Academic literature on the topic '1697-1764 Criticism and interpretation'

Creation and criticism, in comics, as in all types of artistic expression, become intertwined, and all the more so as the form develops self-awareness and seeks defi nition. One of the main precursors of the tradition of graphic storytelling, William Hogarth (1697–1764), told of the social tribulations of the London in which he lived via multi-image series such as A Rake’s Progress (c. 1735) and A Harlot’s Progress (c. 1732), but was also known for his Analysis of Beauty (1753), in which he elaborates the notion of the central S shape as key to the visual expression of attractiveness; this serpentine ‘line of beauty’ can still be detected in the characters of comic books today.

“Say a body. Where none. No mind. Where none. That at least. A place. Where none. For the body. To be in. Move in. Out of. Back into. No out. No back. Only in. Stay in. On in. Still” (Beckett, Short Fiction 471). 1. Introduction – Wherefore to ‘still’?HIRST: As it is?SPOONER: As it is, yes please, absolutely as it is (Pinter, 1971-1981 77). These first lines of Harold Pinter’s play No Man’s Land are indeed the first lines: they were the first lines that came to Pinter, existing as the spark that drove the play into being. Pinter overhead the words ‘As it is’ whilst in a taxi cab and was struck by their poetry and utter uncertainty. That was it. In the play, they are referring to having a scotch – i.e. as it is, without ice. Here, they refer to the ‘still’ – the incessant constitutive moment of being in the world ‘as it is’. In this short paper I want to essay the phenomenon of ‘still’ as it is; as in there is ‘still’, and as in the ‘there is’ is the ‘still’ between presencing and absencing (as in No Man’s Land: two bodies in a room, a question, and a moment of comprehension). Three points need to be outlined from this desire to essay the phenomenon of ‘still’. First, it should be remembered and noted that to essay is to weigh something up in thought. Second, that ‘still’ is to be considered as a phenomena, both material and immaterial, and not as a concept or state, and where our endeavour with phenomenology here is understood as a concern with imagining ‘a body’ and ‘a place’ where there is neither – in this I want to think the vital and the vulnerable in non-oppositional terms “to work against conventional binaries such as stasis–movement, representation–practice (or the non-representational), textual–non-textual, and immaterial–material” (Merrimen et al 193). Third, that I was struck, in the call for papers for this issue of the Journal of Media and Culture, by the invocation of ‘still’ over that of ‘stillness’, or rather the persistent use of ‘still’ in the call focussing attention on ‘still’ as a noun or thing rather than as an adjective or verb. This exploration of being through the essaying of ‘still’ as a phenomenon will be exampled in the work of Samuel Beckett and Pinter and thought through in the philosophical and literary thought of the outside of Maurice Blanchot. Why Beckett? Beckett because he precisely and with distilled measure, exactitude and courage asks the question of being through the vain attempt to stage what remains when everything superfluous is taken away (Knowlson 463): what remains may well be the ‘still’ although this remainder is constitutive of presencing and not a relic or archive or dead space. Why Pinter? Pinter because, through restoring “theatre to its basic elements - an enclosed space and unpredictable dialogue” (Engdaht), he staged a certain vision of our life on earth which pulls on the very logic and power of silence in communication: this logic is that of ‘still’ – saying something while doing nothing; movement where stillness is perceived. Why Blanchot? Blanchot because he understood and gave expression to the fact that that which comes to be written, the work, will not succeed in communicating the experience that drives the writing and that as such the written work unworks the desire that brought it into being (see Smock 4). This ‘unworking’, this putting into question, is the ‘still’. * * * Apart from any other consideration, we are faced with the immense difficulty, if not the impossibility, of verifying the past. I don’t mean merely years ago, but yesterday, this morning. What took place, what was the nature of what took place, what happened? If one can speak of the difficulty of knowing what in fact took place yesterday, one can treat the present in the same way. We won’t know until tomorrow or in six months’ time, and we won’t know then, we’ll have forgotten, or our imagination will have attributed quite false characteristics to today. A moment is sucked away and distorted, often even at the time of its birth. We will all interpret a common experience quite differently, though we prefer to subscribe to the view that there’s a shared common ground, a known ground. I think there’s a shared common ground all right, but that it is more like a quicksand (Pinter, Voices 22). The ‘still’: treating the present in the same manner as the difficulty of knowing the past; seeing the present as being sucked away and distorted at its inception; taking knowing and the constitution of being as grounded on quicksand. At stake then is the work that revolves around the conceptualizations and empirical descriptions of the viscerally engraved being-there and the practical and social formations of embodiment that follow. I am concerned with the ways in which a performative re-emphasizing of practice and materiality has overlooked the central point of what ‘being-there’ means. Which is to say that what ‘being-there’ means has already been assumed in the exciting, extensive and particular engagements which concern themselves more with the different modes of being-there (walking, sitting, sleeping), the different potentialities of onto-technical connections connecting (to) the world (new image technologies, molecular stimulants, practised affecting words), and the various subjectivities produced in the subsequent placements being considered and being made in such connections whether materially or immaterially (imaginary) real (attentive, bored, thoughtful, exhausted). Such engagements do far more than this paper aims for, but what I want for this paper is for it to be a pause in itself, a provocation that takes a step back. What might this step back entail? Let’s start by pivoting off from a phrase that addresses the singular being-there of any performative material moment and that is “the event of corporeal exposure” alluded to by Paul Harrison in his paper ‘Corporeal Remains’ (432). Key to the question of ‘still’ or ‘stillness’ is the tension between thinking the body, embodiment and a sense of life that forms the social when what we are talking about or around is ‘a body. Where none. … A place. Where none’. What briefly do I mean by this? First, what can be said about the presencing of the body? Harrison, following Emmanuel Levinas, both inherits and withdraws from Martin Heidegger’s phenomenology primarily because, and this is what we want to move away from, the key concept of Dasein both covers up the sensible and vulnerable body in being discerned as a disembodied subjectivity and is too concerned forthwith with a sense of comprehension in a teleological economy of intent(ion) (429-430). Second, what is a stake in the ephemeral presence of place? Harrison signals that the eventhood of corporeal existence exists within a “specific relation between interior and exterior”, namely that of “the ‘sudden address from elsewhere’” (436). The Beckettian non-place can be read as that specific relation of the exterior to the interior, of the outside being part of that which brings the sense of self into being. In summary, these two points question the arguments raised by Harrison: ‘What is encountering'? if it isn’t quite the body as nominally thought. And ‘What is encountering?’ if such encountering is a radical asymmetrical address which nonetheless gives some orientation (placement) of comprehension for and of ourselves? 2. What is encountering? Never present still: ‘Say a body. Where none.’Literature is that experience through which the consciousness discovers its being in its inability to lose consciousness, in the movement whereby it disappears, as it tears itself away from the meticulousness of an I, it is re-created beyond consciousness as an impersonal spontaneity (Blanchot, Fire 331-332). I have used the textual extracts from literature and theatre because they present that constitutive and continual tearing away from consciousness (that sense that one is present, embodied, but always in the process of finding meaning or one’s place outside of one’s body). The ‘still’ I want to depict is then the incessant still point of presencing, the moment of disappearance and re-creation: take this passage in Blanchot’s Thomas the Obscure where the eye of the protagonist, Thomas, becomes useless for seeing in the normal way. Read this as a moment where the body doesn’t just function and gain definition within an economy of what we already know it can do, but that it places us and displaces us at the same time towards something more constitutive, indeterminate and existential because it is neither entirely animate flesh nor inanimate corpse but also the traced difference of the past and the differing affirmation of the future:Not only did this eye which saw nothing apprehend something, it apprehended the cause of its vision. It saw as object that which prevented it from seeing. Its own glance entered into it as an image, just when this glance seemed the death of all image (Blanchot, Reader 60). This is the ‘dark gaze’ that Kevin Hart unveils in his excellent book The Dark Gaze: Maurice Blanchot and the Sacred, which he defines as: “the vision of the artist who sees being as image, already separated from the phenomenal world and yet not belonging to a separate order of being” (12). Again this quivering and incessant becoming of ‘a body where none and a place where none’ pushes us towards the openness and exposure of the ‘stilling’ experience of a ‘loss of knowledge’, a lack of comprehension and yet an immediate need for orientation. The ‘still’, shown for Blanchot in the space of literature, distinguishes “itself from the struggle of which it is the dazzling expression … and if it is an answer, the answer to the destiny of the man that calls himself into question, then it is an answer that does not suspend the question” (Blanchot, Fire 343).Thus the phenomenological hegemony that produces “a certain structuring and logos of orientation within the very grammar geographers use to frame spatial experience” (Romanillos 795) is questioned and fractured in the incessant exposure of being by an ever inaccessible outside in which we ironically access ourselves – in other words, find out who or what we are. This is indeed a performance of coherence in always already deconstructing world (Rose). So for me the question of ‘still’ is a question that opens our thought up to the very way in which we think the human, and how we then think the subject in the social in a much more existential and embodied manner. The concern here is less with the biology of this disposition (although I think ultimately such insights need to go in lockstep with the ones I wish to address here) than its ontological constitution. In that sense I am questioning our micro and immediate place-making embodiment and this tasks us to think this embodiment and phenomenological disposition not in a landscape (more broadly or because this concept has become too broad) but in-place. The argument here operates a post-phenomenological and post-humanist bent in arguing for this ‘–place’ to be the neutral ‘there is’ of worlding, and the ‘in-’ to be the always exposed body. One can understand this as the absolute separation of self or other in terms of a non-dialectical account of intersubjectivity (see Critchley 18). In turning to Blanchot the want of the still, “where being ceaselessly perpetuates itself as nothingness” (Blanchot, Space 243), is in ‘showing/forcing us to think’ the strangeness, openness and finitudinal terror of this non-dialectical (non-relational) interhuman relation without the affirmations Levinas makes of an alterity to be understood ethically in some metaphysical sense and in an interpretation of that non-relation as ultimately theological (Critchley 19). What encounters is then the indeterminate, finite and exposed body. 3. What is encountering? The topography of still: ‘A place. Where none’.One of the autobiographical images for Beckett was of an old man holding a child’s hand walking down a country road. But what does this say of being? Embodied being and being-there respectively act as sensation and orientation. The touch of another’s hand is equally a touch of minimal comprehension that acts as a momentary placement. But who is guiding who? Who is pre-occupying and giving occupation to whom? Or take Pinter and the end of No Man’s Land: two men centred in a room one hoping to be employed by the other in order to employ the other back into the ‘land of the living’ rather than wait for death. Are they reflections of the same person, an internal battle to will one’s life to live, or rather to move one’s living fleshy being to an occupation (of place or as a mode by which one opens oneself up to the surroundings in which you literally find oneself – to become occupied by something there and to comprehend in doing so). Either way, is that all there is? Is this how it is? Do we just accept ‘life’ as it is? Or does ‘life’ always move us?HIRST: There is nothing there. Silence SPOONER: No. You are in no man’s land. Which never moves, which never changes, which never grows older, but which remains forever, icy and silent. Silence HIRST: I’ll drink to that (Pinter, Complete Works 157). Disingenuously, taking Pinter at face value here, ‘no man’s land’ is impossible for us, it is literally a land within which no human can be: can you imagine a place where nothing moves, never changes, never ages, but remains forever? Of course you can: we can imagine such a place. The ‘still’ can be made tangible in artistic expressions partly because they provide a means of both communicating that of which we cannot speak and showing the communication of silence when we do not speak. So in the literary spaces of Beckett, Blanchot, and Pinter, “literature as experience is valuable not so much for what it tells us about literature but for what it reveals about experience” (Hart 139-140). So what we have is a communication that reveals but doesn’t define, and that therefore questions the orientation and certainty of subject positions: The literary renderings of certain landscapes, such as those presentations of spatialities outside-the-subject, of the anonymous there is of spaces, contribute to a dismantling and erasure of the phenomenological subject (Romanillos 797). So what I think thinking through ‘still’ can do is bring us to think the ‘neutral presence of life itself’ and thus solicit from us a non-oppositional accounting of vitalism and passivity. “Blanchot asked me: why not pursue my inner experience as if I were the last man?” – for Bataille the answer became a dying from inside without witness, “an impossible moment of paralysis” (Boldt-Irons 3); but for Blanchot it became a “glimpse into ‘the interminable, the incessant’” (ibid) from outside the dying. In other words we, as in humans that comprehend, are also what we are from outside our corporeal being, be that active or passively engaged. But let’s not forget that the outside is as much about actual lived matter and materialized worlds. Whilst what enables us to instil a place in the immaterial flow of absent-presencing or present-absencing is our visceral embodied placement, it is not the body per se but its capacity that enables us to relate or encounter that which is non-relational and that which disrupts our sense of being in place. Herein all sorts of matter (air, earth, water, fire) encounter us and “act as a lure for feeling” (Stengers; after Anderson and Wylie). Pursuing the exposing nature of matter under the notion of ‘interrogation’ Anderson and Wylie site the sensible world as an interrogative agent itself. Wylie’s post-phenomenological folding of the seer and seen, the material and the sensible (2006), is rendered further here in the materialization of Levinas’ call to respond in Lingis’ worlding imperative of “obedience in sensibility” (5) where the materialization is not just the face of the Other that calls but matter itself. It is not just about living, quivering flesh then because “the flesh is a process, not a ‘substance’, in the sense of something which is simply there” (Anderson and Wylie 7). And it is here that I think the ontological accounting of ‘still’ I want to install intervenes: for it is not that there is ever a ‘simply there’ but always a ‘there is’. And this ‘there is’ is not necessarily of sensuality or sensibility, nor is it something vitally felt in one form or another. Rather it persists and insists as a neutral, incessant, interminable presencing that questions us into being: ‘what are we doing here?’ Some form of minimal comprehension must ensue even if it is only ephemeral or only enough to ‘go on’ for a bit more. I can’t go on, you must go on, I’ll go on, you must say words, as long as there are any, until they find me, until they say me, strange pain (Beckett, Unnameable 414). In a sense the question creates the questioner: all sorts of imperatives make us appear. But my point is that they are both of corporeal sensibility, felt pain or pleasure a la Lingis, and minimal comprehension of ontological placement, namely (as shown here) words as they say us, never ours and never finished. The task of reading such stuttering yet formative words is the question ‘still’ presents to social scientific explanation of being bodies in social formations. There is something unreal about the idea of stillness and the assertion that ‘still’ exists as a phenomenon and this unreality rests with the idea that ‘still’ presents both a principle of action and the incapacity to act (see Bissell for exemplary empirics on and theoretical insights into the relational constitution of activity and inactivity) – ‘I can’t go on, you must go on’. There is then a frustrated entitlement of being pre-occupied in space where we gain occupation not in equipmental activity but in the ontological attunement that makes us stall in fascination as a moment of comprehension. Such attunements are constitutive of being and as such are everywhere. They are however more readily seized upon as graspable in those moments of withdrawal from history, those moments that we don’t include when we bio-graph who we are to others, those ‘dull’ moments of pause, quiet, listlessness and apathy. But it is in these moments where, corporeally speaking, a suspension or dampening of sensibility heightens our awareness to perceive our being-there, and thus where we notice our coming to be inbetween heartbeat and thought. Such moments permanently wallpaper our world and as such provide room for perceiving that shadow mode of ‘stillness’ that “produces a strange insectlike buzzing in the margins” (Blanchot, Fire 333). Encountering is then the minimal sense of going on in the face of the questions asked of the body.Let us change the subject. For the last time (Pinter, Dramatic Works 149). Conclusion: ‘For the body. To be in. Move in. Out of. Back into. No out.’Thinking on ‘still’ seems to be a further turn away from vitalism, but such thinking acts as a fear (or a pause and therefore a demand to recognize) that what frightens us, what stills us, is the end of the end, the impossibility of dying (Blanchot, Fire 337): why are we here? But it is this fright that enlivens us both corporeally, in existing as beings, and meaningfully, in our ever ongoing encounter with the ‘there is’ that enables our sense of orientation, towards being something that can say/feel ‘there’.A human being is always on the way toward itself, in becoming, thwarted, thrown-into a situation, primordially ‘‘passive,’’ receptive, attuned, exposed …; far from limiting him, this exposure is the very ground of the emergence of a universe of meaning, of the ‘‘worldliness’’ of man (Žižek 273). The ‘still’ therefore names “the ‘site’ in which the event of Being occurs” (Calarco 34). It comes about from “glimpsing the abyss opened up by the recognition of the perspectival character of human knowledge and the concomitant awareness of … [its] limits” (Calarco 41) – that yes we are death-subjected beings and therefore corporeal and finite. And as such it fashions “a fascination for something ‘outside’ or other than the human” (Calarco 43) – that we are not alone in the world, and the world itself brings us into being. This counterpointing between body and place, sensation and meaning, exists at the very heart of what we call human: namely that we are tasked to know how to go on at the limits of what we know because to go on is the imperative of world. This essay has been a pause then on the circumflexion of ‘still’. If Levinas is right in suggesting that Blanchot overcomes Heidegger’s philosophy of the neuter (Levinas 298) it is because it is not just that we (Dasein) question the ontological from the ontic in which we are thrown but that also the ontological (the outside that ‘stills’ us) questions us:What haunts us is something inaccessible from which we cannot extricate ourselves. It is that which cannot be found and therefore cannot be avoided (Blanchot, Space 259). Thus, as Hart writes, we are transfixed “and risk standing where our ‘here’ will crumble into ‘nowhere’ (150).Neither just vital nor vulnerable, it is about the quick of meaning in the topography of finitude. The resultant non-ontological ethics that comes from this is voiced from an unsuspecting direction in a text written by Jacques Derrida to be read at his funeral. On 12th October 2004 Derrida’s son Pierre gave it oration: “Always prefer life and never cease affirming survival” (Derrida, quoted in Hill 7). Estragon: ‘I can’t go on like this’Vladimir: ‘That’s what you think’ (Beckett, Complete Works 87-88). ReferencesAnderson, Ben, and John Wylie. “On Geography and Materiality.” Environment and Planning A (advance online publication, 3 Dec. 2008). Beckett, Samuel. Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnameable. New York: Grove P, 1958. ———. Samuel Beckett: The Complete Dramatic Works. London: Faber & Faber, 1990. ———. Samuel Beckett, Volume 4: Poems, Short Fiction, Criticism. New York: Grove/Atlantic P, 2006. Blanchot, Maurice. The Work of Fire. Trans. Charlotte Mandell. Stanford: Stanford U P, 1995. ———. The Space of Literature. Trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1989. ———. The Infinite Conversation. Trans. Susan Hanson. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993. ———. The Station Hill Blanchot Reader. Trans. Lydia Davis. Barrytown: Station Hill P, 1999. Bissell, David. “Comfortable Bodies: Sedentary Affects.” Environment and Planning A 40 (2008): 1697-1712. Boldt-Irons, Lesile-Ann. “Blanchot and Bataille on the Last Man.” Angelaki 11.2 (2006): 3-17. Calarco, Matthew. Zoographies: The Question of the Animal from Heidegger to Derrida. New York: Columbia U P, 2008. Critchley, Simon. “Forgetfulness Must: Politics and Filiation in Blanchot and Derrida.” Parallax 12.2 (2006): 12-22. Engdaht, Horace. “The Nobel Prize in Literature – Prize Announcement.” 13 Oct. 2005. 8 Mar. 2009 ‹http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/2005/announcement.html›. Hart, Kevin. The Dark Gaze: Maurice Blanchot and the Sacred. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2004. Harrison, Paul. “Corporeal Remains: Vulnerability, Proximity, and Living On after the End of the World.” Environment and Planning A 40 (2008): 423-45. Hill, Leslie. The Cambridge Introduction to Jacques Derrida. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. Levinas, Emmanuel. Totality and Infinity. Trans. Alphonso Lingis, Pittsburgh: Duquesne UP, 1999. Lingis, Alphonso. The Imperative. Bloomington: Indiana University P, 1998. Knowlson, John. Damned to Fame: Life of Samuel Beckett. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 1997.Merriman, Peter. et al. “Landscape, Mobility, Practice.” Social & Cultural Geography 9 (2008): 191-212. Nancy, Jean-Luc. “The Being-With of Being-There.” Continental Philosophical Review 41 (2008): 1-15. Pinter, Harold. 1971–1981 Complete Works: 4. New York: Grove P, 1981 ———. Various Voices: Prose, Poetry, Politics 1948-2005. London: Faber & Faber, 2005. Romanillos, Jose Lluis. “‘Outside, It Is Snowing’: Experience and Finitude in the Nonrepresentational Landscapes of Alain Robbe-Grillet.” Environment and Planning D 26 (2008): 795-822. Rose, Mitch. "Gathering ‘Dreams of Presence’: A Project for the Cultural Landscape." Environment and Planning D 24 (2006): 537–54.Smock, Ann. "Translator’s Introduction.”The Space of Literature. Maurice Blanchot. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1989. 1-15. Wylie, John. “Depths and Folds: On Landscape and the Gazing Subject.” Environment and Planning D 24 (2006): 519-35. Žižek, Slavoj. The Parallax View. Cambridge: The MIT P, 2006.

In a field of study as well-established as the Gothic, it is surprising how much contention there is over precisely what that term refers to. Is Gothic a genre, for example, or a mode? Should it be only applicable to literary and film texts that deal with tropes of haunting and trauma set in a gloomy atmosphere, or might it meaningfully be applied to other cultural forms of production, such as music or animation? Can television shows aimed at children be considered Gothic? What about food? When is something “Gothic” and when is it “horror”? Is there even a difference? The Gothic as a phenomenon is commonly identified as beginning with Horace Walpole’s novel The Castle of Otranto (1764), which was followed by Clara Reeve’s The Old English Baron (1778), the romances of Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis’ The Monk (1796). Nineteenth-century Gothic literature was characterised by “penny dreadfuls” and novels such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). Frequently dismissed as sensational and escapist, the Gothic has experienced a critical revival in recent decades, beginning with the feminist revisionism of the 1970s by critics such as Ellen Moers, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar. With the appearance of studies such as David Punter’s The Literature of Terror (1980), Gothic literature became a reputable field of scholarly research, with critics identifying suburban Gothic, imperial Gothic, postcolonial Gothic and numerous national Gothics, including Irish Gothic and the Gothic of the American South. Furthermore, as this special edition on Gothic shows, the Gothic is by no means limited to literature, with film, television, animation and music all partaking of the Gothic inflection. Indeed, it would be unwise to negate the ways in which the Gothic has developed to find fertile ground beyond the bounds of literature. In our media-centred twenty-first century, the Gothic has colonised different forms of expression, where the impact left by literary works, that were historically the centre of the Gothic itself, is all but a legacy. Film, in particular, has a close connection to the Gothic, where the works of, for instance, Tim Burton, have shown the representative potential of the Gothic mode; the visual medium of film, of course, has a certain experiential immediacy that marries successfully with the dark aesthetics of the Gothic, and its connections to representing cultural anxieties and desires (Botting). The analysis of Gothic cinema, in its various and extremely international incarnations, has now established itself as a distinct area of academic research, where prominent Gothic scholars such as Ken Gelder—with the recent publication of his New Vampire Cinema (2012)—continue to lead the way to advance Gothic scholarship outside of the traditional bounds of the literary.As far as cinema is concerned, one cannot negate the interconnections, both aesthetic and conceptual, between traditional Gothic representation and horror. Jerrold Hogle has clearly identified the mutation and transformation of the Gothic from a narrative solely based on “terror”, to one that incorporates elements of “horror” (Hogle 3). While the separation between the two has a long-standing history—and there is no denying that both the aesthetics and the politics of horror and the Gothic can be fundamentally different—one has to be attuned to the fact that, in our contemporary moment, the two often tend to merge and intersect, often forming hybrid visions of the Gothic, with cinematic examples such as Guillermo Del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) playing testament to this. Indeed, the newly formed representations of “Gothic Horror” and “Gothic Terror” alerts us to the mutable and malleable nature of the Gothic itself, an adaptable mode that is always contextually based. Film is not, however, the only non-literary medium that has incorporated elements of the Gothic over the years. Other visual representations of the Gothic abound in the worlds of television, animation, comics and graphic novels. One must only think here of the multiple examples of recent television series that have found fruitful connections with both the psychologically haunting aspects of Gothic terror, and the gory and grisly visual evocations of Gothic horror: the list is long and diverse, and includes Dexter (2006-2013), Hannibal (2013-), and Penny Dreadful (2014-), to mention but a few. The animation front —in its multiple in carnations —has similarly been entangled with Gothic tropes and concerns, a valid interconnection that is visible both in cinematic and television examples, from The Corpse Bride (2005) to Coraline (2009) and Frankenweeinie (2012). Comics and graphics also have a long-standing tradition of exploiting the dark aesthetics of the Gothic mode, and its sensationalist connections to horror; the instances from this list pervade the contemporary media scope, and feature the inclusion of Gothicised ambiences and characters in both singular graphic novels and continuous comics —such as the famous Arkham Asylum (1989) in the ever-popular Batman franchise. The inclusion of these multi-media examples here is only representative, and it is an almost prosaic accent in a list of Gothicised media that extends to great bounds, and also includes the worlds of games and music. The scholarship, for its part, has not failed to pick up on the transformations and metamorphoses that the Gothic mode has undergone in recent years. The place of both Gothic horror and Gothic terror in a multi-media context has been critically evaluated in detail, and continues to attract academic attention, as the development of the multi-genre and multi-medium journey of the Gothic unfolds. Indeed, this emphasis is now so widespread that a certain canonicity has developed for the study of the Gothic in media such as television, extending the reach of Gothic Studies into the wider popular culture scope. Critical texts that have recently focused on identifying the Gothic in media beyond not only literature, but also film, include Helen Wheatley’s Gothic Television (2007), John C. Tibbetts’ The Gothic Imagination: Conversation of Fantasy, Horror, and Science Fiction in the Media (2011), and Julia Round’s Gothic in Comics and Graphic Novels (2014). Critics often suggest that the Gothic returns at moments of particular cultural crisis, and if this is true, it seems as if we are in such a moment ourselves. Popular television shows such as True Blood and The Walking Dead, books such as the Twilight series, and the death-obsessed musical stylings of Lana Del Ray all point to the pertinence of the Gothic in contemporary culture, as does the amount of submissions received for this edition of M/C Journal, which explore a wide range of Gothic texts. Timothy Jones’ featured essay “The Black Mass as Play: Dennis Wheatley’s The Devil Rides Out” suggests that although scholarly approaches to the Gothic tend to adopt the methodologies used to approach literary texts and applied them to Gothic texts, yielding readings that are more-or-less congruous with readings of other sorts of literature, the Gothic can be considered as something that tells us about more than simply ourselves and the world we live in. For Jones, the fact that the Gothic is a production of popular culture as much as “highbrow” literature suggests there is something else happening with the way popular Gothic texts function. What if, Jones asks, the popular Gothic were not a type of work, but a kind of play? Jones uses this approach to suggest that texts such as Wheatley’s The Devil Rides Out might direct readers not primarily towards the real, but away from it, at least for a time. Wheatley’s novel is explored by Jones as a venue for readerly play, apart from the more substantial and “serious” concerns that occupy most literary criticism. Samantha Jane Lindop’s essay foregrounds the debt David Lynch’s film Mulholland Drive owes to J. Sheridan le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872) thus adding to studies of the film that have noted Lynch’s intertextual references to classic cinema such as Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950), Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) and Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966). Lindop explores not just the striking similarity between Carmilla and Mulholland Drive in terms of character and plot, but also the way that each text is profoundly concerned with the uncanny. Lorna Piatti-Farnell’s contribution, “What’s Hidden in Gravity Falls: Strange Creatures and the Gothic Intertext” is similarly interested in the intertextuality of the Gothic mode, noting that since its inception this has taken many and varied incarnations, from simple references and allusions to more complicated uses of style and plot organisation. Piatti-Farnell suggests it is unwise to reduce the Gothic text to a simple master narrative, but that within its re-elaborations and re-interpretations, interconnections do appear, forming “the Gothic intertext”. While the Gothic has traditionally found fertile ground in works of literature, other contemporary media, such as animation, have offered the Gothic an opportunity for growth and adaptation. Alex Hirsch’s Gravity Falls is explored by Piatti-Farnell as a visual text providing an example of intersecting monstrous creatures and interconnected narrative structures that reveal the presence of a dense and intertextual Gothic network. Those interlacings are connected to the wider cultural framework and occupy an important part in unravelling the insidious aspects of human nature, from the difficulties of finding “oneself” to the loneliness of the everyday. Issues relating to identity also feature in Patrick Usmar’s “Born To Die: Lana Del Rey, Beauty Queen or Gothic Princess?”, which further highlights the presence of the Gothic in a wide range of contemporary media forms. Usmar explores the music videos of Del Rey, which he describes as Pop Gothic, and that advance themes of consumer culture, gender identity, sexuality and the male gaze. Jen Craig’s “The Agitated Shell: Thinspiration and the Gothic Experience of Eating Disorders” similarly focuses on contemporary media and gender identity, problematising these issues by exploring the highly charged topic of “thinspiration” web sites. Hannah Irwin’s contribution also focuses on female experience. “Not of this earth: Jack the Ripper and the development of Gothic Whitechapel” focuses on the murder of five women who were the victims of an assailant commonly referred to by the epithet “Jack the Ripper”. Irwin discusses how Whitechapel developed as a Gothic location through the body of literature devoted to the Whitechapel murders of 1888, known as “Ripperature”. The subject of the Gothic space is also taken up by Donna Brien’s “Forging Continuing Bonds from the Dead to the Living: Gothic Commemorative Practices along Australia’s Leichhardt Highway.” This essay explores the memorials along Leichhardt’s highway as Gothic practice, in order to illuminate some of the uncanny paradoxes around public memorials, as well as the loaded emotional terrain such commemorative practices may inhabit. Furthering our understanding of the Australian Gothic is Patrick West’s contribution “Towards a Politics & Art of the Land: Gothic Cinema of the Australian New Wave and its Reception by American Film Critics.” West argues that many films of the Australian New Wave of the 1970s and 1980s can be defined as Gothic and that international reviews of such films tended to overlook the importance of the Australian landscape, which functions less as a backdrop and more as a participating element, even a character, in the drama, saturating the mise-en-scène. Bruno Starrs’ “Writing My Indigenous Vampires: Aboriginal Gothic or Aboriginal Fantastic” is dedicated to illuminating a new genre of creative writing: that of the “Aboriginal Fantastic”. Starrs’ novel That Blackfella Bloodsucka Dance! is part of this emerging genre of writing that is worthy of further academic interrogation. Similarly concerned with the supernatural, Erin Mercer’s contribution “‘A Deluge of Shrieking Unreason’: Supernaturalism and Settlement in New Zealand Gothic Fiction” explores the absence of ghosts and vampires in contemporary Gothic produced in New Zealand, arguing that this is largely a result of a colonial Gothic tradition utilising Maori ghosts that complicates the processes through which contemporary writers might build on that tradition. Although there is no reason why the Gothic must include supernatural elements, it is an enduring feature that is taken up by Jessica Balanzategui in “‘You Have a Secret that You Don’t Want To Tell Me’: The Child as Trauma in Spanish and American Horror Film.” This essay explores the uncanny child character and how such children act as an embodiment of trauma. Sarah Baker’s “The Walking Dead and Gothic Excess: The Decaying Social Structures of Contagion” focuses on the figure of the zombie as it appears in the television show The Walking Dead, which Baker argues is a way of exploring themes of decay, particularly of family and society. The essays contained in this special Gothic edition of M/C Journal highlight the continuing importance of the Gothic mode in contemporary culture and how that mode is constantly evolving into new forms and manifestations. The multi-faceted nature of the Gothic in our contemporary popular culture moment is accurately signalled by the various media on which the essays focus, from television to literature, animation, music, and film. The place occupied by the Gothic beyond representational forms, and into the realms of cultural practice, is also signalled, an important shift within the bounds of Gothic Studies which is bound to initiate fascinating debates. The transformations of the Gothic in media and culture are, therefore, also surveyed, so to continue the ongoing critical conversation on not only the place of the Gothic in contemporary narratives, but also its duplicitous, malleable, and often slippery nature. It is our hope that the essays here stimulate further discussion about the Gothic and we will hope, and look forward, to hearing from you. References Botting, Fred. Gothic: The New Critical Idiom. 2nd edition. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2014. Hogle, Jerrold. “Introduction: The Gothic in Western Culture”. The Cambridge Companion of Gothic Fiction, ed. Jerrold Hogle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 1-20.

The objective of this thesis is to analyse the evolution of the concept of pleasure in the literature and the history of ideas of the beginning of the 18th Century in France, through the study of the upheaval of sensibility carried out by Prevost's worried hedonism. In order to better understand the progressive transition of the semantic and lexicological concept of pleasure in the theoritical literature, we examine the philosophical and moral treaties on pleasure as well as the definitions found in the dictionnaires of the time. The study then focuses on two novels by Prevost: L'Histoire du chevalier Des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut and L'Histoire d'une Grecque moderne. These novels stage two experiences of pleasure which contribute to shape a new architecture of man characterised by instability and inconsistance. Prevost's hedonism redefines the position of the social, moral and psychological being according to certain features which lead to a particular aesthetic of disharmony.

This thesis explores the relationship between the Female Gothic novel of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century and the social context of women at that time. In the examination of the primary works of Ann Radcliffe, Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley, this study investigates how these female writers work within the Gothic genre to explore issues related to the role of women in their society, in particular those concerned with sexual identity. It is contended that the Gothic genre provides these authors with the ideal vehicle through which to critique the patriarchal definition of the female, a definition which confines and marginalizes women, denying the female any sexual autonomy. The Introduction defines the scope of the thesis by delineating the differences between the Female Gothic and the Male Gothic. Arguing that the Female Gothic shuns the voyeuristic victimisation of women which characterizes much of the Male Gothic, it is contended that the Female Gothic is defined by its interest in, and exploration of, issues which concern the status of women in a patriarchy. It is asserted that it is this concern with female gender roles that connects the overtly radical work of Mary Wollstonecraft with the oblique critique evident in her contemporary, Ann Radcliffe’s, novels. It is these concerns too, which haunt Mary Shelley’s texts, published two decades later. Chapter One outlines the status of women in the patriarchal society of the late eighteenth century, a period marked by political and social upheaval. This period saw the increasing division of men and women into the “separate spheres” of the public and domestic worlds, and the consequent birth of the ideal of “Angel in the House” which became entrenched in the nineteenth century. The chapter examines how women writers were influenced by this social context and what effect it had on the presentation of female characters in their work, in particular in terms of their depiction of motherhood. Working from the premise that, in order to fully understand the portrayal of female sexuality in the texts, the depiction of the male must be examined, Chapter Two analyses the male characters in terms of their relationship to the heroines and/or the concept of the “feminine”. Although the male characters differ from text to text and author to author, it is argued that in their portrayal of “heroes and villains” the authors were providing a critique of the patriarchal system. While some of the texts depict male characters that challenge traditional stereotypes concerning masculinity, others outline the disastrous and sometimes fatal consequences for both men and women of the rigid gender divisions which disallow the male access to the emotional realm restricted by social prescriptions to the private, domestic world of the female. It is contended that, as such, all of the texts assert the necessity for male and female, masculine and feminine to be united on equal terms. Chapter Three interprets the heroine’s journey through sublime landscapes and mysterious buildings as a journey from childhood innocence to sexual maturity, illustrating the intrinsic link that exists between the settings of Gothic novels and female sexuality. The chapter first examines the authors’ use of the Burkean concept of the sublime and contends that the texts offer a significant revision of the concept. In contrast to Burke’s overtly masculinist definition of the sublime, the texts assert that the female can and does have access to it, and that this access can be used to overcome patriarchal oppression. Secondly, an analysis of the image of the castle and related structures reveals that they can symbolise both the patriarchy and the feminine body. Contending that the heroine’s experiences within these structures enable her to move from innocence to experience, it is asserted that the knowledge that she gains, during her journeys, of herself and of society allows her to assert her independence as a sexually adult woman.

There are many factors that contributed to the proliferation of visual codes, metaphors and references to the gendered gaze in women's fiction of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. This thesis argues that the visual details in women's novels published between 1778 and 1815 are more significant than scholars have previously acknowledged. My analysis of the oeuvres of Jane Austen, Ann Radcliffe, Maria Edgeworth and Fanny Burney shows that visuality — the nexus between the verbal and visual communication — provided them with a language within language capable of circumventing the cultural strictures on female expression in a way that allowed for concealed resistance. It conveyed the actual ways in which women ‘should' see and appear in a society in which the reputation was image-based. My analysis journeys through physiognomic, psychological, theatrical and codified forms of visuality to highlight the multiplicity of its functions. I engage with scholarly critiques drawn from literature, art, optics, psychology, philosophy and anthropology to assert visuality's multidisciplinary influences and diplomatic potential. I show that in fiction and in actuality, women had to negotiate four scopic forces that determined their ‘looks' and manners of looking: the impartial spectator, the male gaze, the public eye and the disenfranchised female gaze. In a society dominated by ‘frustrated utterance,' penetrating gazes and the perpetual threat of misinterpretation, women novelists used references to the visible and the invisible to comment on emotions, socio-economic conditions and patriarchal abuses. This thesis thus offers new insights into verbal economy by reassessing expression and perception from an unconventional point-of-view.

Key words: William Hogarth Exhibition; Hogarth in Johannesburg (1987-1988) Series; A Rake’s Progress, Marriage-a-la-Mode and Industry and Idleness Artists; Robert Hodgins Deborah Bell William Kentridge William Hogarth Caversham Press, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa Printmaking Printmaking in South Africa Resistance art Narratology, narrative, discourse, story, plot, Transference of narratives Sequential art narrative and comics This dissertation considers the prints by South African artists, William Kentridge, Deborah Bell, and Robert Hodgins for the Hogarth in Johannesburg exhibition (1987) in the context of William Hogarth’s historical suites of prints referred to in the title of the exhibition, and contemporary theories about Sequential Art and Narrative. Produced for the artists at The Caversham Press of Malcolm Christian in KwaZulu-Natal, particular emphasis is placed on the images created by Deborah Bell, Robert Hodgins and William Kentridge (such as Industry and Idleness, Marriage-a-la-mode and A Rake’s Progress), and shown in their combined exhibition Hogarth in Johannesburg, in 1987.
Thesis (M.A.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2012.

胡志偉.
稿本(電腦打印本).
Thesis (M.A.)--香港中文大學歷史學部.
Gao ben (dian nao da yin ben).
Includes bibliographical references (leaves 175-177).
Hu Zhiwei.
Thesis (M.A.)--Xianggang Zhong wen da xue li shi xue bu.
Chapter 第一章 --- 緒論
Chapter (一) --- 引言
Chapter (二) --- 近代學界研究阮元概況簡述
Chapter (三) --- 本文研究方案
Chapter 第二章 --- 阮元學術思想述論
Chapter (一) --- 小引
Chapter (二) --- 阮元的論學要點述評及與其學術宗旨的關係
Chapter 1 --- 訓詁
Chapter 2 --- 求實
Chapter 3 --- 尚古
Chapter 4 --- 阮元論學之獨特處
Chapter 5 --- 阮元論學要點及其大旨的結構關係
Chapter (三) --- 訓詁的內容 、 理據及其限制
Chapter (四) --- 義理之層序和檢核標準
Chapter (五) --- 『訓詁明則義理明 』 的再檢討
Chapter (六) --- 小結
Chapter 第三章 --- 阮元的公平學
Chapter (一) --- 小引
Chapter (二) --- 阮元思想與公平學的接合處
Chapter (三) --- 阮元對公平學之態度旁證
Chapter (四) --- 阮著 《春秋公羊傳注疏校勘記》分析
Chapter (五) --- 小結
Chapter 第四章 --- 阮元與 『詁經精舍』
Chapter (一) --- 『詁經精舍』沿革述略
Chapter (二) --- 『詁經精舍』之創辦及立學大旨
Chapter 1 --- 《經籍纂詁》之修撰與『詁經精舍』之關係
Chapter 2 --- 『詁經精舍』之成立日的與講學宗旨
Chapter (三) --- 『詁經精舍』課習內容分析
Chapter 第五章 --- 阮元與『學海堂』
Chapter (一) --- 『學海堂』之立學緣起及與『詁經精舍』之關係
Chapter (二) --- 『學海堂』之立學宗旨與陳建《學部道辯》之關係
Chapter 第六章 --- 阮元與《皇清經解》
Chapter (一) --- 小引
Chapter (二) --- "《皇清經解》編修之緣起 ， 經過和續編
Chapter (三) --- 《皇清經解》作者群與阮元之關係
Chapter (四) --- 《皇清經解》的學術宗尚與阮元學術規模之關係
Chapter 第七章 --- 阮元與《十三經注疏》
Chapter (一) --- 重刊十三經的背景，緣起和經過
Chapter (二) --- 《十三經注疏》的輯校原則
Chapter (三) --- 《十三經注疏》簡評
Chapter 第八章 --- 結論
參考書目舉隅
後記

This study focuses on Bruegel's parodic legacy in the picaresque tradition. It is based, on the one hand, on visual rhetoric, visual parody, and the poetics of epideictic rhetoric; and, on the other, on the interaction between epideictic rhetoric's salient features and the Bruegelian themes of camivalisation, the satirising of human folly, and the ontic order of the World Upside Down topos as organising principles. The relationships between the above themes are chronologically traced in various disguises in pictures by representative picaresque artists from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries: i.e., in Bruegel, Steen, Hogarth, Daumier, and Grosz. Each of these picaresque artists battled with their own times, parodying the paradigmatic targets of the high mode, in both social and genre hierarchy, and in doing so revealed the complexities of the above themes at work within an ever changing context-bound rhetoricity.
Art History, Visual Arts & Musicology
Thesis (D.Litt. et Phil.)