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The challenge of the sublime argues that the unprecedented visual inventiveness of the Romantic period in Britain could be seen as a response to theories of the sublime, more specifically to Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757). While it is widely accepted that the Enquiry contributed to shaping the thematics of terror that became fashionable in British art from the 1770s, this book contends that its influence was of even greater consequence, paradoxically because of Burke’s conviction that the visual arts were incapable of conveying the sublime. His argument that the sublime was beyond the reach of painting, because of the mimetic nature of visual representation, directly or indirectly incited visual artists to explore not just new themes, but also new compositional strategies and even new or undeveloped pictorial and graphic media, such as the panorama, book illustrations and capricci. More significantly, it began to call into question mimetic representational models, causing artists to reflect about the presentation of the unpresentable and the inadequacy of their endeavours, and thus drawing attention to the process of artistic production itself, rather than the finished artwork. By revisiting the links between eighteenth-century aesthetic theory and visual practices, The challenge of the sublime establishes new interdisciplinary connections which address researchers in the fields of art history, cultural studies and aesthetics.
perception has on women’s capacities to write their autobiographies and articulate their ‘desire[s] for resemblance.’63 For women, Johnson argues, such desires are perceived to be monstrous, as they are connected to but also extend far beyond biological reproduction. She makes three books the centre of her analysis: two that reflect the impact of Women’s Liberation – Nancy Friday’s My Mother/My Self (1977) and Dorothy Dinnerstein’s The Mermaid and the Minotaur (1976) – and a classic of Gothic literature, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). While the monster in Frankenstein
the crowd on Kennington Common led to the further employment of imagery of the ghostly and the spectral. To The Times they were ‘visionary tribes of men’; O’Connor had created a ‘Frankenstein’.14 This theme was taken up in a satirical poem, titled ‘The Midnight Review (Slightly Altered from the German Original)’, published in the Puppet-Show.15 The verse was modelled on a well-known poem by the Austrian writer Joseph Christian Freiherr von Zedlitz titled Die nächtliche Heerschau (‘The Midnight Review’) that described a ghostly mustering of French troops reviewed by
).indd 24 31/01/2019 16:05 zurich dada 25 2.2 Fernand Léger, La Partie de cartes (Soldiers Playing Cards, 1917) within itself its progeny, protectively ensconced. Here is the armed, sinister figure of today and tomorrow. No humanity, only the terrible Frankenstein’s monster we have made ourselves into’ (1955: 56). In 1916 Epstein went on to discard the drill and the lower part of the figure, and cast the torso, slightly modified, in gunmetal and later in bronze, turning the earlier heroic figure into a victim, emasculated and vulnerable.8 The image of the worker
Frankenstein’s 1949 performance Selbstmordnummern ( Suicide Numbers ), contributed to ‘nightmarish scenes which refer to the real trauma of the time’. 59 Frankenstein (1918–2010) characterised the group’s work as ‘a tightrope walk on this dividing line, to fall into huge laughter or, close to suicide, to tear yourself apart. The tragic grotesque, at least for the artists, was the feeling of life during those years’. 60 A key figure in the group, the painter Werner Heldt (1904–54), was ‘the most important painterly
, unlike Krämer, we use gross profit figures, not figures adjusted for inflation. The top five box-office hits included in the top twenty of the New Hollywood period are as in the table below. What do these successes share? Comic parody of ‘serious’ genres is apparent in Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein and M*A*S*H. The Graduate and American Graffiti focus on teen heroes
: Photography and Surrealism (New York and London: Abbeville Press, 1985) , p. 31. 93 Abigail Susik, Surrealist Sabotage and the War on Work (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021) , p. 145. 94 ‘C’est l’éveil de la conscience succédant à la fabrication artificielle de l’être humain. Un tel mythe de la création rencontre d’ailleurs ceux du Golem et, dans une moindre mesure, de Frankenstein.’ (‘It is the awakening of consciousness
films. Genres parodied include science fiction (Flesh Gordon 1974; Mars Attacks! 1996), horror (Young Frankenstein 1974; Scary Movie 2000; Shaun of the Dead 2004), action films (Airplane! 1980; Hot Shots! 1991; Tropic Thunder 2008), crime (Murder by Death 1973; Loaded Weapon 1 1993; Hot Fuzz 2007) and spy films (Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery 1997; Johnny English
view and its narrative programme is a good example of how panorama makers adapted their aesthetic ambitions to their awareness of the staticity of their medium. In this case, the text makes explicit the sublime emotions which the visitor is expected to experience, thus allowing the visual representation to focus on other aspects. As noted by Laurie Garrison, ‘[t]he style of the narrative portion of the programme is akin to that of other popular writing about the Arctic, and Barker may have taken some inspiration from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) or Samuel
. Frankenstein’s creature, he is our punishment for tampering with nature and defying God. And yet unlike Mary Shelley’s monster, who despite his ungodliness was in fact a mirror of humanity, Godzilla is not human (although clearly a man in a latex suit) … rather, the King of the Monsters is human only in the sense that he symbolizes a dark piece of man’s mind, an unhealthy part, ripped out and expanded to an atomic scale and intent on destroying and killing on an “inhuman” scale. 209 With Godzilla, through representing what was invisible, Brougher sees a physical