Sue Zemka | University of Colorado, Boulder (original) (raw)

Papers by Sue Zemka

Oxford University Press eBooks, Jul 31, 2023

Towards the end of the first volume of her memoirs, Simone de Beauvoir recounts a visit she paid ... more Towards the end of the first volume of her memoirs, Simone de Beauvoir recounts a visit she paid in the spring of 1929 to the new galleries of French paintings which had just opened at the Louvre. Monet she didn't like, towards Renoir she was tepid, Manet she admired, and Cézanne she worshipped: 'I thought I saw in his paintings "the descent of the spirit to the heart of the senses".' 1 Beauvoir was not alone in professing worship for Cézanne. In the 1920s, worshipping Cézanne was a thing to do, a sign of cool. Since early in the century, a general excitement for Cézanne (who died in 1906) percolated in avant-garde art circles of Paris, New York, and London. It crossed the boundaries between fine art and literature and eventually philosophy. Gertrude Stein told Hemingway to take Cézanne as a model and he wisely obeyed. A few years before Beauvoir stood before Cézannes in the Louvre, Hemingway was visiting them in the Musée du Luxembourg; 'I was learning very much from [Cézanne] but I was not articulate enough to explain it to anyone. Besides it was a secret. ' 2 All of this is context, pieces of the milieu swirling around a 21-year-old Simone de Beauvoir and probably outside of her immediate consciousness when she decided that, among impressionists, it was Cézanne she worshipped, Cézanne who won the day over Monet, Manet, and Renoir. There are reasons why Cézanne reigned supreme as the early trendsetter of modernism (to which I will return). What fascinates me is the person who was standing next to Beauvoir in a gallery of the Louvre on that spring day in 1929.

Cambridge University Press eBooks, Nov 24, 2011

Overview Chapter 1 explores the concept of moments and momentary events in several areas of eight... more Overview Chapter 1 explores the concept of moments and momentary events in several areas of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century culture: association philosophy and psychology, literary criticism, melodrama, religion, and aesthetics. My main concern in this chapter is to trace a gap that emerges in the nineteenth century between embodied experience and abstract time. Embodied experience was the testing ground for British epistemology and aesthetics throughout much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The temporality of physical and emotional sensations was central to the investigation of embodiment and the claims made on its behalf. In aesthetics, the embodied human subject was an organ of receptivity whose cultivation of pleasure and pain was sufficient in itself to the ends of art, and the success of an artwork depended on an artist’s manipulation of the temporal–sensory interface between his work and his audience. In general terms, this describes the cult of sensibility, a tradition that has roots in the eighteenth century, and continued to exert a diffuse influence in Victorian culture. Over the course of the nineteenth century, however, sensibility ceases to be adequate to a growing need to discover meaning (or verify its existence) in a technologically mediated reality that presents itself as rational and totalizing. Sociologists describe this period as one of rationalized institutions, and the aspect of this process that concerns me here is the rationalization of time. Abstract time, as we will see, becomes integral to the articulation of experience in the various fields of knowledge discussed here, such that events do not simply happen in time, but partake of time. Abstract time enters into the articulation of experience as a constitutive element, often in ways that imply that time gives us certain experiences.

Victorian Literature and Culture, 2018

ment to our tremendous appetite for progress narratives, one that certainly exceeds in quantity a... more ment to our tremendous appetite for progress narratives, one that certainly exceeds in quantity and differs in quality from the modest claims of Macaulay or Acton. As we strive to understand historical change that has a more ambivalent direction and as we fight for the future that we want, we need to acknowledge theway that the Victorian theorization of progress went hand-in-hand with its others—regress, cyclicality, stasis, and rupture.

Literature and the Senses: (Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature), 2023

I hope this essay tells a pretty good story about the love triangle between Merleau-Ponty, Elisab... more I hope this essay tells a pretty good story about the love triangle between Merleau-Ponty, Elisabeth "Zaza" Lacoin, and Simone de Beauvoir. It's about what happened them in 1828-9, and the long-term repercussions of those events on the writings of de Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty. Is Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of the senses animated by grief and a yearning to believe in ghosts? I don't use the word "ghosts" in the essay, and it's not exactly what I mean, but I'm keeping this brief and tantalizing.

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The Encyclopedia of Victorian Literature

Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 2021

... John Wroe, and Richard Carlile.3 But because of his unabashedly self-referential interpreta-t... more ... John Wroe, and Richard Carlile.3 But because of his unabashedly self-referential interpreta-tion of the Bible, Ward provides the best exemplar for this book, which takes as its subject the relationship between nineteenth-century attitudes toward biblical authority and nineteenth ...

Victorian Literature and Culture

Macropolitics of Nineteenth-Century Literature, 1991

Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 2016

Oxford University Press eBooks, Jul 31, 2023

Cambridge University Press eBooks, Nov 24, 2011

Victorian Literature and Culture, 2018

Literature and the Senses: (Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature), 2023

$Research paper thumbnail of Wagner\u27s Opera of Redemption: \u3cem\u3eParsifal\u3c/em\u3e at Bayreuth$

The Encyclopedia of Victorian Literature

Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 2021

Victorian Literature and Culture

Macropolitics of Nineteenth-Century Literature, 1991

Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 2016

This essay explores ideas about sacred and secular time in western literature. The vastness of th... more This essay explores ideas about sacred and secular time in western literature. The vastness of the topic is made slightly more manageable by current exigencies. Writing at a time when climate change becomes more perceptible on an almost daily basis, and the global willpower to reduce greenhouse gas emissions appears unequal to the task, I approach this essay with a belief that there is one aspect of literary temporality which currently trumps the others in importance: the question of the future. It is not only by focusing on futurity that our task is limited, but also by the fact that sacred and secular belief systems now seem to agree – in a startling realignment of their past differences – that what lies ahead is transformation at a global scale. Something that looks like an ending looks to be happening, if we agree that by " ending " we mean changes unprecedented in recorded history in the biostability of the Holocene, in the climates and species of life that have remained relatively the same for the last 12,000 years. For supernatural and scientific belief systems alike, there does not seem to be a lot of future left, at least not as a familiar and reliable extension of the same. Sacred and secular time now veer towards an agreement that many earth-bound life forms are framed by an imminent though incalculable finitude.