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7 Topographies of terror: photography and the post-Celtic Tiger landscape Justin Carville The title of this chapter is a sort of homage to Luke Gibbons’s examination of eighteenth-century landscape aesthetics and Romanticism in Ireland (Gibbons 1996). In the essay from which the title is borrowed, and in several other subsequent publications, Gibbons has examined those moments when the collision of cultures brought about by the violence of colonialism has stimulated the complex intersection of aesthetics and politics in philosophical thought, literature and the
2 Topographies of being: space, sensation, and spectatorship in the cinema of Bruno Dumont Space and being in contemporary French cinema Topographies of being: the films of Bruno Dumont When man becomes reconciled to nature, when space becomes a true background, these words and concepts will have lost their meaning and we will no longer have to use them. (M. Antonioni) [E]ven when I’m filming outside, I am only filming the inside. The film itself is the interior, from start to finish. That is why when I film a landscape, it is the character’s interiority. (B
Why did Alberto leave the Val Seriana and why did he go to Cremona and take up a job there carrying wine? The legends advance two possible answers, first that his desire to make pilgrimages lured him away and second that a property dispute drove him away. But the lack of corroborating evidence demands that we suspend judgement on these matters, and turn instead to topography, plus the historical experience of several generations in Alberto’s part of the world, to consider what these have to say, not specifically about Alberto’s motives
A remarkable depiction of Ireland ( Figure 1 ) is found in a manuscript (Dublin, National Library of Ireland MS 700, henceforth N.L.I. 700) from ca. 1200 sandwiched between the Topographia Hibernica (‘Topography of Ireland’) and Expugnatio Hibernica (‘Conquest of Ireland’). 1 The map was likely made or commissioned by the author of these texts, Gerald of Wales (ca. 1146–1223), 2 a prominent Welsh-born cleric and later bishop whose family members, the Geraldines, were
This essay examines The Lair of the White Worms cultural logic, its mobilization of that dense network of specific historical references - to mesmerism, physiognomy, alienism, degeneration, and theories of race - which underlies so much of Bram Stoker‘s output. It is argued that Stokers last novel can serve as a kind of summa for Stoker‘s entire oeuvre, casting a retrospective eye over precisely those ethnological concerns that had animated his writings from beginning to end. For, in Stoker‘s imaginary the monstrous is always inscribed within a topography of race that his novels at once challenge and confirm by bringing pressure to bear on the whole scientific project of a general anthropology at its most vulnerable point: the distinction between the human and the near-human, between the species form and its exceptions.
This article examines a notebook owned by the poet and topographical writer Norman Nicholson, which is held in his collection at the John Rylands Library. The notebook, entitled Topographical Notes: Morecambe Bay etc., includes detailed notes and sketches taken at numerous locations in Cumbria, many of which recur in Nicholson’s poetry and topographical texts. The article analyses Nicholson’s note-taking practices, with particular attention to sensory experience and how this was expressed by the writer. The notebook is especially valuable because no other book of its kind survives in Nicholson’s archive, and because it can be dated towards the end of a long interlude in his career as a poet. The notes can be understood as lying in the space between Nicholson’s poetry and his topographical writing: although ostensibly collecting information for Greater Lakeland (1969), Nicholson’s treatment of light and vision suggests that he was beginning to experiment with some of the themes that characterise his later poetry. The article reflects on what these notes can tell us about Nicholson’s note-taking ‘in the field’, and suggests that his habit of treating the landscape as a repository of history is akin to what Kitty Hauser has called the ‘archaeological imagination’.
This article considers the use made of William Blake by a range of writers associated with the ‘countercultural’ milieu of the 1960s, particularly those linked to its London-based literary context. Iain Sinclair is offered as a writer who, in his appreciation of Blake, stands apart from the poets linked to the anthology, Children of Albion (1969). The article unpacks this distinction, analysing Sinclair’s ‘topographic’ take in comparison to the ‘visionary’ mode of his contemporaries. Having established this dualism, the argument then questions the nature of the visionary poetics assumed to apply to the likes of key poets from the era. The work of Michael Horovitz is brought into view, as is that of Harry Fainlight. In essence, these multiple discourses point to the plurality of Blake as a figure of influence and the variation underpinning his literary utility in post-1960s poetry.
The Ponar-Paneriai base, the main extermination site of Vilna-Vilnius, began its existence as a Red Army fuel depot in 1940. After Nazi occupation of the city in 1941 the Einsatzgruppen and mostly Lithuanian members of the Ypatingasis būrys used the pits dug for the fuel tanks for the murder of the Jews of Vilna and large numbers of Polish residents. During its operation, Ponar was cordoned off, but changes to the topography of the site since the Second World War have made a full understanding of the site difficult. This article uses contemporary plans and aerial photographs to reconstruct the layout of the site, in order to better understand the process of extermination, the size of the Ponar base and how the site was gradually reduced in size after 1944.
Metaphorically set in a border town, the darkly lit, libidinous urban topography of Orson Welles’ classic late film noir, Touch of Evil (1958), harbours primal fears and partially clads criminal activities, underscoring the fact that in the 1950s miscegenation was still illegal in a number of US states. This article juxtaposes Charlton Heston‘s leading role in two interracial romances, Touch of Evil and Diamond Head (1963), which takes place in the new border state of Hawaii. The historical foregrounding of the Civil Rights movement in the United States during the 1950s and ‘60s with respect to the interracial romances growing popularity is discussed, and the relevance of recent genetic research into the appeal of difference and the way it functions within a ‘primal drama’.
This essay brings together the popularity of Venice in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century as a setting for horror, terror and fantasy, and the narrative conventions of the Gothic. Focusing on Schiller, Zschokke, Lewis and Hoffmann, the article studies the representation of Venice as a Gothic labyrinth, in the context of the city‘s changing reputation as a political structure. ‘Venice’ is treated as a common set of signs which overlap between the literary field and the field of cultural politics: ‘plots’ are both political conspiracies and (carnivalised: doubled and disguised) narrative forms. All is given over to the dynamics of masquerade. The topography of the Venetian Republic is itself a political text, which carnivalises the ‘separation of powers’, while the texts of the Gothic writers are narrative masquerades which choose popular hybrid forms of comedy, folktale and horror, rather than Tragedy or Realism, to respond to Venice‘s tension between law and anarchy and the conflicting pressures of Enlightenment, Republicanism and Empire.