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Twenty-first-century Scottish play-acting draws depth and energy from a European and Western tradition of dreaming Scottish dreams, and this tradition dates back to at least the late eighteenth century, to the beginnings of European Romanticism. This book explores how contemporary celebrations of Scotland build upon earlier Scottish fantasies. The Scottish dreamscape is one of several pre-modern counter-worlds which have been approached through imitation in the past. The book examines the 'Scotland' that is on the play-actors' minds. The Scottish dreamscape was formed in an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century process now best known as Highlandism. It was then that Scotland became associated with the aesthetics and supposed characteristics of its Highland periphery. The book also explores the Scottish dreamscape's spread via the channels of the British Empire and American popular culture. It identifies five key carriers which helped to disseminate the Scottish aesthetic across the world, namely epic poetry, the Highland regiments, music hall entertainment, Hollywood films, and romance novels. The book further focuses on fieldwork conducted in 2009 and 2010. It sheds some light on the different forms of Scottish play-acting, on musicians, athletes, commemorators, and historical re-enactors. The pipers and athletes do not imitate the past; they perform in what they hope are old but living Scottish traditions. Commemorators and historical re-enactors have a different aim. They seek to recreate the past in the present. Finally, the book identifies some of the main reasons for the Scottish dreamscape's special resonance in northern and western Europe.
registering the association of this table with somewhere in the region of Afghanistan – a beautifully carved, if rather battered and cracked little table you bought for five pounds at an auction in Cheam village with your mother one day in the 1970s – and seeing that you actually put the phone down on top of a small volume containing Wilhelm Jensen’s Gradiva and Freud’s ‘Delusion and Dream in Wilhelm Jensen’s Gradiva ’, 1 in such a way that it concealed the lower half of Freud’s face but left his piercing left eye still gazing out above it, his right eye in shadow, and
structure oppressing Moses and Kitch and keeping them in bondage. Mister and Ossifer simultaneously stand in for American slave masters and the Pharaoh's army, but they also serve structural purposes comparable to Pozzo and the Boy in Waiting for Godot . Like his namesake, Nwandu's Moses aspires to escape captivity and pursue dreams of a Promised Land. Exodus generates the hopeful forward-moving propulsion towards freedom and equality in Pass Over , while Godot supplies counterforces of cyclical inertia, deadening habit and moral atrophy. Nwandu
’ and instead for ‘elegance, civility and grandeur’. 2 As this chapter explores, the nascent consumer culture surrounding domestic, suburban modernity in the 1930s demonstrated a comparable tension – caught between promoting the home as an escapist spectacle and celebrating conservative ideals of historical tradition, stability and Englishness. By attending to the growing consumerism surrounding domestic life in this earlier period, I resituate postwar aspirational interiors – ‘dream palaces’ onscreen – as engaging with interwar structures of feeling that negotiated
Exploring the status of the oneiric beyond psychoanalysis, Dreams and atrocity synthesises interdisciplinary perspectives from literary criticism, medical humanities, memory and cultural studies, history and art practice. The volume sheds new light on the relevance of dreams as modes of psychic resistance and historical witness as well as symptoms of trauma in modern and contemporary representations of atrocity. Central to the book is the articulation of the oneiric’s potential to awaken us to the pervasive violence of our contemporary world – providing us with the means not only of diagnosing but also of responding to historical episodes of atrocity, from twentieth-century genocide to contemporary racism and transphobia. The contributors develop new ways of reading the dreamlike in cultural works, foregrounding its power as an aesthetic mode and political tool. Organised into three parts – ‘Dream images’, ‘Dreams as sites of resistance’, and ‘Violent states’ – the book conducts a timely enquiry into the role played by the unconscious in processing and illustrating atrocity in an increasingly violent world. In so doing, it attends to the significance of dreams in dark times, illuminating the triangulated relationship between dream life, memory and trauma.
With his ‘curious report’ on an ‘unknown chapter of war and resistance’, 1 as he described his own project, French-Hungarian writer and painter Emil Szittya aimed to investigate dreams as an unconscious form of Second World War experience ( 2019 : 17). Initially published in French in 1963, along with six black-and-white reproductions of his paintings, Szittya’s 82 Dreams During the War Years ( 82 Rêves pendant la
What is this – dream in literature ? The phrase might be construed in at least three ways: the role and importance of dreams in literary works (in a short story, such as Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Ligeia’; a poem, such as Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ‘The Question’; a play, such as Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream ; or a novel, such as Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights ); the impulse or compulsion to dream, to fall into reverie, to lose oneself in a dream or dreamlike state while reading a work of literature, the experience of
‘My mother used to make me do these dream exercises. She wanted me to dream and know I was dreaming at the same time so I could control what happened to me in my dreams.’ ‘What does that do?’ ‘It gives you power, knowing you’re dreaming, when you dream, nothing can take over you. You take over. You bend the
In this chapter, I examine representations of the threshold in René Magritte’s series of door paintings (1933–62), Franz Kafka’s parable ‘Before the Law’ (1905) and Luis Buñuel’s film The Exterminating Angel ( 1962 ). With reference to the Surrealist approach to the dream as a means of subverting ‘normality’, I explore the allegorical engagement of these figures with the
) [P]sychoanalysis makes its most important discoveries through the analysis of dreams, and to this day, the cinema remains a dream factory, a form of public dreaming. (McGowan, 2018 : 1) Todd McGowan’s understanding of cinema as a form of ‘public dreaming’, together with Walter Benjamin’s observation about the threat to modern