Search results for "aesthetics"

Biblical Echoes and Communal Home in Jesmyn Ward's Salvage the Bones

2020

Jesmyn Ward’s second novel, Salvage the Bones (2011), offers a literary account of an African American family in dire poverty struggling to weather the horrors of Hurricane Katrina on the outskirts of Bois Sauvage, Mississippi. This article focuses on the novel’s ‘ideology of form’, which is premised on biblical models of narration —grounded on a literary transposition of The Book of Deuteronomy— that serves to portray the victimization of African Americans in mythical tones to evoke the country’s failed covenant between God and his chosen people. It also brings into focus the affective bonds of unity and communal healing relying on the idiosyncratic tenet of home understood as national spa…

Localising African popular music transnationally: ‘Highlife-Travellers’ in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s

2008

The paper argues that a critical toehold for understanding the formation, modernization, and popularity of Highlife in the 1950s is its transnational dimension. To corroborate this claim, the paper puts emphasis on Highlife musicians in the UK, especially London, during this time, their musical activities and productions there, and the effects of their journeys on popular music. The growing evidence that cultural practices and processes in different locales, across national and continental boundaries, were interrelated in the making of Highlife, asks for a multi-sited study of Highlife especially with regard to the musical creativity and productivity of 1950s and 1960s. It requires further …

Semiotics of pride and profit: interrogating commodification in indigenous handicraft production

2014

This study investigates the shifting terrain of pride, profit and power relations in minority language communities under contemporary globalisation. While “pride” associates linguistic-cultural heritage with identity and preservation, “profit” views these as sources of economic gain. In contemporary late capitalism, “pride” seems to be increasingly giving way to “profit”. Arguing that this transformation needs to be interrogated in terms of complexity and that a detailed, multilayered semiotic analysis can open a privileged window for such an inquiry, this study combines critical multimodal discourse analysis and an ethnographic approach to analyse processes of semiotic commodification in h…

Deep Emotions, Poor Narratives: On the Iconography of the Retreat ( La Retirada )

2011

The Spanish Civil War and the subsequent border crossing of the Republican population towards France in February 1939 generated a profusion of images of which only a few have become recognizable icons that represent the injustice performed by Franco's victorious army. However, most of these images have circulated without any historical context, thus becoming abstraction rather than historical realities. This article discusses the way the corpus of visual —mostly through film— representations of exile have been used and abused, how they have been "migrating" from one media to another, and hence how they have changed their semantic value and have been use to support different ideological mess…

Dialogicality and spiritual quest in Christian metal lyrics

2013

Abstract: Christian metal (CM) music provides a good example of how religious discourse is undergoing change in today’s world. CM merges religion with popular cultural forms and ways of expression, thereby also transforming the meaning of religion and religious practice. However, the phenomenon has attracted surprisingly little scholarly attention; most writers have treated CM as yet another example of North American Contemporary Christian Music (CCM). The present article takes a detailed look into what is “said” by Finnish CM groups with a particular focus on religious ideology in a context outside the original national and religious context of the genre. Drawing on the sociology of langu…

Slikovnica kao predmet

2019

Based on recent studies on materiality, picturebook research, and cognitive studies, this paper investigates how children may perceive picturebooks as objects and their material properties. In this regard, we emphasise three dimensions of picturebooks as objects and relate them to developmental stages. The first dimension concerns the materials the picturebooks are composed of, such as paper, cardboard, wood, plastics, and cloth. The second dimension refers to the type of book, e.g. hardbacks, sets of cardboard sheets, fanfold books, pop-up books, and even hybrid objects such as books which are toys at the same time. Finally, this study focuses on the types of actions that are associated wi…

The Materiality of the Imagined Family

2012

“This England”: Re-Visiting Shakespearean Landscapes and Mediascapes in John Akomfrah’s The Nine Muses (2010)

2017

The paper will offer a reading of John Akomfrah’s The Nine Muses (2010), a 90-minute experimental feature film that has been defined as “one of the most vital and original artistic responses to the subject of immigration that British cinema has ever produced” (Mitchell). It will focus on the multifarious ways in which the film makes the “canonical” literary material that it incorporates, including Shakespeare, interact with rarely seen archival material from the BBC regarding the experience of Caribbean and South Asian immigrants in 1950s and 1960s Britain. It will argue that through this interaction the familiarity of Western “canonical” literature re-presents itself as an uncanny landscap…

“Never Some Easy Flashback”

2012

Abstract This paper provides a close reading of Paul Farley’s 160-line poem, “Thorns.” The poem is read in dialogue with William Wordsworth’s celebrated Romantic ballad “The Thorn.” Special attention is given to Farley’s treatment of memory and metaphor: It is shown how the first, exploratory part of the poem elaborates upon the interdependent nature of memory and metaphor, while the second part uses a more regulated form of imagery in its evocation of a generational memory linked to a particular place and time (the working-class Liverpool of the 1960s and 1970s). The tension between the two parts of the poem is reflected in the taut relationship between the poet and a confrontational alter…

Subjectivity and Femininity: Reading Antigone

2017

With Antigone's lecture, author answer to the question: what is a subject in the feminine? This question allows us to overcome the classic interpretations of Antigone (Hegel, Lacan) and to elaborate a new reading thanks to Kierkegaard, Butler, Derrida, Marion and to the centrality of the theme of love.