showing 3 related works from this author
The Broker in Pornography and Violence: Lou Reed in Lulu’s World
2020
The article analyses the literary and cultural layers of Lulu, the album published by Lou Reed in collaboration with Metallica, based on Frank Wedekind’s two modernist dramas: Earth Spirit (1895) and Pandora’s Box (1904). In Reed’s reinterpretation, the two plays become his means through which he enters the area of disturbing perversion and graphic pornography. Consequently, Reeds seems to follow Susan Sontag’s diagnosis according to which the goal of pornographic literature is to disorient and to disturb mental balance. In the case of Lulu, it demonstrates Reed’s strategies of crossing the borders between what is commonly accepted and what is rejected because of its non-normative quality. …
Under Our Eye: Margaret Atwood's Variation on the Panopticon in "The Heart Goes Last"
2020
In her dystopian dark comedy The Heart Goes Last (2015), Margaret Atwood openly refers to Jeremy Bentham’s concept of the Panopticon. The future world depicted in her novel is filled with violence and deprived of both human bonds and hope. Hence, being contained, monitored and — after Foucault — disciplined and punished appears to be the characters’ last resort. Surveillance tempts both sexes as it is politically correct and universal, and it does not privilege one group of people over the other. The article discusses the dystopian vision of the near future as created by Atwood in her 2015 novel, with direct references to the conception of the Panopticon, both in its original meaning propos…
To See It All / To Hear It All: Michael Gira's Songs of Experience
2018
Between 2012 and 2016, the American experimental rock band Swans, led by the vocalist, multi-instrumentalist and visionary Michael Gira, released a monumental trilogy of albums comprising The Seer, To Be Kind, and The Glowing Man. The lyrics on all of them portray Gira’s own search for identity, with the result being a peculiar version of spirituality that is both philosophically religious and ideologically anti-religious. Forced to exist in the hostile, incomprehensible and spiritually-barren reality, the artist finds himself alienated in the state of the end of childhood and loss of innocence. In other words, he locates his identity in this final stage of spirituality and primal religion …