Aesthetic Studies - Page 3

Ayanita Banerjee

Professor of English, University of Engineering and Management, New-Town- Kolkata. Email: abayanita8@gmail.com

 Volume 12, Number 5, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s10n1

Abstract

To perceive the human world in co-existence with nature and thereby to nurture freedom and constructive processes we need to rethink the transformative literature of Rabindranath Tagore, who explored an environment conscious, almost ecocritical vision of human existence inspiring a “deep ecological” sense of identification with the immediate environment. Tagore’s philosophy of nature with its wide range and variety reifies the real possibility of ‘living, learning and uniting oneself’ with the “organic wholeness of nature”. The relationship between the man and nature remains interwoven in his writings promoting an intimate, interdependent relationship revealing “the deepest harmony that existed between man and his surroundings”. The paper dealing with Tagore’s simplest collection of poetry The Crescent Moon in particular lays emphasis on the relationship of the mother and the child developing out of his traumatic experiences of childhood namely losing his mother quite at an early age and his subsequent identification with nature as an ‘alternative mother-principle’ Nature confers a psychological closure by connecting him with Mother Nature (my italics) “mother nature you have taken me in your affectionate embrace and have begun to sing your imposing music to me rich in harmony and melody”. Nature removed from the crudity of its daily entanglements activated within him a spirit of companionship and receptivity revealing to him “the deepest harmony that existed between him and his surroundings”.

Keywords– Mother- nature, symbiotic-coexistence, alternative-mother principle.

Cassie Jun Lin

University of Macau, mb84026@um.edu.mo, ORCID ID: 0000-0001-7749-1491

 Volume 12, Number 5, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s3n3 

Abstract

With the heated debate on the utility of the humanities as a context, this paper reads Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” as an attempt to reconcile the emerging functional attitude towards the humanities and the susceptibility of the humanities to the neo-liberal condition. This paper traces connections between the “reparative” or the “post-critical” turn and fairy tales or fantasies in order to argue that Christina Rossetti’s much debated poem, “Goblin Market,” could be framed in a fantastic framework that substantiates a reparative orientation that is “additive and accretive” (Sedgwick, Touching Feeling 149). A stubborn insistence on the hermeneutics of suspicion has informed much of the readings of the “Goblin Market,” especially the haunted market, as “kinda subversive, kinda hegemonic” (Sedgwick, Queer Performativity 15). I aim to provide a different approach given that recent scholarship on “Goblin Market” ignores the possibility of reparation. In this paper, I attempt to withhold suspicion in order to hone caring eyes to uncritical materials that are often deemed untenable to politicized life. I reparatively read the female participation in the market that resuscitates a full female identity and the “muted” ending that is often subjected to paranoid readings. Locating “Goblin Market” in a fantastic framework, I argue, helps us to see the actual world and it helps us visualize a fantastic world that brings out an ethical efflorescence that entertains human experience in its plenitude. This essay also argues that “Goblin Market,” partakes in “a new wave of innovative fairy tales” (Zipes 98) that gained ascendancy in the latter half of the nineteenth century and this serves as an affective archive to document long marginalized figures and feelings. I also argue that Rosetti’s poem invites thoughts on how aesthetic devices sustain and reproduce selves that ripple off from real-life experiences in a fantastic interruption of spatiality and temporality.

Keywords: reparative and paranoid readings, and fairy tales

Benjamín Valdivia

University of Guanajuato (Mexico). E-mail: valdivia@ugto.mx

 Volume 12, Number 5, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s0n4

Latin America has been defined as a land which has no other possibilities than its future. Since the historic times gave to this part of the world the fate of being oppressed, all its past was an expectancy of a self-consciousness in search of identity. ¿What are we if our language and traditions were sacked by cruel conquerors? We were, from there, a search for being ourselves.

In any place and time, protest expressions are a common way in the battling to attain power. In many forms, protest is linked to the arts, as they are privileged vehicle for making a stand in favor of a specific political position, or to support an opposition. Arts are, in this connection, used to be subsidiary for an ideology, a set of assumed principles, or a desideratum sustained by some social group. In the other side, arts are ambiguous, or abstract, and need some amount of interpretation. The hermeneutic process applied to arts must cover all gaps and suppositions to complete, almost always in a verbal way, the idea; or to precise with words any lack of sense. Direct declarations or obvious elements give place to pamphletary pieces, but artists accept these if they can establish with certainty a militant proposition. In that, poetry is the best way for a fusion of the abstract realm of musicality with the direct phrasing of politics. In that case, the result is a song, transmitting concepts, but with the empowering of sounds. Martial rhythms, or traditional schemes already adapted in the basis of culture, can be a good option for composers having this purpose.

In Latin America, protest is almost a way of life, due to political conflicts, war, invasion, and submission, are continuous experiences from past centuries to present. Some philosophers, as we established before, think Latin America as a world region having a serious search for identity, since each stage of its past seems to be a destruction of any possibility of feel the life as a normal property of human beings; and seems, too, an expulsion from its proper self. Because of this historical feeling of not belonging, Latin America has only one stage for self-recovery or redemption: the future. Colonial oppression is a principal item whenever we search for a definition appliable. But, at the same time, we recognize a constant trend inside the heart of Latin America: revolutionary expressions inviting to build a better future or claiming for a transformation in a self-affirming way. For all of this, one can understand why exists a variety of artistic Latin American expressions aligned in this profound path to build a better life. Its revolutionary songs and poetry intent to service for that…FULL TEXT PDF>>

Yes, I Mean Poetry, Now!

Albrecht Classen

University of Arizona. Email: aclassen@arizona.edu

 Volume 12, Number 5, 2020 I Full Text PDF

DOI: 10.21659/rupkatha.v12n5.rioc1s0n3

Introduction

In a certain way, COVID-19 has forced the world to wake up again and to realize how little we are in control of our own existence. We have increasingly built a world of fantasy on the basis of science and medicine over the last decades or so, but one tiny virus has now brought that house of cards down in an incredibly short period of time, and no end is in sight while I am writing these lines (July 2020). We have been asleep for far too long, dreaming of a bright future in which everything would be possible without any costs to ourselves and the earth. But we live now in the Anthropocene, the new age in which the earth is slowly but certainly getting out of control because of the human impact, while we humans also face the horrifying reality that we are surrounded by an infinite number of viruses that could all become deadly for us.[i] How do we then live under those circumstances, and where do we find ourselves now that we are coming out of these dreams?[ii]

            Throughout the centuries, if not millennia, pandemics have raked humanity, taking a huge toll each time, but then people managed somehow to pick up their previous activities and kept living, deeply shaped by the tragedy, but still, living.[iii] However, there were the dead, thousands, if not millions. And the grief, the mourning, the personal suffering, the huge questions, WHY? And, WHAT IS THE PURPOSE of it all? Love or religion did not help to prevent anything, death came and cut down so many people, good ones and bad ones, old and young, men and women, all races, all genders; the grim reaper has never made a difference; it’s only the number that matters, the more the better, at least from death’s perspective. We could almost re-write human history as a history of suffering, of tears, or pain, and question the true nature of the creature we call homo sapiens. All founders of world religions have been deeply moved by this realization and have tried, more or less successfully, to come to terms with these almost quixotic questions. If we have to die anyway, why do we live?[iv] We only need to think of the Crusades, the Hundred Years’ War, the Thirty-Years’ War, World War I and II, the Vietnam War, the Afghanistan wars, the Biafra War, the Kosovo War, the civil war in Syria, the war between Saudi-Arabia and Yemen, and countless other conflicts, and could despair over the endless aggression and hostility in the name of this or that religion, ideology, political claims, or racist notion. It almost seems a miracle that humankind has not yet annihilated itself by now, especially in light of the nuclear threat since the Cold War, a threat that has not effectively been eliminated until today, irrespective of what poets might have said about it ever since the first explosion….FULL TEXT PDF>>

[i]. Michael B. A. Oldstone, Viruses, Plagues, and History: Past, Present, and Future (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2010); Michael G. Cordingley, Viruses: Agents of Evolutionary Invention (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017); the current literature on this topic is legion.

[ii]. David Farrier, Anthropocene Poetics: Deep Time, Sacrifice Zones, and Extinction. Posthumanities, 50 (Minneapolis, MN, and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2019); Reinhold Münster, “The Anthropocene, Technology and Fictional Literature,” Humanities 9(3), 56 (2020); https://doi.org/10.3390/h9030056; Gregers Andersen, Climate Fiction and Cultural Analysis: A New Perspective on Life in the Anthropocene. Routledge Environmental Literature, Culture and Media (London and New York: Routledge, 2020).

[iii]. Pandemic Disease in the Medieval World: Rethinking the Black Death, ed. Monica Green. Medieval Globe (Kalamazoo: Arc Medieval Press, 2015); John Aberth, Plagues in World History. Exploring World History (Lanham, Boulder, et al.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2011); Pest: Die Geschichte eines Menschheitstraumas, ed. Mischa Meier (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2005);  Peter C. Doherty, Pandemics. What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

[iv]. In the Middle High German verse narrative, “Der arme Heinrich,” by Hartmann von Aue (ca. 1190), the protagonist is destined to die a very early death because of leprosy. A medical doctor down in Salerno, Italy, has told him, however, that if a young nubile virgin were willing to die for him, then her blood could heal him. This is, of course, impossible, but at the end, when Heinrich is awaiting his death while staying with a farmer whom he had granted numerous privileges before, the man’s young daughter learns of this miracle cure and quickly volunteers to die for him so that he could live. Although her parents are horrified about this, she develops such rhetorical skills in justifying her decision that they have to give in, as much as it grieves them deeply. Heinrich also accepts her offer, but just before the doctor is then about to cut open her body to take out her heart, the protagonist peeks through a hole in the wall and suddenly realizes the terrible misdeed that he is about to commit via the doctor. Like in an epiphany, he recognizes the spiritual beauty within and the ugly nature of his body outside, so he forgoes the sacrifice, despite her vehement protests. Amazingly, he is then miraculously healed because God, the speculator cordis (the scrutinizer of the heart), has observed that Heinrich has healed spiritually, which makes it possible for him to return to the living completely recovered in body and mind.

               When the girl discusses her decision to sacrifice herself for Heinrich, she explains: “till now worldly desires that lead to hell have not touched me. Now I thank God that in my young days he has given me the good sense to scorn this fragile life completely. I intend to surrender myself into God’s power, pure as I am now. I fear that if I get old, the sweetness of the world will draw me underfoot, as it has drawn very many whom its sweetness has duped. Then I might well be denied to God. . . . Our life and our youth are mist and dust. Our stability trembles like a leaf. He is surely a misguided fool who likes to fill himself with smoke . . . who cannot grasp this and who pursues the world; for a silk cloth is spread over the fool dung before us. He whom the splendor seduces is born for hell and has lost nothing less than both soul and body.” The Complete Works of Hartmann von Aue, trans. with commentary by Frank Tobin, Kim Vivian, and Richard H. Lawson (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001), 225. I have argued before that the young woman actually symbolizes Heinrich’s soul, and only when he accepts his spiritual and material side as a holistic whole, can he live fully. Albrecht Classen, “Herz und Seele in Hartmanns von Aue “Der arme Heinrich.” Der mittelalterliche Dichter als Psychologe?,” Mediaevistik 14 (2003): 7-30; id., “Utopian Space in the Countryside: Love and Marriage Between a Knight and a Peasant Girl in Medieval German Literature. Hartmann von Aue’s Der arme Heinrich, Anonymous, ‘Dis ist von dem Heselin,’ Walther von der Vogelweide, Oswald von Wolkenstein, and Late-Medieval Popular Poetry,” Rural Space in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age: The Spatial Turn in Premodern Studies, ed. Albrecht Classen, with the collaboration of Christopher R. Clason. Fundamentals of Medieval and Early Modern Culture, 9 (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2012), 251-79.