Maria Cichosz | University of Toronto (original) (raw)
Papers by Maria Cichosz
The tail end of the 1960s saw the closing of two major sites of utopian potential and imagining: ... more The tail end of the 1960s saw the closing of two major sites of utopian potential and imagining: the waning of enthusiasm about deep-sea exploration and the disillusionment of radical social movements with the emerging conservatism of the 1970s. These two sites come together in Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice, where a drug-addled and waning counterculture finds its hopes and disillusionments bound up in the myth of a sunken continent in the Pacific Ocean. Reading this continent, Lemuria, as a heterotopia, and applying an archetypal, psychological, and spatial reading to a novel normally read as an exemplar of postmodern aesthetics and paranoid epistemologies allows for a rethinking of postmodern allegory as not necessarily disruptive of a historical continuum, but as confused, melancholy, and fundamentally lost.
There is enormous power and ethical potential in the seemingly simple act of paying attention and... more There is enormous power and ethical potential in the seemingly simple act of paying attention and choosing what one pays attention to. Taking this power seriously, I explore the ethical value attunement, or the state of paying attention, holds in relation to affect and its circulation. Because the affective texture of the everyday is not always directly accessible to experience, the ethical potential of becoming attuned to this texture can be more effectively examined through a conceptual framework of a radically altered, affectively-mediated state of consciousness: the trip. Conceptualizing tripping allegorically, as meaning something other and more than what is literally said, I use this mode of experience as a framework to think through the question of what ethical potential lies in practices of affective attentiveness. Exploring the connections between affect, attention, and tripping, I bring these concepts together in a close reading of excerpts from David Foster Wallace's The Pale King and This is Water. Engaging with the work of a writer who has always seen attention as an ethical imperative, I show that an indefinite, shifting understanding of affect can have concrete ethical applications in day to day life.
Book Chapters by Maria Cichosz
Allegory Studies: Contemporary Perspectives, 2021
This chapter imagines the events of a single May morning in 1953 to trace how allegory was concep... more This chapter imagines the events of a single May morning in 1953 to trace how allegory was conceptualized in late modernist thought. Focusing on Aldous Huxley, British expatriate writer turned early mescaline aficionado, and Morris Louis, canonized American Color Field painter, it examines the work of two paradigmatic high modernists to show how modernism’s attempt to preserve its declining ideals affected the form and function of allegory in the mid-twentieth century. Conceptualizing allegory as a structure of thought, a set of historically contingent formal relations that organize collective ideas about vision, meaning, and the viability of metaphysics, I use an approach that is simultaneously formal, archetypal, and historical to situate allegory in a moment of intense structural transformation. Placing Louis’ painting in dialogue with Huxley’s contemporaneous psychedelic explorations, I use juxtaposition to clarify the nature of their respective aesthetic projects and demonstrate their shared affinity for a specific mode of transporting vision. In doing so, I argue that late modernism enlisted allegorical logic to reimagine transcendence as aesthetic immanence, thereby securing the possibility of ideal experience within a secular space. This reimagining involved flattening the levels of the archetypal allegorical Veil into a single immanent plane to create a mode of visionary experience induced through material means, an understanding of transcendence as immanence shared by modernist aesthetics and early psychedelic thought. Spanning the American east and west coasts, Hollywood and Washington, and the literary and visual arts to their point of ideological convergence, this chapter describes a major historical transformation in allegorical form, reading the concerns of late modernist aesthetics as a story about where it is possible to go in a shrunken world, and how it is possible to get there.
Essay about Jane Stanford's struggle with faith for Cantor Arts Center's book "Faults and Traces:... more Essay about Jane Stanford's struggle with faith for Cantor Arts Center's book "Faults and Traces: Some Stanford Ghost Stories."
Dissertation by Maria Cichosz
Stanford University Libraries, 2020
This project tells a history of allegory from late modernism into the present. It presents case s... more This project tells a history of allegory from late modernism into the present. It presents case studies of four sites of allegorical thought and practice in late twentieth-century American cultural production, with a focus on post-WWII art, theory, literature, and material culture: Aldous Huxley’s psychedelic writings in dialogue with the work of Color Field painter Morris Louis and his critics; the relationship between materiality and hermeneutics in Ken Kesey’s communal art project, Furthur; the literary theory of Paul de Man, where allegory becomes conflated with irony; and allegorical structure and performativity in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. Understanding allegory as a structure of thought—a transmedial structure based on an urge for meaning-making inherent in the human mind that is modified and adapted in response to evolving historical contexts, circumstances, and pressures—it examines these sites of allegorical transformation to ask how allegory was mobilized, theorized, or used by historical actors working within the limits of their contextual conditions of possibility. In doing so, it asks how recent changes in allegorical form, structure, and function come to shape the mode’s contemporary appearance, arguing that allegory’s structure undergoes a progressive flattening of levels as its aesthetic transcendence is reimagined as aesthetic immanence.
Fiction by Maria Cichosz
Now or Never Publishing (NON), 2020
First chapter of my novel, Cam & Beau, available October 15, 2020. Check out www.camandbeau.ca f... more First chapter of my novel, Cam & Beau, available October 15, 2020.
Check out www.camandbeau.ca for more information.
Book Reviews by Maria Cichosz
Social History of Alcohol and Drugs, 2023
Review of Ido Hartogsohn's American Trip: Set, Setting, and the Psychedelic Experience in the Twe... more Review of Ido Hartogsohn's American Trip: Set, Setting, and the Psychedelic Experience in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020)
The Social History of Alcohol and Drugs, 2020
A review of Christopher Partridge, High Culture: Drugs, Mysticism, and the Pursuit of Transcenden... more A review of Christopher Partridge, High Culture: Drugs, Mysticism, and the Pursuit of Transcendence in the Modern World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.
Exhibition Catalog Essays by Maria Cichosz
A short piece on Felicita Norris' art for Stanford Art Gallery MFA exhibition and catalogue, "We’... more A short piece on Felicita Norris' art for Stanford Art Gallery MFA exhibition and catalogue, "We’re Not in the Business of Warehousing Paper," on view from May 12 through June 14, 2015.
A short piece about Ashley Valmere Fischer's work in catalogue for "my only heroes are phenomena,... more A short piece about Ashley Valmere Fischer's work in catalogue for "my only heroes are phenomena," a Stanford Art Gallery exhibition (May 17-June 12, 2016).
Thesis Chapters by Maria Cichosz
Thesis written to satisfy the requirements for the Master of Arts degree at the Women and Gender ... more Thesis written to satisfy the requirements for the Master of Arts degree at the Women and Gender Studies Institute, University of Toronto (2012).
This piece uses "tripping," broadly conceived, as a conceptual metaphor for methodology and research processes within the humanities and social sciences. It uses drug theory and theories of qualitative methods to read Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas as an allegory of methodological questions and processes. As such, it is also an original product of applied narrative methods, and an argument for the use of creative writing approaches in the humanities.
Lectures, Talks, Conferences by Maria Cichosz
Conference paper on material history of Ken Kesey's original psychedelic school bus, Furthur, giv... more Conference paper on material history of Ken Kesey's original psychedelic school bus, Furthur, given as part of the "Expanded Mediums and the Summer of Love: Objects, Performance, and Film" panel at the 50th Anniversary Summer of Love Conference (California Historical Society and Northwestern University, San Francisco, July 29, 2017).
What happened to Furthur? After a final trip to the Woodstock festival in 1969, the Merry Pranksters’ famous psychedelic school bus was abandoned in the swampy woods of Ken Kesey’s Oregon family farm, overtaken by growth and left to decay. The interior rotted, the frame rusted, and the once-beautiful exterior art flaked away. Like the counterculture and community it symbolized, the vehicle fell into disrepair. Now relocated to a covered garage, the bus is the subject of a restoration campaign aiming to put it back on the road as a travelling museum to educate and inspire future generations about its previous life and context.
The Pranksters understood ordinary material phenomena as manifestations of a higher, unified cosmic reality, and Furthur was no exception. At the center of their group’s action, the bus was a symbol of a complex matrix of social shifts, a West Coast brand of American freedom, radical communal living, and a fledgling drug culture. In its transformation from a mobile object that fused art and life, to a stationary ruin, to a historical restoration project, Furthur’s life cycle raises questions about the embeddedness of symbolic meaning in material artifacts, community memorialization, and tensions between historical value and art value. Using theories of allegory and material culture, my paper explores how a colorful bus became a vehicle for community building and a repository for a counterculture’s deferred dreams. In the retrieval of a rusting bus from a swamp, what else is salvaged? What is lost?
The tail end of the 1960s saw the closing of two major sites of utopian potential and imagining: ... more The tail end of the 1960s saw the closing of two major sites of utopian potential and imagining: the waning of enthusiasm about deep-sea exploration and the disillusionment of radical social movements with the emerging conservatism of the 1970s. These two sites come together in Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice, where a drug-addled and waning counterculture finds its hopes and disillusionments bound up in the myth of a sunken continent in the Pacific Ocean. Reading this continent, Lemuria, as a heterotopia, and applying an archetypal, psychological, and spatial reading to a novel normally read as an exemplar of postmodern aesthetics and paranoid epistemologies allows for a rethinking of postmodern allegory as not necessarily disruptive of a historical continuum, but as confused, melancholy, and fundamentally lost.
There is enormous power and ethical potential in the seemingly simple act of paying attention and... more There is enormous power and ethical potential in the seemingly simple act of paying attention and choosing what one pays attention to. Taking this power seriously, I explore the ethical value attunement, or the state of paying attention, holds in relation to affect and its circulation. Because the affective texture of the everyday is not always directly accessible to experience, the ethical potential of becoming attuned to this texture can be more effectively examined through a conceptual framework of a radically altered, affectively-mediated state of consciousness: the trip. Conceptualizing tripping allegorically, as meaning something other and more than what is literally said, I use this mode of experience as a framework to think through the question of what ethical potential lies in practices of affective attentiveness. Exploring the connections between affect, attention, and tripping, I bring these concepts together in a close reading of excerpts from David Foster Wallace's The Pale King and This is Water. Engaging with the work of a writer who has always seen attention as an ethical imperative, I show that an indefinite, shifting understanding of affect can have concrete ethical applications in day to day life.
Allegory Studies: Contemporary Perspectives, 2021
This chapter imagines the events of a single May morning in 1953 to trace how allegory was concep... more This chapter imagines the events of a single May morning in 1953 to trace how allegory was conceptualized in late modernist thought. Focusing on Aldous Huxley, British expatriate writer turned early mescaline aficionado, and Morris Louis, canonized American Color Field painter, it examines the work of two paradigmatic high modernists to show how modernism’s attempt to preserve its declining ideals affected the form and function of allegory in the mid-twentieth century. Conceptualizing allegory as a structure of thought, a set of historically contingent formal relations that organize collective ideas about vision, meaning, and the viability of metaphysics, I use an approach that is simultaneously formal, archetypal, and historical to situate allegory in a moment of intense structural transformation. Placing Louis’ painting in dialogue with Huxley’s contemporaneous psychedelic explorations, I use juxtaposition to clarify the nature of their respective aesthetic projects and demonstrate their shared affinity for a specific mode of transporting vision. In doing so, I argue that late modernism enlisted allegorical logic to reimagine transcendence as aesthetic immanence, thereby securing the possibility of ideal experience within a secular space. This reimagining involved flattening the levels of the archetypal allegorical Veil into a single immanent plane to create a mode of visionary experience induced through material means, an understanding of transcendence as immanence shared by modernist aesthetics and early psychedelic thought. Spanning the American east and west coasts, Hollywood and Washington, and the literary and visual arts to their point of ideological convergence, this chapter describes a major historical transformation in allegorical form, reading the concerns of late modernist aesthetics as a story about where it is possible to go in a shrunken world, and how it is possible to get there.
Essay about Jane Stanford's struggle with faith for Cantor Arts Center's book "Faults and Traces:... more Essay about Jane Stanford's struggle with faith for Cantor Arts Center's book "Faults and Traces: Some Stanford Ghost Stories."
Stanford University Libraries, 2020
This project tells a history of allegory from late modernism into the present. It presents case s... more This project tells a history of allegory from late modernism into the present. It presents case studies of four sites of allegorical thought and practice in late twentieth-century American cultural production, with a focus on post-WWII art, theory, literature, and material culture: Aldous Huxley’s psychedelic writings in dialogue with the work of Color Field painter Morris Louis and his critics; the relationship between materiality and hermeneutics in Ken Kesey’s communal art project, Furthur; the literary theory of Paul de Man, where allegory becomes conflated with irony; and allegorical structure and performativity in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. Understanding allegory as a structure of thought—a transmedial structure based on an urge for meaning-making inherent in the human mind that is modified and adapted in response to evolving historical contexts, circumstances, and pressures—it examines these sites of allegorical transformation to ask how allegory was mobilized, theorized, or used by historical actors working within the limits of their contextual conditions of possibility. In doing so, it asks how recent changes in allegorical form, structure, and function come to shape the mode’s contemporary appearance, arguing that allegory’s structure undergoes a progressive flattening of levels as its aesthetic transcendence is reimagined as aesthetic immanence.
Now or Never Publishing (NON), 2020
First chapter of my novel, Cam & Beau, available October 15, 2020. Check out www.camandbeau.ca f... more First chapter of my novel, Cam & Beau, available October 15, 2020.
Check out www.camandbeau.ca for more information.
Social History of Alcohol and Drugs, 2023
Review of Ido Hartogsohn's American Trip: Set, Setting, and the Psychedelic Experience in the Twe... more Review of Ido Hartogsohn's American Trip: Set, Setting, and the Psychedelic Experience in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020)
The Social History of Alcohol and Drugs, 2020
A review of Christopher Partridge, High Culture: Drugs, Mysticism, and the Pursuit of Transcenden... more A review of Christopher Partridge, High Culture: Drugs, Mysticism, and the Pursuit of Transcendence in the Modern World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.
A short piece on Felicita Norris' art for Stanford Art Gallery MFA exhibition and catalogue, "We’... more A short piece on Felicita Norris' art for Stanford Art Gallery MFA exhibition and catalogue, "We’re Not in the Business of Warehousing Paper," on view from May 12 through June 14, 2015.
A short piece about Ashley Valmere Fischer's work in catalogue for "my only heroes are phenomena,... more A short piece about Ashley Valmere Fischer's work in catalogue for "my only heroes are phenomena," a Stanford Art Gallery exhibition (May 17-June 12, 2016).
Thesis written to satisfy the requirements for the Master of Arts degree at the Women and Gender ... more Thesis written to satisfy the requirements for the Master of Arts degree at the Women and Gender Studies Institute, University of Toronto (2012).
This piece uses "tripping," broadly conceived, as a conceptual metaphor for methodology and research processes within the humanities and social sciences. It uses drug theory and theories of qualitative methods to read Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas as an allegory of methodological questions and processes. As such, it is also an original product of applied narrative methods, and an argument for the use of creative writing approaches in the humanities.
Conference paper on material history of Ken Kesey's original psychedelic school bus, Furthur, giv... more Conference paper on material history of Ken Kesey's original psychedelic school bus, Furthur, given as part of the "Expanded Mediums and the Summer of Love: Objects, Performance, and Film" panel at the 50th Anniversary Summer of Love Conference (California Historical Society and Northwestern University, San Francisco, July 29, 2017).
What happened to Furthur? After a final trip to the Woodstock festival in 1969, the Merry Pranksters’ famous psychedelic school bus was abandoned in the swampy woods of Ken Kesey’s Oregon family farm, overtaken by growth and left to decay. The interior rotted, the frame rusted, and the once-beautiful exterior art flaked away. Like the counterculture and community it symbolized, the vehicle fell into disrepair. Now relocated to a covered garage, the bus is the subject of a restoration campaign aiming to put it back on the road as a travelling museum to educate and inspire future generations about its previous life and context.
The Pranksters understood ordinary material phenomena as manifestations of a higher, unified cosmic reality, and Furthur was no exception. At the center of their group’s action, the bus was a symbol of a complex matrix of social shifts, a West Coast brand of American freedom, radical communal living, and a fledgling drug culture. In its transformation from a mobile object that fused art and life, to a stationary ruin, to a historical restoration project, Furthur’s life cycle raises questions about the embeddedness of symbolic meaning in material artifacts, community memorialization, and tensions between historical value and art value. Using theories of allegory and material culture, my paper explores how a colorful bus became a vehicle for community building and a repository for a counterculture’s deferred dreams. In the retrieval of a rusting bus from a swamp, what else is salvaged? What is lost?