Search

This essay begins by examining the rhetorical significance of the guillotine, an important symbol during the Romantic Period. Lacefield argues that the guillotine symbolized a range of modern ontological juxtapositions and antinomies during the period. Moreover, she argues that the guillotine influenced Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein through Giovanni Aldini, a scientist who experimented on guillotined corpses during the French Revolution and inspired Shelley's characterization of Victor Frankenstein. Given the importance of the guillotine as a powerful metaphor for anxieties emergent during this period, Lacefield employs it as a clue signaling a labyrinth of modern meanings embedded in Shelley's novel, as well as the films they anticipated. In particular, Lacefield analyzes the significance of the guillotine slice itself-the uneasy, indeterminate line that simultaneously separates and joins categories such as life/death, mind/body, spirit/matter, and nature/technology. Lacefield's interdisciplinary analysis analyzes motifs of decapitation/ dismemberment in Frankenstein and then moves into a discussion of the novel's exploration of the ontological categories specified above. For example, Frankenstein's Creature, as a kind of cyborg, exists on the contested theoretical "slice" within a number of antinomies: nature/tech, human/ inhuman (alive/dead), matter/spirit, etc. These are interesting juxtapositions that point to tensions within each set of categories, and Lacefield discusses the relevance of such dichotomies for questions of modernity posed by materialist theory and technological innovation. Additionally, she incorporates a discussion of films that fuse Shelley's themes with appeals to twentieth-century and post-millennium audiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Trans/Form/Ação is the property of Trans/Form/Acao and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This essay focuses on fault lines and contradictions in author Theodor W. Adorno's theory and practice of immanent critique. Immanent criticism pursues the logic of its aporias, the insolubility of the task itself. In such antinomies criticism perceives those of society. A successful work, according to immanent criticism, is not one which resolves objective contradictions in a spurious harmony, but one which expresses the harmony negatively by embodying the contradictions. Confronted with this kind of work, the verdict mere ideology loses its meaning.

Discusses the works of the 20th-century writer Erich Auerbach. Absence of footnotes in "Mimesis"; Engagement with certain antinomies; Formal opposition of high to low style; Gradual shedding of a transcendentalist ontology, as realism comes of age.

The article presents information on the antinomies of the book "Nineteen Eighty-Four." On the one hand, there is the loose-jointed, empiricist, Wellsian naturalism. This is the aspect of "Nineteen Eighty-Four" that deals in great particularity of detail with objects and relations of the "real" world and that recalls the author of "A Clergyman's Daughter" and the early work generally. On the other hand, there is the totally controlled, programmatic, Swiftian satire, where complete coherence is achieved through an intricate and thoroughly fantastic two-dimensionality. It is the dialectic of genres that determines the book's overall quality. "Nineteen Eighty-Four" partakes of both the empiricist solidity of "A Clergyman's Daughter" and the total coherence and significance of "Animal Farm" by a constant and, as it were, illicit traffic between naturalism and satire.