heuristically interesting to see as a multifaceted expression of globalization. In the guise of Orientalism it appeared as the beginning of the systemic crisis of the Occidental civilization that grew into the feeling of the limits of its own self-sufficiency (on the cultural, artistic, religious and philosophical, as well as economic levels). The West needed its Other. Orientalism can be viewed as the Ur-phenomenon of globalization, or as the process of making the West less Western.
Nineteenth-Century Aetiologies, Exoticism, and Multimodal Aesthetics
University of Liverpool, 2-4 April 2013
Of illness and exotic curatives, one hardly escapes solidago odora, ass’s milk, juice of millipedes, senna, horse dung, and snake oil. Medical narratives during the nineteenth century manifest somewhat irreconcilable cross-modalities of enthusiasm and fear with ‘otherness’. Drawing inspiration from early Greek philosophy, the post-Enlightenment art flourished with a focus on various modes of otherness; debating determinism, slavery, forgiveness, and nationalism while bringing together concepts that play major roles in our contemporary pedagogical approaches. Though it is not often emphasized, modes of eroticism in prose, poetry, and painting, whether of metaphorical or mythological conceptualisation, communicate certain entanglements with ‘otherness’. Given that today, multimodal normativity in aesthetics has moved in part a considerable distance from the concept of individualism, but not necessarily from egotism, how can it be read on account of mere ‘embodiment’? Multimodality, then, having been acclaimed with much achievement in current scholarship of literature and linguistics, is indebted to a prominent array of historical theories and practices mainly expanding on historiographies of otherness and aetiology.
И расскажу о еще одном случае экзотического лекарства для томящихся европейцев 19 века: японские картинки.
In the Eye of the Beholder: Ugliness, Beauty and Exoticism in the Orientalist Quest for Otherness
The proposed paper will offer the understanding of the 19th c. Orientalism as a European form of the quest for cultural difference and
for molding the notion of the otherness. I’ll begin from a little-known episode of a tragicomic encounter of a European naval officer Vasilii Golovnin, a Russian who for about five years was on the service in the British Royal Navy, with Japanese art. It occurred in 1812 while Golovnin was in captivity in Japan for an accidental entering the closed country. The benign warden brought him pictures of “women in rich garments” (most probable prints of beauties by Utamaro and other contemporary artists), but the Russian Westerner said that they “were depicted in such an ugly way that they could not produce any feelings besides laughter and repugnance - at least in Europeans.” Half a century later these very pictures made an uproar in Europe and inspired Japonisme as well as an aesthetic revolution of Impressionism and Art Nouveau. What was changed during these years? - The mode of perception that was provoked by the search for otherness. I suggest that European Orientalism in arts and letters is methodologically fruitful and heuristically interesting to see as a multifaceted expression of globalization. In the guise of Orientalism it appeared as the beginning of the systemic crisis of the Occidental civilization that grew into the feeling of the limits of its own self-sufficiency (on the cultural, artistic, religious and philosophical, as well as economic levels). The West needed its Other. Orientalism can be viewed as the Ur-phenomenon of globalization, or as the process of making the West less Western.