Modern Art and Desublimation (original) (raw)
Related papers
Venice: Objective Correlative of Aschanbach's Repressed Self in Thomas Mann's Death in Venice
IJCIRAS, 2018
Published in 1913, Death in Venice marks the end of the earliest phase of Mann's career and the beginning of a transitional phase in which the author wrote only non-fiction works for several years. Death in Venice is considered among the finest novellas in world literature. The work skillfully combines the psychological realism and mythological symbolism to create a multi-dimensional story that explores the moral transformation undergone by the artist in quest of perfect beauty. This classic situation is depicted in the decline and ultimate collapse of Mann's artist-hero Gustav von Aschenbach, a renowned German author who, after years of living a morally and artistically ascetic life, surrenders to the sensual side of his nature during a sojourn in Venice. There the sultry Venetian setting incites Aschenbach's homoerotic passion for Tadzio, a beautiful god-like youth. As Aschenbach succumbs to long-repressed spiritual and physical desires, he loses control of his will, and his resulting degradation leads to his death. Aschenbach's craving for release is first expressed in a vision of the East, the tropical marshland, the jungle. Unwilling however to undertake so long and difficult a journey, he happily recognizes the natural goal he should choose. When one wanted to arrive over night at the incomparable, the fabulous, the like nothing else in the world, where was it one went? Venice is the outpost of the East, half Byzantium, half Bruges, flower of the Italian Renaissance and yet in contact with Asia; it is a city of mystical longing and romantic expansiveness-the natural complement to Florence, which is purely rational and western. A strange combination of sea and land, built on tepid, miasmic swamps, it is another symbol of the conflicting passions in Aschenbach's own soul. Therefore, this paper attempts to project, in Mann's novella, Venice, being the "objective correlative" of Aschenbach's repressed, becomes a place which gives Aschenbach glimpses of extreme beauty that the artist's mind was craving for, and exacts a heavy price for that glimpse.
Gramma: Journal of Theory and Criticism, 2017
Under the polished surface of national and cultural symbiosis, Europe has perennially emerged as a locus of political, social, and ideological implosion. Heiner Müller's words could not have described it more accurately: " When we speak of peace in Europe we speak of peace in war " (Germania 1990). Prompted by the-disconcerting to many-2012 Nobel Peace Prize awarded to the European Union for " [helping] to transform most of Europe from a continent of war to a continent of peace, " this paper traces in the spiral workings of history an ailment that devours the body –in all its political allegory and thickness of flesh-from within. It is the cancer-stricken organism whose destabilized mechanisms have mindlessly ordered a cannibalistic schizophrenia – once experienced as self-destructive fascism, as a crippling schism between West and East, and lately, as a self-consuming recession in the South threatening the North with aggressive metastases. Heiner Müller's and Christoph Schlingensief's theatrical visions provide rich ground for such a debate: both of them were German, artistically and ideologically transgressive, and afflicted by cancer. Exploring the symbolic, the personal, and the political in their art, but in unbending denial of any set of edifying or therapeutic conceptions of closure whatsoever, this paper registers the artists' avowal of " digging up the dead and showing them in the open " (Müller), as well as " [generating] visibility " (Schlingensief).