The Significance of The Palimpsest in Contemporary Literary and Cultural Studies (original) (raw)
Related papers
(Another)Introduction To Palimpsest
2017
Story of palimpsests and their emergence as a both type of materiality and metaphor is one developed through reading of scattered, and sometimes un-relatable timelines and histories. This research aims to set up an understanding of the palimpsest as a construct that allows us to deal with sexual and erotic art practice, and provides us with an important and necessary enquiry into emerging methods and methodologies in artistic research. In this book I will establish a way of understanding the palimpsest not as a layered type of phenomena, but instead as a concept, which deals with the intimacy established through and in artistic practices and research. To do this, I will analyse the contextual writings of literary scholar Sarah Dillon, who in 2014 first attempted on creating a ‘working’ field of studies into the meaning of the concept of the palimpsests and through it develop a critical enquiry into my artistic practices that engages with this concept. Through that I aim to provide clarity in the conceptual move into palimpsestuousness as an artistic synthesis of matter and meaning, which is established in the intimacy of sexual, erotic art practices that this thesis provides.
2017
Contemporary theories and art practices that embrace the metaphor of a palimpsest find their grounding in the layered form that this concept speaks of. As such, they represent matter and meaning as a collection and assemblage of individually formed structures that can create a work of art via a constant move of superimposition. This practice-led research argues for a way of creating a palimpsest as a form of spatial and temporal (dimensional) enactment. This discussion is developed and embodied throughout drawing parallels between the formalisation of the palimpsest, as presented by Sarah Dillon in The Palimpsest: Literature, Criticism, Theory (2007), in which she develops a strategy for rethinking history, subjectivity, temporality, textuality and sexuality, and an analysis of conceptual bodies established in the philosophical works of Michel Foucault. I aim to adapt Dillon’s argument to develop a model of palimpsestuousness, an original and wearable synthesis of matter and meaning, that allows for the creating and understanding of palimpsestuousness as something beyond a layered structure. This process aims to show that through a focus on the intensity of intimacy that emerges from multiple encounters, notions of ars erotica, subjugated knowledges, parrhesia and heterotopia become embodied forms of queer art practice, which can challenge and expand on contemporary methodologies in fine art practice-led research. The aims are specifically explored in my performance, video and photographic practices and at the same time they influenced form and materiality of this thesis submission itself by deregulating, and with it challenging, the notions of presupposed causality and linearity when creating and sustaining discursive, critical argument. The series Fatima focuses on the performative understanding of palimpsestuousness as a non-layered dimensionality. Through the series of short films entitled Heterotopias I develop a vital multi-voiceness that speaks of its domestic-like quality. By referencing the body of work of artistic duo Lovett/Codagnone and literary texts of Jean Genet, I demonstrate the necessity of including sexual and erotic art in experimenting with plural and non-layered methods of producing matter and meaning that refuse hierarchy.
Theorizing Palimpsests: Unfolding Pasts into the Present
History of the Present, 2021
How do we connect the past with the present to address structural problems? While the pursuit of a cause-and-effect past flowing into the present contributes to the understanding of an event or object, how that past is recalled, represented, related, disconnected, suppressed, and/or obfuscated in any given present matters. This article proposes palimpsests as a critical tool for analyzing the many histories of the present. To illustrate this theoretical practice, the article offers a palimpsestic reading of a museumized object, the Nubian Temple of Dendur, now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. The structural nature of a history of the present comes into view only when one is able to discern multiple histories, presents, categories, and objects layered together within the palimpsest of history.
The Textual Ecology of the Palimpsest: Environmental Entanglement of Present and Past
Utilizing the metaphor of the palimpsest, this paper looks at layering processes at work in the natural world and human perceptions of it, paying particular attention to the manifestations of the past visible in constructions in and of the landscape. History is made of constant reformations, in which pieces of the past make up the present. The palimpsest offers a useful tool for discussing a trans-temporal landscape. The layers of landscape construction go beyond the literal geological construction, encompassing human pasts and presents as well. Engaging the palimpsestuous layers at work in physical and textual landscape construction allows us to place human endeavours into more expansive notions of temporality.
Miscelanea a Journal of English and American Studies, 2002
Words once spoke can never be recall'd" declared Wentworth Dillon in his classical Art of Poetry (1680), little thinking that his statement along with many other canonical truisms would be challenged and overturned by postmodernist fiction. To simultaneously say and unsay, tell and untell, assert and negate, propose and retract is precisely the type of paradoxical privilege contemporary literature likes to claim for itself. The consequence of these self-contradictory practices, which is manifestly also its purpose, is a lack of committment, of selection, of assertiveness, foremost on the narrative level but also and crucially in the aesthetic and ideological fields. It is my contention that if postmodernism has given rise to such polemical definitions and analyses and if it continues to be such a complex cultural phenomenon to grasp, it is in particular because of its paradigmatic association of contradictory statements, modalities, and literary traditions. The logic of self-contradiction stems from what one might call, to transpose Lyotard's renowned phrase, an incredulity towards all meta-ideologies, or in other words a fundamental political weariness and wariness. Defined as a song and by extension a text which retracts, negates or contradicts that which has previously been stated, the palinode is, according to Antoine Compagnon (1990: 151), what characterizes postmodernism and its retraction of modernist purity, balance and messianism. Rather than choose one guiding line, contemporary art explores one type of tradition, style or dogma before questioning
BEYOND ONE AND TWO: THE PALIMPSEST AS HIEROGLYPH OF MULTIPLICITY AND RELATION
BEYOND ONE AND TWO: THE PALIMPSEST S HIEROGLYPH OF MULTIPLICITY AND RELATION, 2003
This paper contributes to redress the imbalance in male modernist critical control over H(Ilda) D(Doolittle) poetry. Especially Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot pushed her aside the movement. Eight international women scholars have contributed to the volume "H.D.'s Poetry, the meanings that words hide", edited by Marina Camboni, examining the textual, linguistic , rhetorical, thematic, multimedia cores of H.D.'s poetry, thus uncovering a major female poet's voice, the world in which she sang, and her protofeminist vision.
Removed and Rewritten: Palimpsests and Related Phenomena from a Cross-Cultural Perspective
2021
Palimpsest manuscripts are particularly interesting textual witnesses: frequently, they transmit texts or text forms that are no longer directly attested. So it is in the case of the Greek Psalter. The most important witnesses to the Hexapla of Origen are the Mercati Psalter (Ra 1098), which is a Catena manuscript that provides excerpts from the Hexapla in its original columnar layout, and the Taylor-Schechter fragment of the Hexapla (Ra 2005) from the seventh century AD. One of the earliest witnesses to the Lucianic recension is Codex Zuqninensis rescriptus (Ra Z) from the sixth century AD. Another quite interesting example is the so-called “Pantocrator Psalter” (Ra 1032): this manuscript was modernised by washing off the old Psalter text in majuscule script (9th century) and replacing it with a new Psalter text in minuscule script (13th century), in which the Odes were not modernised. For the “Editio critica maior des griechischen Psalters”, a long-term project of the Göttingen Ac...
Reconfiguring Bodies, Maps, and Geography in Catherynne M. Valente’s Palimpsest
Criticism and Theory , 2017
This article analyzes Catherynne M. Valente’s fantasy novel Palimpsest as a literary example of the rhizomatic mapping conceptualized by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus. While fantasy literature has been long criticized for being formulaic and conformist, the quality which extends to and often is reinforced by its use of maps, there have been works that subvert and challenge the hegemonic perceptions of the world. Many of them, including Palimpsest, utilizes the radically imagined fictional world and characters that are prerogative of the genre. Utilizing Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of the map and the becoming and Elizabeth Grosz’s theory of body-city, this article examines how Valente uses cartographical and geographical imaginations to envision an alternative relationship between the body and space. It argues that, by subversive reimagining of the map and the landscape, Valente creates an imaginary world where the boundaries between the self and the other and between the body and the environment are blurred and thereby challenges the conventions of the hegemonic geographic imagination as well as those of fantasy literature.
Palimpsest as analysis in "Aby Warburg and Art of the Pueblo Indians"
by Mariana Wadsworth (Ph.D. student) Abstract: this essay will investigate the structure of Warburg’s text titled Images from the Pueblo Indians of North America, based on a conference he gave in 1923 in the LudwigBinswagner’s Kreuzlingen sanatorium. The aim is to highlight a recurrent motif of modernity that is present in Warburg: the palimpsest as a way of understanding history and art. Freud’s Mystic Writing Block (1925) will aid in explaining the palimpsest as an interpretational device. The proposal is that Warburg’s way of seeing history and art is affected or tinted by that of the Pueblo Indians and that his study of the primitive and pagan, like Freud’s, is not an attempt to reduce non-western art and culture to less-developed rationality. But, on the contrary, it shows a fundamental connection between the “primitive” and Western mind: the symbol as a language of images. As a system of layers, these ideas sit on top of Haeckel’s biogenetic law, which sees the individual evolution of humans as a mirror image of the history of the evolution of the human species as a whole. Like the palimpsest, the biogenetic law works only as a tool for analysis of questions surrounding the nature of different conceptions of epistemology, history, and art when faced with the anthropological problem of studying one culture from the “outside.”