How do acts of caring for the sick or grieving for the dead change
the way we move through our living rooms and bedrooms? Why do
elderly homeowners struggle to remain in messy, junk-filled houses?
...Why are we so attached to our pets, even when they damage and soil
our living spaces? In Home Bodies: Tactile Experience in
Domestic Space, James Krasner offers an
interdisciplinary, humanistic investigation of the sense of touch
in our experience of domestic space and identity. Accessing the
work of gerontologists, neurologists, veterinarians, psychologists,
social geographers, and tactual perception theorists to lay the
groundwork for his experiential claims, he also ranges broadly
through literary and cultural criticism dealing with the body,
habit, and material culture. By demonstrating crucial links between
domestic experience and tactile perception, Home Bodies
investigates questions of identity, space, and the body. Krasner
analyzes representations of tactile experience from a range of
canonical literary works and authors, including the Bible,
Sophocles, Marilynne Robinson, Charles Dickens, John Steinbeck, and
Sylvia Plath, as well as a series of popular contemporary texts.
This work will contribute to discussions of embodiment, space, and
domesticity by literary and cultural critics, scholars in the
medical humanities, and interdisciplinary thinkers from multiple
fields.
The entwining of the craft worker’s body both with the materials of her artistic process and with the craft object itself is central to an understanding of craft aesthetics. This paper addresses ...embodied craft in Lia Cook’s weavings, which foreground the artist’s body and the embodying dynamics of woven art. Cook’s work is read in relation to the Lady of Shalott, a fictional textile artist portrayed in Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem by that name, and the painted versions of it by William Holman Hunt and other Pre-Raphaelite artists. Cook’s work emerges as an elaboration upon Pre-Raphaelite ideas for the digital age, and a useful model for understanding the embodied dynamics of craft aesthetics.
The terminology used to describe people living in socially or legally ambiguous housing conditions is contradictory and contested in often unpredictable ways. Homeless people, as well as the laws and ...government discourses designed to limit their behavior, frequently choose language that is at odds with what their bodies are actually doing in the spaces they occupy. In this essay I will discuss the oxymoronic verbal formulations for how transients, especially transient women, move through and live in social space by looking at two texts that focus on homeless women and their social power, Marilynne Robinson’s novel Housekeeping, and the biblical Book of Ruth (on which it is partially based). By placing these works in the context of the legal discourses of homelessness and squatting, and gender analyses of mobility, I hope to identify a mode of gendered embodiment based in the language of motion.
Arthur Conan Doyle’s short story “The Leather Funnel” is a brief, rather ghastly tale that centers on a dream vision of a woman being brutally tortured. Doyle’s other major publication of 1902, The ...War in South Africa: Its Cause and Conduct, was his defense of the British army against claims made by W. T. Stead in Methods of Barbarism (1901) that Boer women and children had been the victims of war crimes and systematic torture. Doyle structures the story so that the narrator’s naïve response of moral outrage at seeing a woman being tortured gradually develops into a more sophisticated understanding of justice as his vision is placed in its proper legal and historical context. Taken together, “The Leather Funnel” and The War in South Africa: Its Cause and Conduct offer useful insights into Doyle’s understanding of the relationship between literature and history, and the deployment of state power through written language.
The film shows the two women, who are the aunt and cousin of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, sunbathing, sorting through family pictures, eating ice cream in bed, and performing song and dance numbers, ...even as their house crumbles around them and cats walk, scratch, eat, and sleep on every surface. In 2006, David Maysles contributed to the renewed cultural interest in the Beales by releasing outtakes from the original film under the title The Beales of Gray Gardens (released on DVD in 2001 by Criterion along with the original documentary as part of a two-disc set).
Soup, Bones, and Shakespeare Dugan, Owen; Krasner, James
Mythlore,
03/2022, Letnik:
40, Številka:
2
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Examines Tolkien's theory of authorship and storytelling by exploring the literary allusions to Shakespeare's Macbeth in the Witch-king's fall and the theory of creation in Tolkien's description of ...the Silmarils. Tolkien alludes to Macbeth to undercut both the modern view of the author as an isolated genius and to critique the approach to literary allusion that reinforces this view. Feanor's creation of the Silmarils serves as a symbolic representation of modern authorship, suggesting that Tolkien not only disagrees with a singular model of authorship but also believes it to be a manifestation of corrupted artistry. Ultimately, both the Witch-king and Silmaril passages reveal that Tolkien believed modern interpretations of authorship had become too narrow and failed to reflect the multiply-sourced nature of storytelling.
Cultural geographers and tourism studies scholars have written extensively on the way tourist expectations serve to distort their perceptions of the destination they visit by replacing its actual ...history with an ahistorical ideal.17 In his study of tourism in the Langtang National Park in Nepal, Francis Khek Gee Lim offers a useful example: "The representation of Langtang as a pristine and timeless place where inhabitants are untouched by history and ossified in their cultural practices-in other words, preserved in an Age of Innocence-educates the eyes of visitors to see the Langtang valley as a spectacle. ...I thought that the managers of these tours took undue risks, and when I found myself on one occasion on the rock of Abousir with a drove of helpless tourists, male and female, nothing whatever between us and the tribesmen, and a river between us and the nearest troops, I could not but think what an appalling situation would arise if a little troop of these far-riding camel men were to appear ... and experienced British officers agreed with me, that it was unjustifiable.19 The genesis of the novel, then, was Conan Doyle's appalled awareness of the potentially tragic schism between political reality and the tourist mind-set, which rendered a politically volatile state into a picturesque commodity. "30 This aside to Holmes places Watson's archaeological musings in the context of Holmes's and Watson's recurring dispute over how their own history should be recorded; in "The Adventure of the Abbey Grange," for example, Holmes reprimands Watson for his "fatal habit of looking at everything from the point of view of a story" and of "dwelling upon sensational details" rather than facts.31 Leslie Haynsworth argues that Conan Doyle's "ambivalence" about the Holmes stories is played out in this conflict between the two friends: "This insistent debate about how to-and how not to-write for a mass audience thus seems to indicate a kind of self-consciousness on Conan Doyle's part about his own practice as a writer of detective fiction. '"37 This implies that reanimating the ancient baronial mansion will in some way reestablish a lost history of social coherence that existed under a powerful gentry, but as Robbie B. H. Goh points out, there is an irony in reestablishing a British manorial economy with an infusion of cash from South African capitalist speculation.38 Yet the Chronicle is quick to praise Sir Charles for his wily manipulation of the markets and it becomes obvious that it is the loss of modern South African gold, not ancient Devonshire blood, that most inspires sorrow at Sir Charles's death.39 The tendency for economic motives and inaccurate reenactments of local history to be mutually reinforcing is apparent in Edward Bruner's study of living history interpreters at the Abraham Lincoln Historic Site in New Salem, Illinois.
Tangible grief -- Mess and memory -- The hoarder's house -- Homeless companions -- The healing touch -- The language of pressure -- The leper's studio -- Living and dying at home
Part 1. Broken ...homes: intimacy, tactility, and the dissolution of domestic space. Tangible grief ; Mess and memory ; The hoarder's house -- Part 2. Homes without walls: intercorporeal domestic space. Homeless companions ; The healing touch -- Part 3. Home at the body's edge: domesticity as somatosensory boundary definition. The language of pressure ; The leper's studio -- Postscript: Living and dying at home.
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