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Beginning from a consideration of some ideas on aesthetics deriving from R. G. Collingwood, this essay sets Dreyer‘s Vampyr beside Fulcis The Beyond. The article then goes on to suggest something of the nature of the horror film, at least as exemplified by these two works, by placing them against the background of certain poetic procedures associated with the post-symbolist poetry of T. S. Eliot.
This essay deals with Joseph Cornell’s peculiarly American transformation of surrealism in both his more traditional art works, his boxes and collages, and the films he made. Although Cornell’s work frequently displays his Francophile taste, I claim his appropriation of surrealism shows a strong relation not only to European Symbolist poetry, but also American Romanticism as typified by Melville and Hawthorne, but particularly Emily Dickinson. Further, both his boxes and his cinematic work show Cornell’s grasp of the moving image as a unique means for conveying moments of sudden inspiration and revelation, corresponding to what Walter Benjamin called surrealism’s ‘profane illumination’. Cornell’s films, but also his boxes, which frequently evoke the mechanism of ‘pre-cinema’, inscribe an experience of glimpses and sudden revelations through the evanescent aspect of the moving image.
The painter, illustrator, playwright, and textile artist Amy Sawyer (1863–1945) was born in East Grinstead, Sussex and studied at the Herkomer School of Art, Bushey. She exhibited widely between 1887 and 1910 at venues including the Royal Academy; the Society of Women Artists, Brighton; the Institute of Painters in Oil; and the Paris Salon. Her subject matter tended to the whimsical and included incidents from fairy tales, romance fictions, and symbolist poetry. This chapter begins with an in-depth biography emphasizing the life and art of this little-known artist. The second section considers Sawyer’s unique contributions to the imperial romance and adventure fiction form, focusing on illustrations Sawyer produced for H. Rider Haggard’s (1856–1925) The Heart of the World (1895). The chapter discusses why it is significant that Sawyer’s fifteen illustrations for this romance represent the only illustrations commissioned by a woman artist to accompany any of Haggard’s nearly fifty novels during his lifetime. Influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites, Sawyer was recognized as a virtuosic artist in halftone. The third and final section examines Sawyer’s lush symbolist illustrations created to accompany her book of verse The Seasons (1901). This chapter suggests the importance of the legacy of Amy Sawyer as it relates to book history and illustration studies.
touch the very essence of our art’, he wrote. ‘We truly deciphered the global meaning of our ancestors’ work’ (Nous touchions par notre désir à l’essence même de notre art, … nous avions véritablement déchiffré la signification d’ensemble des labeurs de nos ancêtres). 11 Since symbolist poetry was able to express the very essence of all poetry, Valéry proposed nothing less than a properly Hegelian reading of literary history: symbolism materialized the absolute; history – and by that, I mean the history of literature – was finally abolished. But the end of the
genre can be. Crucially, it’s a frightening story, but so much more besides – like an intricate piece of symbolist poetry. ‘Pure’ horror doesn’t interest me at all – poetry and a weird kind of beauty have to be mixed in there too. (Marty Ross, 2011 ) Ross captures the particular effect of the CBC version, but what he
knowledge, the Manifesto of Tactilism is clearly in debt to the positivist climate of the early twentieth century.9 He was certainly aware of the discussion about synaesthesia in symbolist poetry, which was also part of a more general interest in ‘pathological’ perceptive phenomena at that time. Marinetti probably also borrowed from Jules Romains’s La vision extra-rétinienne et le sens paroptique (1920), published the year before Marinetti’s Manifesto of Tactilism, in which Romains argued, among other things, that ‘any region of the periphery of the body … is capable of
new practice alone and without the heady but potentially stifling atmosphere of a cabal of elders. Deren shared several key intellectual reference points that might have been expected at the very least to facilitate sympathetic dialogue with the émigré surrealists. In addition to her proficiency in French, her highly informed interests included ethnography, a recurring and growing concern for the surrealists in this period; French Symbolist poetry, a topic in her Master’s dissertation, where poets such as Baudelaire or Mallarmé were also part of French surrealism
des impressions créatrices, des sensations’ (‘was to replace the story with creative impressions, sensations’). As in symbolist poetry, deeply indebted to music, evocative images suggest ideas rather than state them. What Dulac values most in the films that she reviews is ‘la richesse des suggestions’ (‘the richness of suggestions’) and the ‘lien sensible’ (‘perceptible link’) between the shots, which transports the spectator (29 October 1926). Similarly, Dulac holds up Eisenstein's Le Cuirassé Potemkine as an exceptional example of the new
) (1883) and L’Ève future (Future Eve) ( 1886 ). It prefigures too the repertoire of images of the femme fatale in such texts as Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan (1894), Oscar Wilde’s Salome (1894), Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula ( 1897 ), as well as French Symbolist poetry and painting. The fetishistic modes of femininity that
efficacy of literature and text to represent subjectivity truthfully. The idea of an ‘art of high interiority’ took shape more concretely after 1979, when Wallace began to combine his interest in symbolist poetry with images that document his studio or place of work. Image/Text (1979: Figure 29) is one of the first of these images, but still contains some of the strategies found in The Summer Script and An Attack on Literature. It too is a large mural-sized photograph composed of twelve separate panels mounted side by side (six on top, six underneath) to form a large