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Monday, August 01, 2011

The Muse-An International Journal of Poetry (ISSN 2249–2178) call for submissions

'The Muse-An International Journal of Poetry' (ISSN 2249–2178) is calling for submission of original and unpublished (both print and online) poems, research papers on poetry and book reviews of latest poetry books for December 2011 issue. Last date of Submission is November 10, 2011. Website : www.themuse.webs.com, Email:
themuseindia AT gmail.com .

Submission Guidelines:
1. Work submitted for publication must be original, previously unpublished (both print and online, not even published on blogs,literary or discussion forums or social networking sites), and not under consideration for publication elsewhere.

2. Send 1 to 5 poems and a brief biodata. A cover letter would be nice but is not mandatory.

3. The research papers should be not less than 3000 words. References should be prepared strictly following MLA Stylesheet (7th edition).

4. E-mail your poems, essays and research papers to themuseindia AT gmail.com . Response time varies from 2 to 12 weeks.

5. With poem/ research paper the poet/author is requested to submit a statement of originality of work.

for more details visit : www.themuse.webs.com

Pradeep Chaswal
Chief Editor
The Muse-An International Journal of Poetry (ISSN 2249–2178)
www.themuse.webs.com
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MPhil Research Methodology Class - Management Cluster

Today's Class

There is no information regarding shifting of class. Hence, please assemble in the same class. 

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Sunday, July 31, 2011

M.Phil:Structural Research Methodology and Research Writing. Session I

Following note prepared by Lissy Mathew based on the first session of Unit 4: Structural Research Methodology and Research Writing of Ph.D. Management cluster group taught by Anil Pinto


------------------------------
Expectations from the sessions
Why research
How to do the literature review – how to identify what is the right literature
How to do the abstract – for research and for article / paper
Table of content, proposal writing
Bibliography – citation and references
Style of writing – MLA- APA , Harward style
Historical shifts in research, publication style
Choice of methods
Methodology, research plan
Hypothesis

Certain things will have to be discussed with the guides concerned.

Why Research ?

Main reasons :
1. Career development
2. to solve the concerns of humanities, in order to evolve in the society,
3. to be serve the desire of the state to be technologically ahead

Research question determines what kind of methodology is required

Historical shifts in research

Most of contemporary research practices do not have a history of more than 50 years. Most of the practices were developed after WW II.

Communication model was also developed in 1948. Many modern ideas were
developed after WW II. E.g Psycho metric tests .

States realized the need to reduce the time required to do research. As a result methodologies and norms evloved.Citations styles are part of such tendencies.

The strenght of the research depends on literature review and methodology.


Knowledge should be democratic.

What is scientific research /
Karl Popper – suggested that to call scientific, it should predict,  and it should be falsifiable.

Epistemology: branch of philosophy dealing with knowledge
What is knowledge ?
What contributes knowledge ?
Philosophy – Kant – that which makes you reflect on one element
Deductive methodology
For Descartes -Proof of existence is thinking

21st century research is of methods,
- developed the writing styles
- there was no proposal, in the olden days

Structured Research Methodology

Developed at Christ University.
Argument was there is sturucture, apparent structure, not necessary. Latent structure is mandatory. In research, it is not only the apparent structure, but latent structure is must. Unravelling of the latent strucure strenthens research.


E.g. of Mungaru Male Kannada movie – Mysore boy and coorgy girl

When does a structure becomes epislomological?
Should have the steps and need to be acceptable and should be logical
Test the validity, methodology should be sound important/
Find out causal structure

Ontology
Nature of existence
Aristotle – categories exist in nature: men, women, water earth
Kant – Categories don’t exist in nature. Humans give it to nature.

Thesis
Statement – proposition to be maintained or proved
One report is supposed to have one thesis.

Reference to the way Karl Marx – unravels the latent structures in the process of understanding Capital

Summary – To constantly look for structure, apparent , latent. See structure that exists, and find latent structures.

Assignment :
Details of five books:

Author , full title, year of publication, place of publication , publisher. one book should be an edited book.

Journals – 2 articles and same information from the articles , plus – vol, no, year, month
Two articles from online. Same information should be taken
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International Seminar Holocaust Literature: Memories and Losses


A Two –Day International Seminar on 
Holocaust Literature: Memories and Losses
September 23-24, 2011

The Department of Studies in English, University of Mysore, Mysore is organizing a two-day colloboration with P E S College of Arts, Science and Commerce , Mandya. Thanks to writers and second generation Holocaust survivors such as Professor Scarlett Epstein, Savyon Liebrecht, Dr. Diti Ronen and Tzippy who volunteered to participate in the Seminar. Dr. U R Ananthamurthy has agreed to deliver the keynote address. Nemichandra, a Holocaust writer in Kannada, is also taking part in the Seminar. The Seminar will be held at P E S College campus, Mandya which is 45 kms. from Mysore on the way to Bangalore. Our other participants are Dr. Neluka Silva, Colombo University, SriLanka; Professor Gurumurthy Neelakantan, I I T Khanpur; Professor Rajendra Chenny, Kuvempu University; Professor K T sunitha, Professor C Naganna, Uni. Of Mysore; Dr. Seema Malik, Mohanlal Sukhadia University, Udaipur; Dr Chitra Panicker, Bangalore University; Dr Kalpana Rao, Pondicherry Central University.

Holocaust is whatever it is. An attempt is made to come to terms with it by Holocaust writers. A legacy as it is, it has been kept up very high by the three successive generations of writers. Beginning with the Letters and Diaries it has encompassed all forms of Literature. A bird’s eye view of the ever-growing list of the Holocaust writers includes the three Nobel Laureates – Elie Wiesel, Nelly Sachs, Ketesz and others like Anne Frank, Leslie Epstein, Primo Levi, Nava Semal, Ida Fink, Savyon Liebrecht, Diti Ronen, Daniel Mendel Sohn, Thane Rosebaum, Joseph Skibell, Jonathan Safron Foer and many more.

Seminar Objectives
  • To explore the history and the beginning of Holocaust Literature
  • To debate and discuss the contemporary trends and themes in Holocaust Literature

Seminar Theme:
The Seminar explores the complex relationship between the Holocaust and its ever deepening
impact on its victims and humanity; the depiction of trauma and the contemporary response; Holocaust
and identity, race and religion.

They invite seminar paper proposals in not more than 300 words and seminar papers to be readable
in 15-20 minutes (10- 15 pages in A4 size).

The last date for receipt of proposals is August 31, 2011.

The last date for receipt of complete papers is September 15, 2011.

Registration fee: Rs. 200.

E mail papers and proposals, queries and clarifications to: mahadev_kunderi  AT yahoo.co.uk /
Mobile: 94481 94470.


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Indian Philosophical Quarterly

Indian Philosophical Quarterly
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Friday, July 29, 2011

MA English-Western Aesthetics CIA2 - Mapping Essays

Following are the write ups by I Semester MA English Students done as part of their Continuous Internal Assessment 2. The write ups map the seminal essays on Western Aesthetics.


5. Amol Kadam (1124101) : The Other Story; Rasheed Araeen
12. Jordanna Rachel Drego (1124109) :
17. Nitya Santosh (1124115) : Subversive signs; Hal Foster
18. Poonam Vaidya (1124116) : Modernity and Femininity: Griselda Pollock
19. Puja (1124117) : Orientalism; Edward Said
20. Radhika Shenoy (1124119) : Painting: The Task of Mourning; Yve-Alain Bois
25. Sangeeta Nath (11241124) : In The Name of Picasso: Rosalind Krauss
30. Tara Thomas (1124129) : Taking Stock (Unfinished); Hans Haacke
38. Anshuman Manur (1124137) : Culture Wars; Richard Bolton
39. Krishnendu Basu (1124138) : A Collage of Indignation; Max Kozloff
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Thursday, July 28, 2011

 

 Mahto 1

Shreya Mahto   

1124125

Mr.Anil Pinto

MEL: 132: Western Aesthetics

13 July 2011

Philip Leider

Literalism and Abstraction:

Frank Stella's Retrospective

At the Modern

Thesis statement:

Also, a picture isn't abstract just because the artist doesn't know when it's finished. Pollock's message wasn't 'Go Wild'; it was (1) keep the field even and without dominant image or incident; (2) be careful about colour; (3) keep the space as free from the space needed to depict three-dimensional forms as possible; (4) eliminate gesture, let  the method chosen seem to generate the picture.

Paragraph (1)

Topic Sentence: Both abstraction and literalism look to Pollock for sanction; it is as if his work was the last achievement of whose status every serious artist is convinced.

Key words: Pollock, Stella, Cubist grid.

Paragraph (2)

Topic sentence: The literalist view of Pollock emerged somewhat more hazily, less explicitly, more in argument and conversation than in published criticism.

Key words: paint, canvas, handprints, cigarette butts.

Paragraph (3)

Topic sentence: In short, the greatness of the abstraction is in large measure a function of the literalness of Pollock's approach.

Key words: objectness of painting,

Paragraph (4)

Topic sentence: Abstraction was discovering that objectness was the thing to beat, and that the breakthrough to look for was a breakthrough to an inspired two – dimensionalism, and that the way to do it was through colour, and, as much as possible, through colour alone.

Key words: abstraction

Paragraph (5)

Topic sentence: One college student, Stella, saw in John a way to an advanced all overness.

Key words: possibilities of a centred image.

Paragraph (6)

Topic sentence: Stella was crucially interested in keeping his pictures flat because he was crucially interested in making abstract pictures that could survive as post Pollock art.

Key words: Stella's anti literalist ideas, abstract pictures.

Paragraph (7)

Topic sentence: Thus if you are going to make an abstract painting, then you cannot make it in the kind of space used for non-abstract painting.

Key words: abstract painting, non abstract painting.

Paragraph (8)

Topic sentence: The main criticism of the pictures seems to have been that they had nothing to say

Key words: none

Paragraph (9)

Topic sentence: The incipient move into three dimensions implied in Stella's paintings is made manifestly clear in Andre's work of the early 1960s,most explicitly in a work like the 1959-60 untitled construction.

Key words: literal objectness of Stella's paintings, three dimensions, presumption of literalism, literalist.

Paragraph (10)

Topic sentence: The differences between Andre and Judd emerged slowly and steadily all through the 1960s; Andre was to consistently limit himself to solutions that were respectful of, and consonant with, the problems of sculpture, while Judd's indifference to sculpture and its problems would become more obvious every day.

Key words: Minimal Art

Paragraph (11)

Topic sentence: The minimal art craze set everyone back for years; the job of criticism now would seem to be patiently undo the damage and carefully begin the work of revealing the development of a literalist art in America which extends quite unbrokenly from about 1959 to the present and which, in one way or another, involves in its network at least part of the work of artists as diverse as Andre, Judd, Flavin, Serra, Heizer, Morris.

Key words: anti form process or anti illusion.

Paragraph (12)

Topic sentence: The abstractionist critics- mainly Clement Greenberg, then Michael Fried ,William Rubin and others in greater or lesser degree- had, by the mid -1960s,done monumental work.

Key words: Literalism, abstractionist criticism

Paragraph (13)

Topic sentence: Abstractionist criticism tended to ignore the literalists except when it had to deal with Stella.

Key words:  Abstractionist criticism

Paragraph (14)

Topic sentence: As the 1960s drew to a close, the relationship between literalism and abstraction in American art changed considerably.

Key words: Abstract expressionists of the mid -1940s

Paragraph (15)

Topic sentence: Certainly by 1969 and 1970, Stella had thoroughly loosened the overall design structure and seems to have systematically turned more and more of the authority of the paintings over to colour.

Key words: design structure, Stella's art.

 

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cia assignment

Name: Jordanna Drego

Reg. No.:1124109

MEL132 Western Aesthetics

Anil Pinto

13th July 2011

　
The Intrasigent Artist or How the Impressionists Got their Name
by Stephen F. Eiseman
　
Thesis statement:
The new art , between 1874 and 1877, was both Impressionist and Intransigent, that is, affirmative and individualistic, or radical and democratiic
　
Paragraph 1
Topic sentence:
Most histories of Impressionism provide an account of how the movement got its name.
Supporting statements:
In an art exhibition in Paris held by a photographer Nadar, thirty artists participated, including Claude Monet, submitted a painting entitled Impression, soleil levant.
Within a week the terms 'impression', 'effect of an impression' and 'quality of impressions' were being employed in the press.
Louis Leroy was apparently the firts to speak of the school of 'impressionists' in his famous satirical dialogue.
This was followed by Jules Castangary who described 'Impressionism'
the name stuck and the third exhibition was named the 'Exhibition of Impressionists'
the members of this exhibition were remembered as Impressionists.
Key words:
 origin of impressionism.
Paragraph 2
Topic sentence:
 Two aspects of this story of origins concern me.
Supporting sentences:
first, was the basic accuracy of the account
second, what was at stake in naming the new art?
The answers to these questions the author believes will contribute to the history of art and to the ongoing debate on Modernism
Paragraph 3
Topic sentence:
 the word impressionism entered the vocabulary of art criticism at about the same time that the French positivists were undertaking their studies of perception.
Supporting sentences:
-
Charles Baudelaire, in 1863 described the Impression produced by things on the spirit of M.G.[uys]
- by 1870 it had become clear that any art based on impressions, that is upon unmediated sensory experience, must resemble the coloured patchwork that it was believed constituted unreflective vision, what Ruskinhad earlier called 'the innocence of the eye'
Theodore Duret said of Manet 'He brings back the vision he casts on things as truly his own........... a particular note of the palette'.
Paragragh 4
Topic sentence:
Duret thus detected two aspects in Manet's Impression(ism): first, its utter individuality, and second, its stucture of discrete colour 'notes' juxtaposed against, but not blended with their adjacent tone.
Supporting sentence:
the dual nature of Impressionism also underlay Castagary's celebrated usage of 1874.
Castangary meant to signify the individualism of the artists, an idividualism that corresponded to their technique of laying down a mosaic of colours and forms, which was determined by the impression of the exterior world upon their sense organs.
　
　
Paragraph 5
Topic sentence:
Impressionism in 1874 thus connoted a vaguely defined technique of painting and an attitude of individualism shared by an assortment of young and middle-aged artists officially led by Manet.
Supporting sentences:
served as a description of unbridled individualism
assured politically moderate criticsthat the new art had broken with increasingly discredited salon conventions, and remained unsullied by any troubling radical affiliations
Individualism was deemed as an essential instrument for the emancipation of citizens from debilitating ties to former political, economic and religious dogma.
Individualism would be necessary in the massive work of reconstructing France after the disasters of the Franco- Prussian War and commune.
The combination of painterly daring and political discretion suggested by the word impressionism helps account for the suprisingly positive reception given to the new art by many critics.
Key word
: Individualism
Paragraph 6
Topic sentence:
Impressionist was not the only name given to the artists exhibited at Nadar's studio in 1874
The word Intransigent also appeared, and continued to gain popularity until the Impressionists self-naming in 1874.
a critic for Le Fiagio, described the 'brutality of the Intransigents'.
Jules Claretie commented that 'the skill of these Intransigents is nil'
Key word:
 Intransigent
Paragraph 7
Topic sentence:
the French word intransigeant, like the English word intransigent, is derived from the spanish neologism los intransigentes, the designation for the anarchist wing of the Spanish Federalist Party of 1872
Suppoting sentence:
the intransigents were opposed to the compromises offered by the Fedealist
they believed instead that the Spanish constitutional monarchy could bet be toppled by mass armed resistance and a general strike.
When the constitution' fragile coalition finally collapsed in Feb 1873, the intransigents pressed for Cantonial independence against the newly empowered Benevolent Republicans.
The dispute resulted into civil war.
Paragraph 8
Topic sentence:T
he perception that was widespread that the newly hatched Spanish Republic might degenerate into a radical Commune.
the links between the two were direct, as it had been the Commune who helped the Federalist challenge in Spain.
Many Communards had foung refudge in Spain, thus precipitating the belief mentioned above.
An attempted Intransigent coup in July 1873, ignited civil war, but without support of the International, the major Spanish cities or France, the rebels were routed.
The last Intransigent stronghold; Cartagena, had submitted to the increasingly conservative Rebublic in January 1874.
Paragraph 9
Topic sentence:
with the destruction of Intransigentism in Spain, the worg intranigent entered the political and cultural vocabulary of France.
Supporting sentence:
in March 1875, Phillipe Burty, described the landscapes of Impressionist paintings ' who are here called the Impressionists, elsewhere the Intransigents'
Albert Wolff wrote in his review about the Impressionists that 'they barricade themselves behind their own inadequacy'.
Armand Silvestre spoke of Manet and 'the little school of Intransigents among whom he is considerd the leader'.
Gustav Caillebotte composed a late will where in a sum of his money would go to organize an exhibition of works by impressionist or intransigent painters.
Responding to a favourable review in the radical Le Rappel, an anonymous critic wrote,' let us profit that this circumstance ............ could be more natural'
the assertion that the impressionists had joined hands with the Intransigentsin politics was given further support by Louis Enault in Le Constitutionnel, which he called 'Exposition des Intransigents'where he recalls the origins of the word transigent.
A critic for La Gazette , Marius Chaumelin, was more precise about the politics of Intransigent Art and the approapriateness of its name. He claimed the principles of the new art- reform of the laws of colour and design, were derived from the principles of political Intransigents i.e. The radicals who had gained some thirty seats in the March 1876 elections of the Chamber of Deputies.
　
Paragraph 10
Topic Sentence:
 Not all evaluations of the new art as Intransigent came from the political right.
Supporting sentence:
The critic Stephane Mallarme described with the greatest clarity as well as the greatest subtlety the link between radical, or Intransigent, art and politics.
He percieved the new art as an expression of working class vission and ideology
Mallarme argued that , as Romantic fantasy and imagination characterized the first half of the century. The impressionist art marked a significant new stage in social evolution.
The Impressionist artist became the eyes of the 'energetic modern worker'
Mallarme believed that Impressionism was a movement with a radical co-operative programme and the currency of the name Intransigent signalled to him the widespread perception of that fact.
Key words: Romantic Fantacy, radical co-operative programme.
　
Paragraph 11
Topic sentence:
Mallarme offered a set of homologies between Impressionist art and working class or radical vission.
Supporting Sentence:
he began by noting that intransigent art or politics stripped away outmoded principles, seeking a blank slate upon which to write a new cultural and political agenda.
The key term in Mallarme' dialectic was 'The theory of the open air' by which academic formulas were jettisoned in favour of a greater truth.
Open air painting thus provided an objective justification for the discarding of academic traditions of individualist caprice.
He felt that Impressionists stripped away results in pictorial clarity and flatness that mimics the look of the simplepopular art forms favoured by the rising class of workers.
Manet's sea princess illuminates this vaunted simplicity, revealing how the artist's technique of cropping reiterates pictorial flatness.
　
Paragraph 12
Topic sentence:
faced with such conflicting interpretations of such formidable writers as Castangary and Mallarme, the reader by now be wondering whether the new art , between 1874 and 1877, was in fact Impressionist or Intransigent, that is, affirmative and individualistic, or radical and democratic.
Supporting Statement:
the essence of the new art was its determined position between the polarities Impressionist/Intransigent.
The new art must be understood as a signal instance of Modernist dialectics.
Works that primarily explore their own physical origins or constituents are intransigent rebukes to a society that seeks to tailor all culture to its own interests.
The apolitical self-regard of Modernist art creates an enironment favourable to the eventual industrial appropriation of the works.
Yet there have been times when this latter process of appropriation has been sufficiently slowed that a semblance of autonomy has been achieved.
The new art was definable only by uncertanities in critical language between 1874 and 1877.
Paragraph 13
Topic sentence:
 the opposition between the Impressionist and Intransigent art is unresolved in he criticism of Claretie, Chesneau, Burty, Wolff, Silverste, Blemont, Enault, Chaumelin and Mallarme.
Supporting Sentence:
even critics who worked the hardest to claim Impressionism for the moderate Republic was strangely compelled to call attention to its Intransigent alter-ego.
Emile Blavet tried to rescue Impressionism from the left, claiming that the new art represented 'the fruitful renovation of the French School, of a principle of art whose results may be considerable'
If the new art , as we have seen , embodied a 'theory of open air', so too did the criticism, often seeming to 'tremble, melt and evaporate' into ideologiacal unease.
The critics on the left providing no more confident than those on the right.
The uncertain art criticism was thus wholly appropriate to the ambiguities of the new art.
Renoir's rejection of a name encouraged critical uncertainity over the new art, thereby prolonging the period during which it remained between ideological antinomies.
Such a stance was considered by Renoir as part of the tradition of 'the Masters'
　
Paragraph 14
Topic sentence:
 The success of the new art in evading either academicism or political tendentiousness is thus attributed to the refusal of a proper name and the articulation of a new style.
Supporting sentences:
Romanticism had vested artists with the power symbolically to breach the Enlightenment frissure between subject and object, word or thing.
Manet chose to expose these scissions through an art that called attention to its status as fiction.
Manet did not adopt the Jacobian tradition instead as T.J.Clark has shown in his study on Manet was an avoidance of the explicit signs of politics or class achieved through the blankness of human expression and and odd unreliability of gesture, posture, and physical place.
Paragraph 15
Topic sentence:
Manet's art, it may generally be said, elided the oppositions that comprised contemporary ideology: work/leisure, city/country, artifice/authenticity, public/private- in short a whole rhetoric of binaries that seemed to assure the political and class stability.
Supporting statements:
Manet questioned this stability and did so with a modernist style that compelled conviction.
His paintings revealed an undeniable finish, solidity, composure and simple rationality that signalled a real knowledge.
Impressionist followers of Manet similarly succeded in elidind ideological oppositions while still offering something that could approach knowledge.
The evidence of the new painters success in eliding comforting social oppositions provide the aporias that dominate criticism of the new art, that is, the free space between Impressionist and Intransigent.

　
　

　
　
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Preliminaries to a possible treatment of 'Olympia' in 1865: TimothyJ. Clark

Chandana Nirwan

1124107



Thesis statement: Olympia's handling of sexuality, and its relation to the tradition of the nude



Paragraph 1

But for reasons we can only guess at, he kept the picture entitled Olympia in his studio for almost two years, perhaps repainted it, and submitted it to the jury in 1865.

Painting- accepted for showing-excited public scrutiny .



Paragraph 2

If Manet's hesitation had to do with anxieties over what the papers would say, then what happened when the Salon opened was to prove his worst fears well-founded.

Critical reaction to Olympia - negative.

I believe this mass of disappointing art criticism can provide an opportunity to say more about the relation of a text to its spectators.

Verses written along with the painting- were another reason for the critics' contemptuous remarks.



Paragraph 3

I intend instead is to sketch the necessary components of such a study( a study of Olympia and its spectators), to raise some theoretical questions which relate to Screen's recent concerns and to give in conclusion, a rather fuller account of the ways in which this exercise might provide 'a materialist reading [specifying] articulations with the [picture] on determinate grounds'.



Paragraph 4

I would like to know which set of discourses Olympia encountered in 1865 and why the encounter was so unhappy.

Two discourses- a) relations and disjunctions of the terms Woman/Nude/Prostitute were obsessively rehearsed. B) complex but deeply receptive discourse of aesthetic judgement in the Second Empire.

Aesthetic judgements- missing from the writings of Olympia – present in spasmodic and unlikely form



Paragraph 5

Olympia is a picture of a prostitute: various signs declare that unequivocally.

Olympia's sexuality –laid out for inspection – appeared in a vocabulary of uncleanness, dirt, death, physical corruption and actual bodily harm.

The oddity: None of the discourses had difficulty in including and accepting the prostitute as one of the possible categories of art.



Paragraph 6

It was some transgression of le discours prostitutionnel that was at stake; or rather, since the characterization of the courtisane could not be disentangled from the specification of Woman in general in the 1860s, it was some disturbance in the normal relations between prostitution and femininity.



Paragraph 7

Certainly it ( Olympia)deserves its place there, but the very word indicates the artificiality of the limits we have to inscribe – for description's sake – around our various 'discourses'.

Nude, sexuality revealed, not-revealed, displayed and masked.



Paragraph 8

The critics asked certain questions on Olympia and did not get an answer.

Questions like: what sex is she, or has she? Has she a sex at all? Can it be included within the discourse on Woman/the nude/the prostitute? Can it be modern example of the nude?



Paragraph 9

It is a matter of tracking down, in the writings on Olympia, the appearance of the normal forms of discourse and the points/topics/tropes at which (or around which) they are simply absent, or present in a grossly disturbed state.

Hand of Olympia- shamelessly flexed, improper, form of a toad, dirty, in a state of contraction.

Olympia's whole body- disobedient, unfeminine.

Critics' unease over Olympia's handling of hair and hairlessness. (Bertall's caricature- a triumph- as cat and flowers place in place of the hand).



Paragraph 10

I think it is possible to say that at its first showing Olympia was not given a meaning that was stabilized long enough to provide the framework for any further investigation- for some kind of knowledge, for criticism.

For spectators Olympia failed to establish a relationship with previous forms of representation.



Paragraph 11

That Olympia is arranged in such a way as to invite comparison with the Titan has become a commonplace of criticism in the twentieth century, and a simple charting of the stages of Manet's invention, in preparatory sketches for the work, is sufficient to show how deliberate was the reference back to the prototype.

1865- Olympia twice talked in reference to the greater tradition of European painting ( with Titan and Ravenel).



Paragraph 12

'This Olympia', wrote Amedee Cantaloube in Le Grand Journal, 'sort of female gorilla, grotesque in indiarubber surrounded by black, apes on a bed, in a complete nudity, the horizontal attitude of the Venus of Titan, the right arm rests on the body in the same way, except for the hand which is flexed in a sort of shameless contraction.'

indiarubber; grotesque.



Paragraph 13

For the most part, for almost everyone, the reference back to tradition in Olympia was invisible.

Feminity



Paragraph 14

I have already said that Ravenel's text is the only one in 1865 that could possibly be described as articulate, and somehow appropriate to the matter in hand.


Ravenel's entry on Olympia.



Paragraph 15

Ravenel's interpretation:

Olympia- the scapegoat of the Salon- Each passer-by takes a stone and throws it in her face.



Paragraph 16

Ravenel – it is the achievement which first impresses us, I suppose –breaks the codes of Olympia.

Reference to Baudelaire and Goya.



Paragraph 17

For a reader like Ravenel it(The discovery of Baudelaire) destablises meaning still further since Baudelaire's meanings are so multiple and refractory, so unfixed, so unmanageable, in 1865.
Meaning



Paragraph 18

For the recognition or attribution of class – once again, we are entitled to draw breath at Ravenel's petite faubourienne.

Petite faubourienne : opens to three phrases- a) a working girl from the faubourgs, b) woman from the farthest edges, c) a character out of Eugene Sue's melodramatic novel of the city's lower depths.



Paragraph 19

The identification of class is not a brake on meaning: it is the trigger, once again, of a sequence of connotations which do not add up, which fail to circle back on themselves, declaring their meaning evident and uniform.
free play of the 'signifier'



Paragraph 20

I suppose it will be obvious that my reading of Olympia will be produced as a function of the analysis of its first readings.

'within historical materialism'



Paragraph 21

My reading of Olympia would address the question: what is it in the image which produces or helps produce, the critical silence and uncertainty I have just described?

Olympia's handling of sexuality and its relation to the tradition of the nude.



Paragraph 22

The picture turns, inevitably, on the signs of sexual identity.
odd coexistence of decorum and disgrace.



Paragraph 23

I shall deal with three aspects of the matter here. a) The question of access and address. B) the in-correctness in the drawing of the body; c) the handling of hair and hairlessness.

One of the primary operations of the nude is, to borrow MacCabe's phrase again, 'a placing of the spectator in a position of imaginary knowledge'.



Paragraph 24

In the 1830s, realism had invented a set of refutations of just these placings.
The Bathers.



Paragraph 25

But The Bathers broke the rules of the nude in other ways, which were hardly more subtle, but perhaps more effective.



Paragraph 26

What Olympia contrives is stalemate, a kind of baulked invitation, in which the spectator is given no established place for viewing and identification, nor offered the tokens of exclusion and resistance.

The woman's gaze- asymmetry of the lids – smudged and broken corner of the mouth….



Paragraph 27

(b) what the critics indicated by talk of 'incorrectness' in the drawing of Olympia's body, and a wilder circuit of figures of dislocation and physical deformity, is, I would suggest, the way the body is constructed in two inconsistent graphic modes, which once again are allowed to exist in too perfect and unresolved an equilibrium.

Certain aspects: Olympia's body – emphatically linear; Olympia is too definite, lack of articulation.



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c) The manipulation of the signs of hair and hairlessness is a delicate matter for a painter of the nude.
Hair let down : decent, sign of Woman's sexuality

Hairlessness: a hallowed convention of the nude, ladies in paintings do not have hair in indecorous places.

Olympia does not entirely break these rules.



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Olympia's face is framed, mostly, by the brown of a Japanese screen, and the neutrality of that background is one of the things which makes the address and concision of the woman's face all the sharper.

There are two faces, one produced by a ruthless clarity of edge and a pungent certainty of eyes and mouth, and the other less clearly demarcated, opening out into the surrounding spaces.



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[…] hair , pubic or otherwise, is a detail in Olympia, and should not be promoted unduly.
signs



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Is there a difference- a difference with immediate, tactical implications- between an allowed, arbitrary and harmless play of the signifier and a kind of play which contributes to a disruption of the smooth functioning of the dominant ideology?

Specific positioning of the body.



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It is admirable in 1865 for a picture not to situate Woman in the space- the dominated and derealized space – of male fantasy.

In Olympia, there are signs of the depiction of social identity.



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Let me make what I am saying perfectly clear. Olympia refuses to signify – to be read according to the established codings for the nude, and take her place in the Imaginary.
Imaginary; relations of dominator/dominated, fantasizer/fantasized.



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The picture would have to construct itself a position- it would be necessarily a complex and elliptical position, but it would have to be readable somehow- within the actual conflict of images and ideologies surrounding the practice of prostitution in 1865.

The shift between petite faubourienne and courtisane

The endless exchange of social and sexual meanings.



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In the end Olympia lends its peculiar confirmation to the latter structure, the dance of ideology.

Prostitute: an abject, dominant, equivocal and unfixed term.

An act of unsettling the old codes and conventions.



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I am pointing to the fact that there are always other meanings in any given social space - counter-meanings, alternative orders of meaning, produced by the culture itself, in the clash of classes, ideologies and forms of control.

meanings.



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A clue to Manet's tactics in 1865, and their limitations, might come if we widened our focus for a moment and looked not just at Olympia but its companion painting in the Salon, The Mocking of Christ.

Purpose of such paintings: to show us the artifice of this familiar repertoire of modern life, and call in question the forms in which the city contrives its own appearance.

art; tradition.

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WESTERN ASTHETICS Barbara M. Reise Greenberg and the Group: A Retrospective View

Shrutika Ghorpade
1124126

Thesis statement: Greenberg's involvement with Marxism gave him a historical sense which committed him to the avant-garde, converted him to 'abstract' art as a revolution against the established American taste for nationalistic narrative paintings and gave him an evolutionary concept of history allowing him to see the 1940's immigration of European artist as historically establishing new York as the artistic centre of the future.

 

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Topic sentence: "mr. clement Greenberg has been a controversial figures most of his life, a guru to some and a Satan to others.

 

Supporting sentence: his art criticism- especially on American painting and sculpture after the second world war- has been so intelligent, perspective, biased and influential that everyone concerned with contemporary art seems to take some sort of stand in relation to it.

 

Idea: introduction to Greenberg-his work- and the reactions to it.

 

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Topic sentence: "his previous experiences as editor of partisan review, involvement with Marxist thought, and acquaintance with students of Hohmann prepared him to be a champion of avant-garde painting in journalism which would reach a broad public.

 

Idea: qualifications and associatiation with important people. Influence of Marxism.

 

Key word: avant-garde

 

 

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Topic sentence: " …corroborative reference for his championing of young American artists against the dominance of the 'school of paris' in the eyes of artists and taste of the world.

 

Supporting sentence: it brought together grahams friends and presented Jackson Pollock's work to the public for the first time, with de Kooning's and Krasner's in juxtaposition with paintings of acknowledged French masters like Braque and Picasso

 

Key word: juxtaposition- to place beside another for comparison.

 

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Topic sentence: their work dominated his writing at that time and he seemed only peripherally aware of concurrent activity of other young artists like Rothko, still, merman, baziotes, gottlieb who were more closely involved with the French surrealists than with graham Hofmann circle.

 

Idea: Pollock and the rest- Greenberg exposed their work to the larger public and made them famous

 

Key word: championed

 

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Topic sentence: when the work of the artist known as the first generation abstract expressionism began to receive international acclaim in the 1950s, the quality and courage of greenberg's insight was recognized as well.

 

Supporting sentence: his role easily shifted from the alienated critic writing art columns for intellectual magazines to an impresario in the New York art world judged by his commitment to a specific kind of art and respected for his ultimate success.

 

Idea: growing success of Greenberg

 

Key phrase: prophet in the New York art world

 

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Topic sentence: by mid 1950s greenberg's critical style was clearly different from that of Harold Rosenberg, his chief rival as an interpreter of abstract expressionism.

 

Idea: Rosenberg-rival of Greenberg-style metaphoric-writing of shared experience- not so much for the public.

 

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Topic sentence: the fact that his rival's 1952 label of 'action painting' caught on quickly and misleadingly infuriated Greenberg and the two men began quarreling.

 

Supporting sentence: greenberg's didactic prose, references to the history of modern art and analysis of the formal properties of exhibited art made his ideas more accessible to critics and the countless art-history and painting students who discovered abstract expressionism in the late 1950s.

 

Key word: accessible ideas

 

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Topic sentence: during the 1960s, the tone of greenberg's criticism changed.

 

Supporting sentence: in the 1960s it has become more didactic, concerned with philosophy and history, removed from concrete aesthetics encounters, and seemingly sure of its own objectivity.

 

Supporting sentence: in the 1960s, these penchants rigidified into dogmas: allowing only art which confirmed to greenberg's philosophy of art history to be considered as 'authentic', 'serious'; high' art in his discussions.

 

Ides: his style changed from passionate to didactic- more philosophical and historically oriented.

 

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Topic sentence: this increasingly defensive and academic stance of Greenberg against the subjective nature of aesthetic judgment was begun under the influence of two historical phenomena around 1962: mthe threat to his taste and critical assumption in the success of pop art in the new York art world; and the aesthetic respect for his approach and experience from the American art historical academy establishment.

 

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Topic sentence: green berg's failure to predict and inability to discuss or even see this type of art seriously threatened his established position as prophet of future trends.

 

Supporting sentence: but Greenberg was naturally alienated by its use of representation conceptual with, and source of "low" commercial popular imagery.

 

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The irony of hearing a pronouncement on "safe" taste by a man once renowned for the courage of his conviction that Pollock was a master is somewhat lessened by the realization that this taste was "safe" to Greenberg because it was objective as part of the inevitable evolution of history of art.

 

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Topic sentence: Bernard Berenson's historiographical vision plans greenberg's art historical form firmly in the 19th century.

 

Supporting sentence: since the content of his art history is 20th century art, some interesting disparities between form and content occur.

 

Keyword: historiographical vision

 

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Topic sentence: the scope of modern art is reduced in greenberg's later writings to a narrow line between impressionism, cubism, late cubism, abstract expressionism and post painterly abstraction.

 

Supporting sentence: reading only Greenberg one would never know the existence of symbolism, futurism, pop art and mixed media happenings.

 

Keyword: distorted history.

 

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Topic sentence: this greenbergian distortion of art and history ensures that subjectivity of his evaluations of art no matter how objective he believes his arguments to be.

 

Supporting sentence: it is no more an objective compliment to be included in his history of modern masters than exclusion is an objective damnation to the realm of Kitch.

 

Keyword: objectivity

 

 

 

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Topic sentence: the sad thing is that this fact has not been apparent to greenberg's followers, some of whose writings show blind adherence to his philosophy as if it were a true criterion for qualitative evaluation.

 

Supporting sentence: the qualitative excellence of being in the forefront of greenberg's progressive modernism is so pervasive an assumption among them that they plot artists' positions like sportscasters describing a horse race.

 

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Topic sentence: …respectfully reports Greenberg as saying 'that Lichtenstein has proved that abstraction painting is fashionable again', and forecasts (hopefully) 'the eng of pop art as we know it'.

 

Supporting sentence: Lichtenstein's change of pictorial references from popular comic and advertising imagery of the 1940s to popular architectural design of the 1930s is interpreted by tillim as a fashionable nostalgia inferior to bonnie and clied

 

Key word: pop art

 

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Topic sentence: Kraus and tillim toll the death knell on artistic styles on the objective basis that the art changed from their own labelled concept of it.

 

Supporting sentence: their concern with the death of art by art shows an antagonism naturally arising from the conflict between their concept and the lively irreverence of art to it.

 

Key word: death of art

 

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Topic sentence: 'art and object hood' of fried presenting objects in a basically theatrical dialogue with the viewer; his analysis of the work of these 'minimalists' is taken from Greenberg with changed labels.

 

Key phrase: rigid understanding of art

 

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Topic sentence: Greenberg's pronouncements constantly embody insights which, if thought about critically, can provide a structure against which to build one's own artistic vision.

 

Supporting sentence: the obvious danger of swallowing greenberg's philosophy without criticism of it has done much to render irrelevant the determination of these Greenberg followers to write significantly, originally, and influentially.

 

 

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Topic sentence: Barbara rose and William Rubin have been influenced by greenberg's criticism, both approach art in terms of history, visual form, and style-epochs, but neither limits himself/herself to greenberg's vision of modern art.

 

Key phrase: critical stand against 'formalists criticism'

 

 

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Topic sentence: critics try to abstract themselves from the hustle of contemporary history to spend more time thinking and feeling about what a particular artistic experience is all about before they begin relating it to anything

 

Key phrase: we are all critics.

 

 

 

 

 

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