If art is our bid to make sense of the senseless, there is hardly more fertile creative ground th... more If art is our bid to make sense of the senseless, there is hardly more fertile creative ground than that of the twentieth century. From the trench poetry of World War I and Holocaust memoirs by Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel to the post-colonial novels of southern Asia and the anti-apartheid plays of the South African Market Theater, writers have married beauty and horror. This ""century of trauma"" produced writing at once saturated in political violence and complicated by the ethics of aesthetic representation. Stretching across genres and the globe, Terrible Beauty charts a course of aesthetic reconciliation between empathy and evil in the great literature of the twentieth century. The ""violent aesthetic""-a category the author traces back to Plato and Nietzsche-accommodates the pleasure people take not only in destruction itself but also in its rendering. As readers, we oscillate between a fascination with atrocity and an ethical imperative to bear witness. Arguing for the immersive experience of literature as particularly conducive to ethical contemplation, Marian Eide plumbs the aesthetic power and ethical purpose of this creative tension. By invoking the reader as complicit-both stricken witness and enthralled voyeur- Terrible Beauty sheds new light on the relationship between violence, literature, and the moral burdens of art.
... contexts through which an utterance becomes an actuality.2 While forgiveness has been a susta... more ... contexts through which an utterance becomes an actuality.2 While forgiveness has been a sustained concern in political, psycho-logical ... is the proper site for considering forgiveness because it is an imaginal sphere for creating the grounds on which forgiveness can take ...
In spring 1916 as Dublin suffered the British empire’s stern reprisals for an insurgent movement ... more In spring 1916 as Dublin suffered the British empire’s stern reprisals for an insurgent movement she had helped to lead, Countess Constance Markievicz waited with uncharacteristic passivity in her Kilmainham Gaol cell. The Easter Rising had failed, and with Patrick Pearse, James Connolly, Michael Mallin, and other republican leaders, she had surrendered to the British authorities. Her sister Eva Gore-Booth traveled to Ireland from England and brought Markievicz news of Dublin’s plight as well as of the fates of her comrades. By the end of the spring Markievicz had listened to gunshots that signaled the deaths of insurgent leaders; her own sentence was commuted to life in prison “for the sole reason of her gender.” In visits and letters the devotion expressed between the sisters reflected their core beliefs in the causes of Irish independence, labor rights, and women’s equality. Their views about the means of pursuing the first, however, sharply diverged. A skilled sharpshooter, Markievicz became a military leader in the rebellion, whereas GoreBooth, a committed pacifist throughout her life, believed the Rising and its aftermath a “great tragedy” (Arrington 151). The substance of their 1916 conversation about the means to Irish independence appears allegorically through verse and illustration in their collaborative volume titled The Death of Fionavar from the Triumph of Maeve, published during the summer of 1916 while Markievicz was still in prison.2 Thus in the spring of that year, as the sisters were separated
Walking along the edge of the Irish Sea on Sandymount Strand, Stephen Dedalus reflects on the rel... more Walking along the edge of the Irish Sea on Sandymount Strand, Stephen Dedalus reflects on the relation between the water's movement and language: "These heavy sands are language tide and wind have silted here" (U 3.288-89). In "Proteus," Stephen envisions language as a heavy sediment whose surface is disturbed by the implacable and constantly changing in fluences of water and wind. While in this episode of Ulysses Joyce suggests that language is a solid though alterable element, in Finnegans Wake language appears on the page in a constant, liquid state of flux. Joyce's last book records the tracings of water on land, the interaction of ALP and HCE, in a protean language aptly repre sented by the babbling flow of the river Liffey's fluidities as they wash against the weighty sediments of two changeable shores. While Stephen envisages writing as sand itself, Finnegans Wake is pre sented as the writing of water on sand. If this prose is not fluent, in the usual sense of the term, it is turbulently fluid with the currents of varied languages and idioms. The fluidity of language in Finnegans Wake demands of its readers (and at the same time demonstrates the methods of) a fluidity of per ception, interpretation, and understanding. Fluidity is also Joyce's sign for the negotiation of difference between nations in the colonial situation, between siblings in a family, and between genders in a marriage. The necessary adoption of fluid perception trains Joyce's readers in an alternative mode of understanding opposition. As a complement to the fluid mechanics provided by the text, I offer a vi rological approach, arguing that the exchange of genetic material in a viral invasion illuminates Joyce's exploration of oppositional inter action in colonial invasion.
... and opportunities, were subject to the will of others (often backed up by violence and intimi... more ... and opportunities, were subject to the will of others (often backed up by violence and intimidation ... saints, in both life and death, were still restricted by their sex, and Caroline Walker Bynum ... bonds of com-radeship (most famously the Arthurian round table) and of vertical bonds of ...
Throughout her literary works, Jeanette Winterson describes sexual passion in the language and wi... more Throughout her literary works, Jeanette Winterson describes sexual passion in the language and with the understanding of a parallel and informing spiritual faith and compassion. Winterson's narratives of romantic love and sexual passion seek in a different form the experience of perfect union with another demonstrated in the ecstatic practices of charismatic Christianity. From her first book, Oranges Are Not
If women are not yet accorded the full rights of citizenship internationally and especially in th... more If women are not yet accorded the full rights of citizenship internationally and especially in the military context, a feminist position on just war may have to be provisional. Drawing on Virginia Woolf's argument referenced in the title, Eide suggests in this essay that feminist theory develop its principles from women's exclusion from national privileges and argues that jus post bellum or justice after war be central to feminist theories of just war.
... MARIAN EIDE ... led some contemporary readers to label him an estheticist (placing art above ... more ... MARIAN EIDE ... led some contemporary readers to label him an estheticist (placing art above the quo-tidian concerns of politics or morality), Joyce actually dramatizes both the nationalist and the estheticist points of view in his draft version of the novel, Stephen Hero, and in ...
If art is our bid to make sense of the senseless, there is hardly more fertile creative ground th... more If art is our bid to make sense of the senseless, there is hardly more fertile creative ground than that of the twentieth century. From the trench poetry of World War I and Holocaust memoirs by Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel to the post-colonial novels of southern Asia and the anti-apartheid plays of the South African Market Theater, writers have married beauty and horror. This ""century of trauma"" produced writing at once saturated in political violence and complicated by the ethics of aesthetic representation. Stretching across genres and the globe, Terrible Beauty charts a course of aesthetic reconciliation between empathy and evil in the great literature of the twentieth century. The ""violent aesthetic""-a category the author traces back to Plato and Nietzsche-accommodates the pleasure people take not only in destruction itself but also in its rendering. As readers, we oscillate between a fascination with atrocity and an ethical imperative to bear witness. Arguing for the immersive experience of literature as particularly conducive to ethical contemplation, Marian Eide plumbs the aesthetic power and ethical purpose of this creative tension. By invoking the reader as complicit-both stricken witness and enthralled voyeur- Terrible Beauty sheds new light on the relationship between violence, literature, and the moral burdens of art.
... contexts through which an utterance becomes an actuality.2 While forgiveness has been a susta... more ... contexts through which an utterance becomes an actuality.2 While forgiveness has been a sustained concern in political, psycho-logical ... is the proper site for considering forgiveness because it is an imaginal sphere for creating the grounds on which forgiveness can take ...
In spring 1916 as Dublin suffered the British empire’s stern reprisals for an insurgent movement ... more In spring 1916 as Dublin suffered the British empire’s stern reprisals for an insurgent movement she had helped to lead, Countess Constance Markievicz waited with uncharacteristic passivity in her Kilmainham Gaol cell. The Easter Rising had failed, and with Patrick Pearse, James Connolly, Michael Mallin, and other republican leaders, she had surrendered to the British authorities. Her sister Eva Gore-Booth traveled to Ireland from England and brought Markievicz news of Dublin’s plight as well as of the fates of her comrades. By the end of the spring Markievicz had listened to gunshots that signaled the deaths of insurgent leaders; her own sentence was commuted to life in prison “for the sole reason of her gender.” In visits and letters the devotion expressed between the sisters reflected their core beliefs in the causes of Irish independence, labor rights, and women’s equality. Their views about the means of pursuing the first, however, sharply diverged. A skilled sharpshooter, Markievicz became a military leader in the rebellion, whereas GoreBooth, a committed pacifist throughout her life, believed the Rising and its aftermath a “great tragedy” (Arrington 151). The substance of their 1916 conversation about the means to Irish independence appears allegorically through verse and illustration in their collaborative volume titled The Death of Fionavar from the Triumph of Maeve, published during the summer of 1916 while Markievicz was still in prison.2 Thus in the spring of that year, as the sisters were separated
Walking along the edge of the Irish Sea on Sandymount Strand, Stephen Dedalus reflects on the rel... more Walking along the edge of the Irish Sea on Sandymount Strand, Stephen Dedalus reflects on the relation between the water's movement and language: "These heavy sands are language tide and wind have silted here" (U 3.288-89). In "Proteus," Stephen envisions language as a heavy sediment whose surface is disturbed by the implacable and constantly changing in fluences of water and wind. While in this episode of Ulysses Joyce suggests that language is a solid though alterable element, in Finnegans Wake language appears on the page in a constant, liquid state of flux. Joyce's last book records the tracings of water on land, the interaction of ALP and HCE, in a protean language aptly repre sented by the babbling flow of the river Liffey's fluidities as they wash against the weighty sediments of two changeable shores. While Stephen envisages writing as sand itself, Finnegans Wake is pre sented as the writing of water on sand. If this prose is not fluent, in the usual sense of the term, it is turbulently fluid with the currents of varied languages and idioms. The fluidity of language in Finnegans Wake demands of its readers (and at the same time demonstrates the methods of) a fluidity of per ception, interpretation, and understanding. Fluidity is also Joyce's sign for the negotiation of difference between nations in the colonial situation, between siblings in a family, and between genders in a marriage. The necessary adoption of fluid perception trains Joyce's readers in an alternative mode of understanding opposition. As a complement to the fluid mechanics provided by the text, I offer a vi rological approach, arguing that the exchange of genetic material in a viral invasion illuminates Joyce's exploration of oppositional inter action in colonial invasion.
... and opportunities, were subject to the will of others (often backed up by violence and intimi... more ... and opportunities, were subject to the will of others (often backed up by violence and intimidation ... saints, in both life and death, were still restricted by their sex, and Caroline Walker Bynum ... bonds of com-radeship (most famously the Arthurian round table) and of vertical bonds of ...
Throughout her literary works, Jeanette Winterson describes sexual passion in the language and wi... more Throughout her literary works, Jeanette Winterson describes sexual passion in the language and with the understanding of a parallel and informing spiritual faith and compassion. Winterson's narratives of romantic love and sexual passion seek in a different form the experience of perfect union with another demonstrated in the ecstatic practices of charismatic Christianity. From her first book, Oranges Are Not
If women are not yet accorded the full rights of citizenship internationally and especially in th... more If women are not yet accorded the full rights of citizenship internationally and especially in the military context, a feminist position on just war may have to be provisional. Drawing on Virginia Woolf's argument referenced in the title, Eide suggests in this essay that feminist theory develop its principles from women's exclusion from national privileges and argues that jus post bellum or justice after war be central to feminist theories of just war.
... MARIAN EIDE ... led some contemporary readers to label him an estheticist (placing art above ... more ... MARIAN EIDE ... led some contemporary readers to label him an estheticist (placing art above the quo-tidian concerns of politics or morality), Joyce actually dramatizes both the nationalist and the estheticist points of view in his draft version of the novel, Stephen Hero, and in ...
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