Search

Este trabajo elabora una configuración de la autora implícita de Fondo de armario (2019), de Patricia Esteban Erlés (Zaragoza, 1972), con base en sus columnas. En una primera instancia, se presentan las similitudes entre estas, los microrrelatos y otros géneros literarios. Dado que muchas son autobiográficas, se infieren aspectos de la vida de la autora y sus intereses tamizados por la memoria y la escritura autobiográfica. Los textos de denuncia muestran sus principales inquietudes y su empatía hacia los desprotegidos, entre ellos las mujeres, a quienes se dedica un buen número de artículos, por lo que se abordará la perspectiva feminista de los textos. Finalmente, la tendencia de la autora a destacar los aspectos crudos y gráficos de ciertos episodios remiten a su afición por los detalles macabros de las historias, los cuales, fuera del mundo ficcional, resultan más aterradores y cobran una nueva dimensión.

Nineteenth-century critics saw in Baudelaire, author of the poem «Une charogne», the heir to the macabre and mystifying inspiration of Petrus Borel, nicknamed “the lycanthrope”. This rapprochement, very frequent in the years 1860-1890, irritated Baudelaire, who had a deep sympathy for Borel while considering him as a counter-example. This context explains why the article that Baudelaire published on Borel in the “Revue fantaisiste” on July 15, 1861, has a strong polemical tinge.

Alexander McQueen (1969-2010) changed the fashion industry and history forever with his innovations and runaway shows that verged on performance art. His talent for tailoring matched the strong narrative and originality of his garments. Some of them were destined for commercial consumption and catered to the masses, but most of them were works of art grown from a vivid yet macabre imagination. He refused the common grounds of fashion to focus on themes usually ignored, such as fetishism, violence, death and mental disturbance. Therefore, he aimed to transcend the usual and reach for the sublime as he created a fantasy world out of his own tormented mind. His Romantic and Gothic inspired work mirrored the anxieties of our times, and raised fashion to an art form on its own, thus prompting a reflection on the affiliation between fashion, visual arts and literature., Alexander McQueen (1969-2010) a changé l’histoire et l’industrie de la haute-couture de façon irrémédiable par ses innovations ainsi que ses défilés qui touchaient à la performance artistique. Ses talents de couturier étaient égalés par la forte ligne narrative et l’originalité de ses créations. Certaines étaient destinées aux circuits commerciaux et répondaient aux demandes du marché, mais la plupart étaient de véritables œuvres d’art dérivées d’une imagination vive quoique macabre. McQueen refusait les lieux communs de la haute-couture et leur préférait des thèmes généralement ignorés tels que le fétichisme, la violence, la mort, ou encore les troubles mentaux. Ainsi, il espérait transcender l’ordinaire et atteindre le sublime en créant son propre univers, né de son esprit tourmenté. Son travail, inspiré par les courants artistiques romantique et gothique, reflétait les anxiétés de notre époque, et a élevé la mode au rang d’expression artistique, permettant une réflexion sur l’alliance entre la mode, les arts visuels et la littérature.

"The present paper analyzes the possible functions of medieval stove tile depictions consisting of violent scenes and images of devils and devilish monsters. The depictions on mold‑made stove tiles can be considered the first mass produced images before print and are thus valuable sources in the research of popular culture, especially in Central and Eastern Europe where print made a later appearance. The focus here is on macabre depictions of tiles (devilish monsters, scenes of deadly violence, demons, and afterlife torments). My hypothesis is that though ‘lighter’ than macabre scenes in other arts, such images on stove tiles might have played an apotropaic function, meant to repel or distract maleficent spirits that could cause people harm through stove malfunctions. Still, one cannot exclude the moralizing, instructive, and purely entertaining functions of such depictions."

The subject of the study is the topos of dance. The article identifies the factors of its actualization in the literature of the late 19th — early 20th centuries; considers the origins of its reading through the prism of Eros and Thanatos; analyses works with “dance” imagery, and clarifies its role in the texts poetics. These tasks aim to outline the author’s models that utilize “Dance of the Seven Veils” and “The Danse Macabre”. Comparative, mythological-archetypal, historical-cultural research methods have been applied to study the specifics of dance interpretation in the aesthetic coordinates of modernism. The interest in these aspects of the archetypal topos existence and the need to define the author’s representations as variants of the national determine the relevance of the study. Results of the Study. The reminiscences of Salome’s dance and the Dance of Death are due to the perception of the era as a “plague age”; aesthetic understanding of dance as a personification of the phenomenon of death; interest in the body as a socio-cultural concept and its sensory cognition; a revival of the art of dance; interest in the theme of the East; popularity of erotic motives and the character “woman-child”; the relevance of archetypal codes for the triad “life — death — art”. Charles Baudelaire’s poetry is analyzed as the origins of the modernist interpretation of dance at the intersection of Thanatos and Eros. His dance imagery is characterized by its ironic understanding through the prism of existential categories and interpretation in the context of eschatological and aesthetic issues. The development of the Baudelaire tradition is reflected in the examples of the “new drama”: Lesya Ukrainka reminiscences Salome’s dance as an embodiment of bodily freedom (The Forest Song) and dance as a sign of humility and choice of “death” of the spirit (The Orgy). In Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House the tarantella is both an image of a festive atmosphere and a sign of falsified values of the characters. The dance heralds the catastrophe of Nora’s “puppet” house and at the same time opens up prospects for finding one’s self. The Danse Macabre for Mykhailo Kotsyubynsky (Ivan’s dance with Chuhaister in Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors) and Thomas Mann (dance seen in Aschenbach’s bizarre dream in Death in Venice) is connected with the infernal. It symbolizes the heroes’ awareness of the new “reality” and the transition to another level of worldview; concentrates on thanatological and erotic and defines the complex relationship of mind and body as issues of works. For both characters, the dance is a warning of imminent physical death. But for Aschenbach, it is also the last act of dying as an artist, a symbol of his soul’s death. In contrast, for Ivan, it is a duel-dance to protect his beloved, reunion with whom gains his integrity.

This article discusses the rubrics introducing the characters in the incunables of the middle French Danse Macabre. These rubrics are not a part of the original text, but of a paratext added later during the transmission of the originally hybrid work of art, which was based on the fusion of text and image. This study shows that the distribution of the variants in the rubrics is strictly related to the particularities of the dissemination of the Danse Macabre. The rubrics in the printed tradition are compared to those in the extant manuscripts transmitting the same text; text-image relations are also taken into account. In particular, the study of the rubrics allows to see that the influence of the iconographic elements on the text changes significantly with the passage of the Danse Macabre from manuscript to print.

There has been a reignition of interest in the use of visual art in legal scholarship. 1 Likewise, there has been a reassessment of the intersections between law and time, that seeks to consider th...

Neurotoxicologist Deborah Cory-Slechta had a somewhat macabre introduction to her current area of research. In 2012, a colleague at the University of Rochester kept pestering her, “You have to look...

espanolEn este articulo se analiza la novela Noli me tangere de Jose Rizal en el contexto de la liberacion de Filipinas del imperio espanol. Tal como Nikolai Gogol no solo describe realisticamente en Almas muertas los sufrimientos de Rusia, sobre todo de los campesinos, y una de sus causas, la falta de educacion de las clases altas o medias, sino que tambien se burla de ello, al igual que la “novela tagala”, de Rizal, la cual comparte la misma tradicion grotesca, suma la irrision a la descripcion realista de la opresion del pueblo filipino. A la luz de la historia de la literatura mundial, como la presentan Mikhail Bakhtin, Iuri Mann y Franca Beltrame, y con la ayuda de la critica de E. San Juan, Jr., se muestra que ese realismo va mas alla del aspecto politicosocial. Para los autores, el aspecto macabro es importante, es decir, la transgresion desvergonzada, absurda y ridicula del ambito de los muertos por parte de los vivos. EnglishIn this study we analyze Noli me tangere by Jose Rizal, in the context of the Filipino liberation movement. Just like Nikolai Gogol’s poem Dead Souls not only describes realistically the sufferings of Russia, and most of all, of the serf farmers, and one of its main reasons, the lack of education in the middle and higher classes, but also makes fun of it, likewise, Rizal’s “novela tagala”, which belongs to the same artistic tradition of the grotesque, combines the realistic description of the Filipino people’s suffering with ridicule. With the help of the history of world literature, as presented by Mikhail Bakhtin, Yuri Mann and Franca Beltrame, and in the light of E. San Juan, Jr.’s critical method we show that realism in both writers’ works goes beyond political and social aspects and is strongly imbued with the macabre aspect, i.e. the shameless, absurd and ridiculous transgression of the realm of the dead by the living.

The object of this research is the theatricalizes “Danse Macabre” in the Catalonian city Verges is the only extant in La Bisbal province testimony of the popular in Medieval Western Europe traditions of Macabre. “Danse Macabre” in Verges takes place on a Maundy Thursday: five actors-skeletons with the symbolic inventory in their hands – scythe, colors, urns with ash and hourglass – move to the sounds of drums and remind spectators on the brevity of life and implacable approach of death. The presence of Macabre images in the Medieval art and literature is substantiated by crisis mentality caused by the Black Death and military conflicts. The conclusions on the archetypical features and authentic elements in Catalonian “Danse Macabre” are based on the research of historical-literary context, examination of the main scientific hypothesis regarding the Iberian trace in the emergence of this synthetic genre form, analysis of the circle beginning of Catalonian “Dance Macabre” under the influence of oriental presence on the peninsula. The author assesses modern approaches towards “Danse Macabre” with their sad procession of the representatives of all social classes to mass manifestations of democratic spirit of irreconcilability and resistance, democratic satire that is fighting for social equality facing death and acting against impunity of the powers that be.

Edgar Allan Poe's personal religious feeling may have been uncertain, but the influence of the Bible on his works is not in question. Poems such as “The Raven” and “Annabel Lee,” for instance, allude to ideal states not unlike that described in the creation story of Genesis, particularly the scriptural verses depicting the Garden of Eden. As in the biblical creation story—which provides the literary model of “paradise”—so in these poems: death has a lasting and adverse effect on happiness. In Genesis and “Annabel Lee,” moreover, malign influence undoes archetypal innocence. In much of his prose, too, Poe includes (sometimes telling) rhetorical references to the creation story, from the forbidden wisdom of “Ligeia” to the picturesque vale of “Landor's Cottage.” Allegorically, though, Poe's short story “The Black Cat” treats the creation story of Genesis 1–4 remarkably fully, moving beyond allusion as it essentially retells those chapters of Genesis in macabre form, describing an ideal state, original sin, and murder—the very outline of the biblical narrative itself.

Background: To help shed light on the peculiar circumstances surrounding the death of the famed macabre and mystery writer, poet, editor, and literary critic, we explored the potential role of depression in the life and death of Edgar Allan Poe via his written language. Method: Using computerized language analysis, we analyzed works from Poe’s corpora of personal letters (N = 309), poems (N = 49), and short stories (N = 63), and investigated whether a pattern of linguistic cues consistent with depression and suicidal cognition were discernible throughout the writer’s life, particularly in his final years. Building on past work, language scores were collapsed into a composite depression metric for each text. Data from each work type was subsequently compiled and graphed into a single plot by year, with scores exceeding the 95th percentile (p

The concepts ‘classical antiquity’ and ‘heavy metal music’ may appear to be worlds apart. Not only are they separated chronologically but each belongs to an entirely different habitus. While the classical is associated with tradition, good taste and harmony, heavy metal is, at least by some, associated with the very opposite: the breaking of tradition, bad taste and disharmony. And yet, as the present book shows, a very large number of heavy metal bands reference antiquity in various ways, including exponents of Thrash Metal, characterised by speed and aggressiveness; Death Metal, characterised by macabre subject matter and growling vocals; Black Metal with related subject matter but less polished style, and other subgenres. Bands from countries ranging from Greece and Italy to Scandinavia incorporate classical quotations in their lyrics or rewrite ancient texts and myths. Some sing in Greek or Latin, others in Italian or English. The titles of songs, such as Hymn to Apollo, Hymn to Zeus, Medusa and so on, further show the classical inspiration.

This chapter examines the politics and rhetoric of recording a famine in early colonial archives. It reads the travel reports of servants of the English and Dutch East India Companies alongside the internal correspondence of the East India Company (EIC) to deconstruct the colonial biases that resulted in an institutional failure in managing the famine. The stakes for reading the Chiattorer Monnontor in the various colonial records such as the EIC's official correspondence and the travel reports of its employees are high, especially in the context of authr's recent interest in colonial famines. The EIC initially looked to gain access to the markets in western India, and thus the first Company ship to reach the Indian subcontinent, the Hector, arrived in Surat as early as 1608. During eighteenth century, the EIC's acquisition of zamindari rights continued, much to the growing alarm of the nawabs of Bengal, who at the time had practically declared their autonomy from a weakening Mughal Empire.

This article argues that the cannibalistic connotations in ‘Hamlet’ may be interpreted in the context of specific cultural anxieties relating to the popular and problematic use of corpse medicine, or mumia. I begin by exploring how Shakespeare represents corpses throughout Hamlet in ways which reference food and culinary practices. By doing so, Shakespeare not only emphasises the tragic objectification of the dead, but also links life and death inextricably to figurative and literal consumption. The essay proceeds to analyse the cannibalistic allusions in ‘Hamlet’ through the lens of the contemporary medical consumption of corpse medicine. While the use of corpse medicine was semantically distinguished from anthropophagy in early modern Europe, I argue that Shakespeare’s depiction of man-eating in Hamlet forces his audience to confront their own unsavoury distinctions between ‘acceptable’ and ‘unacceptable’ forms of cannibalism. Viewed through the lens of cannibal discourse, Hamlet’s language over the course of the tragedy takes on new significance as the prince displays profane hunger that seems to simultaneously repel him and imbue him with a macabre vitality. Something is indeed ‘rotten in the state of Denmark’ (1.4.67), Shakespeare suggests, and the smell appears to be coming from the kitchen.

Dark tourism, which deploys taboo subjects and commercially exploits the macabre, has always raised moral conflicts at a collective and individual level while providing new spaces in which morality is communicated, reconfigured and revitalized. Although earlier studies in dark tourism have focused upon the collective notions of morality with a considerable amount of discussion on the comprehension and the manner in which the history and information of dark tourist attractions are presented for tourist consumption, the individual differences of tourist morality and how tourists morally engage with death and its various forms of representation, has been neglected. In order to understand morally transgressive behavior displayed by tourists at emotionally sensitive or controversial sites and the various ways they justify their actions, the narratives of international tourists who are interested in death-related rituals at a cremation ground in India were collected and analyzed. Drawing upon a socio-cognitive theory, the moral mechanisms involved in tourist judgment towards photography of death-related rituals are discussed. It was observed that the cremation ground offers a liminal space for tourists to exercise their moral agency in an inhibitive form, as well as proactive form and that transgressive behavior among tourists is likely if they disengage from processes related to moral conduct using various moral disengagement mechanisms. This behavior arises due to an obscuring and fragmentation of human agency during moral disengagement thereby making it possible for tourists to not take ownership of the consequences of their actions.

The Chase family vault (Oistins, Barbados) is widely known as the setting of a macabre nineteenth-century story of moving coffins. On several occasions between 1812 and 1821, on opening the sealed ...

The three collections of tragic stories of Jean-Pierre Camus, L’Amphitheâtre sanglant, Les Spectacles d’horreur and Les Rencontres funestes, were already the object of several studies which insist most of the time on the dissuasive role of the terrible scenes represented in the eyes of the reader with a particular sense of macabre detail. Our purpose in this article is to nuance this summary approach by taking into account his conception of the passions explained in the Traitte des passions de l’âme and the Traite de la Reformation interieure. It seems in the light of these works that the intention of Camus in his stories is not simply to illustrate the idea that nothing escapes the vigilance of the Providential Justice and that God punishes inevitably all delinquents. Certainly Camus tries to terrify to improve, but also incites to think. Indeed the Providentialism of the bishop of Belley gives an important place to a rational conception of Justice, because it invites the readers to understand the criminal behaviours in relationship to passionate mechanisms causing their fatal development. This particular representation of the crime, that also focuses on the psychological issues, is rich with many repercussions on the narrative structure, rhetoric and morality of his tragic stories.

In 1701 Puritan minister John Rogers published the criminal narrative of Esther Rodgers, who had been convicted of infanticide and executed. Esther Rodgers appears in Rogers’s Death the Certain Wages of Sin not as a depraved criminal or even a repentant sinner but as a courageous Christian martyr. Much of the productive recent scholarship on Rodgers studies the way her criminal status operated in the public sphere generally or print culture specifically, but the literary construction of her legal criminal status reveals a larger negotiation over marginalized individuals’ ability to consent and dissent in early New England and an unexpected orientation toward choice in early American literature. Rogers and his contemporaries engaged the conventions of the early modern criminal narrative to organize the chaos of maternal tragedy according to fictions of choice and the conventions of ancient and antique scripture to recast execution as a prelude to salvation. But in the ill-fitting spaces between the criminal’s story and the forms to which these authors suited it, readers could see a character who was something more—or less—than murderer or martyr: a sympathetic victim granted the ability to consent only in order to certify her legal culpability, religious conversion, and complicity in the macabre spectacle of her own public execution.

The Beresford Monument from the Church of St Edmund at Fenny Bentley in Derbyshire is a funerary monument that has received relatively little attention from scholars due to its unusual imagery and the lack of documentary evidence regarding its creation. The alabaster monument depicts Thomas Beresford (d. 1473) and Agnes Hassall (d. 1467) as fully shrouded three-dimensional effigies. Incised around the base of the monument are enshrouded representations of their twenty-one children. This paper analyzes the impact that veiling the bodies of Thomas Beresford and Agnes Hassall has on the effectiveness of the monument as a commemorative tool and situates the shrouded effigies within their broader visual and social context at the turn of the sixteenth century. Rather than dismiss the unusual imagery of the Beresford Monument as an expedient solution selected by sculptors who did not know what Thomas Beresford and Agnes Hassall actually looked like, this paper argues that shrouding the effigies was a deliberate commemorative strategy meant to evoke specific responses in the monument’s viewers. Although there is little concrete information about the tomb’s commission, contextualizing it by examining the monument in concert with other aspects of late medieval culture—including purgatorial piety, macabre texts and imagery, and ex votos—can provide a richer understanding of the object’s potentiality for its beholders. The anonymizing aspect of the shroud ultimately enabled viewers to identify freely and easily with the individuals depicted on the monument, which would have encouraged them to pray for the souls of Thomas and Agnes, thus perpetuating their memories and reducing their time in purgatory.

In 1958 Marcel Duchamp and a friend gained access to the modernist poet Mina Loy's apartment on stanton street near the Bowery in New York, so that they could display the art she was storing there in a one-woman show of her assemblage artwork (Burke, Becoming 433–34). The show, which Loy herself couldn't attend since she was unwell and living with family in Aspen, Colorado, was known as the Bodley Gallery Exhibition and generated considerable interest, even drawing the increasingly reclusive Djuna Barnes to its lively opening (434). The show was described by Stuart Preston in a New York Times review as a boxing match between the popular art of the time and “Mina Loy's shocking and macabre big collages, composed most graphically of refuse, and inspired by scenes near the Bowery” (qtd. in Burke, Becoming 434). Loy's dadaist assemblages, Preston's review made clear, were a formidable opponent not only of mainstream art but also of the larger politics of art at the time: the “alliance” they reflected “between Dada and social comment,” he wrote, was “downright sinister,” and they contained a slightly apocalyptic undercurrent of social critique. Loy's artwork incorporated discarded objects, such as bottles and pieces of cardboard, from New York City's liminal spaces—especially the Bowery's alleys and abandoned buildings, places where the homeless and unemployed gathered in desperate conditions. Transporting the gutter to the gallery, this body of work depended on her close relationship to the city's so-called refuse, the homeless people she befriended who helped her collect the objects she recycled as art. It has been almost impossible to know what Loy's body of assemblage artwork—carefully dusted off and hung up by Duchamp—looked like at the Bodley Gallery show. But one fellow Bowery artist, the American photographer Berenice Abbott, had photographed Loy's assemblages. Abbott and Loy had been friends since the 1920s, when they frequented the same art scene in Paris, where Abbott was Man Ray's assistant. Abbott photographed Loy's children, and the two artists are pictured together, along with Tristan Tzara, Jane Heap, and Margaret Anderson, in a famous photograph taken at a party in Constantin Brancusi's studio in 1920.1 In this image, Loy and Abbott fill the center of the frame; Abbott's eyes confront the camera, as if to say, “I know what you're up to,” her confident head emerging over Loy's right shoulder—Loy looking as ethereal as she does glamorous. Their friendship picked up again in New York in the 1940s and 1950s, where it was defined by Abbott's interest in Loy's success and well-being.

Romanticism, initiated in eighteenth-century Europe, had, among other characteristics, the overestimation of emotions and the elaboration of a social critique based on pre-defined customs and values. In America, Romanticism established itself, primarily, in the United States, where Edgar Allan Poe was one of its main figures, whose pessimist and macabre works were translated by Baudelaire; and, afterwards, in Brazil, the need to build a literature that had its own nationality, even if still under the influence of the French molds. Therefore, the translations of Poe’s tales made by Baudelaire came to Brazil and served as inspiration for many established authors. By observing concomitant aspects in the prose of both Poe and Álvares de Azevedo, whose work Noite na Taverna (1997) is regarded as one of the first pieces of fantastic literature in Brazil, our article aims to verify the possible influence of the American author on the work of Azevedo, using the studies held by Alfredo Bosi, Antônio Candido, Todorov and Roas, as well as consolidated literary reviews on Edgar A. Poe. Keywords: Edgar Allan Poe. Álvares de Azevedo. Romanticism. Noite na Taverna.

This research paper offers a stylistic analysis of some selected poems of Wystan Hugh Auden's war poetry. It focuses on four major poems: 'O What is that Sound', 'Danse Macabre', 'Spain 1937' and 'September1, 1939'. These poems represent the period of the thirties of the twentieth century. The research shows how Auden skillfully uses the foregrounding-backgrounding approach in presenting his poems. In so doing, the researcher uses the following theoretical framework: simple repetition, parallelism and deviation. The research paper investigates mainly these levels of linguistic deviations: discoursal, grammatical and graphological, morphological and lexical, and semantic. The researcher concludes that Auden is a great poet because his poems could keep him alive even after his death. His poetry still needs a lot of work. Key Words: Stylistics, W. H. Auden, Foregrounding, repetition, parallelism and deviation. المستخلص: يعرض هدا البحث تحليل أسلوبي لبعض قصائد الحرب للشاعر ويستان هيو أودن. يرکز البحث على أربع قصائد رئيسيه هي: "اوه ما هدا الصوت", "رقصه الموت", "أسبانيا 1937 ", و "سبتمبر1,1939". تمثل تلک القصائد فتره الثلاثينيات من القرن العشرين. يوضح البحث کيفيه الاستخدام الماهر لأودن لأسلوب الوضع في المقدمه والخلفيه في عرضه لقصائده. وفي هدا الشأن يستخدم الباحث الاطار النظري التالي: التکرار البسيط, التماثل, و الانحراف. يتناول البحث المستويات التاليه للانحرافات اللغويه: الخطاب, القواعد و الجرافولوجيا أوالخط, ترکيب الکلمه والمفردات, و المعاني. و يخلص الباحث الى أن أودن شاعر عظيم لأن قصائده استطاعت أن تبقيه على قيد الحياه حتى بعد وفاته. فشعر أودن لا يزال بحاجه لمزيد من الدراسه. کلمات مفتاحيه: أسلوبيات, أودن, الوضع في المقدمه, التکرار, التماثل, و الانحراف.

Estrella distante (1996), la cuarta novela de Roberto Bolaño, se plantea como una re-lectura y re-escritura de la dictadura y post-dictadura chilena al momento que centra su interés en dos figuras principales, el narrador, Arturo Belano y el asesino devenido artista Carlos Wieder. Ambas figuras sostienen la construcción narrativa de una novela que, a partir de la elaboración de un registro fotográfico de obra, manifiesta o tensiona las nociones tradicionales acerca de lo artístico y cuestiona éticamente sus procedimientos. La imposibilidad de la écfrasis o descripción vívida del estímulo plástico pareciera enfatizar el horror de las obras, sostenidas por momentos alrededor de una voz que funciona como un ente censor y, por otro, como una voz curatorial que pone en valor los macabros registros fotográficos confeccionados por el artista/asesino.

This paper, which adopts the form of a case study, aims to fill a gap in research on the use of gore content in the Islamic State’s online propaganda. It has two major goals. Firstly, to understand...

The article centers on close readings of Iurii Tarich’s little studied film Wings of a Serf (1926) and the life and times of the archaeologist Ignatii Iakovlevich Stelletskii (1878–1949), who obsessively sought to discover the legendary library of Ivan the Terrible, thought to lie concealed beneath the Moscow Kremlin. These examples show the peculiar fascination of early Soviet audiences with the tsarist past in its most extreme expressions of violence and cruelty. The alluring, frightening early Soviet Ivan the Terrible demonstrates post-Revolutionary society’s queasy sense that the excesses of the old regime threatened to reemerge in the new, Soviet era. The conclusion of the article considers how the Stalinist period, both in its unprecedented bloodshed and violence and in its positive myth of Ivan the Terrible as a great leader despite his cruelty, fulfilled this fearful anticipation in ways that could not have been foreseen in the 1920s. This macabre return of a superseded past undergirded the one Stalinist representation of Ivan to revisit the 1920s Gothic image of the tsar, Sergei Eisenstein’s ambivalent portrayal of despotic power and violence in his uncompleted film trilogy Ivan the Terrible (1942–1944).

Reflections on death in the second Remeta of Ragusan poet Mavro VetranovicRagusan poet Mavro Vetranovic, as a representative of the Christian Renaissance, expressed in his poetry an appreciation of earthly life and he thought of death as an inevitability. These attitudes were present in both types of his lyrics, religious and mundane. The second Remeta was Vetranovic’s most famous satirical poem. Although it belongs to mundane lyrics, its function was to express a religious sentiment. Vetranovic begins with general reflections on death, and then he develops this theme with effective comparisons, rhetoric questions and ingenious allegories. He makes it more tangible with a vision of death, armed with a scythe, cutting all around. Vetranovic draws attention to human sin, as well as the only way of redemption, counting on wisdom from the Holy Bible. Renouncing earthly pleasures was one of the ways to fight against sin. The absurdity of pleasures was contrasted with naturalistic pictures of a dead man in a grave, of whom little would remain as no one can escape decomposition. He was trying to make people understand, by macabre pictures and images of rotten bodies, that they are mortal. At the same time, he moti­vated them, by preaching contemptus mundi, to despise and renounce all the pleasures of this life. Размышления о смерти в Ремете второй дубровницкого поэта Мавра ВетрановичаДубровницкий поэт Мавро Ветранович, являясь представителем христианского Ренессанса, в своей поэзии раскрывал ничтожность земной жизни и размышлял о неминуемости смерти. Такое миропонимание отражается в его религиозной и светской лирике. Самым известным сатирическим стихотворением Ветрановича является Ремета вторая. Хотя оно относится к светской лирике, его функция заключается также в выражении религиозных представлений. В Ремете второй поэт размышляет о смерти, используя сравнения, риторические вопросы и остроумные аллегории, поэт рисует образ смерти с косой. Ветранович указывает человеку на его грехи, а также на путь к спасению, опираясь на Святое писание. Один из способов побороть грех заключается в отречении от всех мирских удовольствий. Мысль о бессмысленности мирских удовольствий подтверждается натуралистическим описанием мертвого человека. Смертность человека подчеркивается изображением жутких картин разложения тела. Одновременно, проповедуя contemptus mundi, поэт поощряет пренебрежение и презрение к наслаждению земными благами.

The stolen death: About the play Hledame strasidlo by Hanus Hachenburg from 1943The puppet theatre play Hledame strasidlo by Hanus Hachenburg was written in the Terezin/Theresienstadt ghetto in 1943 and over 50 years was hidden in the archive until it was presented to readers and viewers in the 1990s — but it turned out to be still surprisingly valid and cogent. The author, a 14-year-old prisoner of the ghetto, used the conventions of the puppet theatre, the carnival and the fairy tales. The mythical or fairy-tale-like “timelessness” allowed him to show the absurdity of Nazism and — yet unnamed — the Holocaust. The main character of the play, the King, captures Death itself, which soon becomes so ordinary and kitschy that no one is afraid of her. The confinement of Death — a motif known, among others, from the myth of Sisyphus — is an important theme of the theatre in Terezin; it appears also in the German-speaking opera by Peter Kien and Viktor Ullmann, Der Keiser von Atlantis Emperor of Atlantis. In this article, I show how the old themes of enslaved Death and the dance macabre between extasy and destruction become the symbols of the war, and indeed of the 20th century, which culminates in the devastating forces of the great ideologies and in which there can be found the origins of retrotopia, which is now, according to Zygmunt Bauman, the dominating point of view in East- and West-European and in American discourse. Unos smrti. O terezίnske divadelnί hře Hledame strasidlo Hanuse Hachenburga z roku 1943Divadelni hra Hledame strasidlo od Hanuse Hachenburga byla napsana v ghettu Terezin / Theresienstadt v roce 1943 a vice než padesat let byla ukryta v archivu, aby v 90. letech si nasla cestu pro sve ctenaře a divaky — a ukazalo se, že je překvapivě platna a přitažliva. Autor, ctrnactiletý vězeň ghetta, využil konvenci loutkoveho divadla, karnevalu a pohadek. Mýticka nebo pohadkova „nadcasovost“ mu umožnila ukazat absurditu nacismu a — tehdy jestĕ nemenovaneho — holocaustu. Hlavni postava hry, Kral, zachyti samotnou Smrt, ktera se brzy stane tak obycejnou a kycovitou, že se ji nikdo nebude bat. Unos smrti — motiv znamý mimo jine i z mýtu Sisyfa — je důležitým tematem divadla v Terezině; objevuje se take v německojazycne operě Petera Kiena a Viktora Ullmanna Der Keizer von Atlantis Cisař Atlantidy. V tomto textu ukazuji, jak se stare motivy zotrocene Smrti a danse macabre mezi extazi a zniceni stavaji symbolem valky a celeho dvacateho stoleti, v který vyvrcholily nicivými sily velke ideologie a kde lze nalezt pocatky retrotopie, ktera je podle Zygmunta Baumana dominantnim hlediskem ve východnim, zapadoevropským a americkým diskurzu.

There is a deep and persistent cultural fascination with the macabre – public executions, true crime books, slasher films, and sites of violence attract large audiences. Although serial and mass mu...

Alberto Pezzali/AP/Shutterstock Clubbers at London’s Piano Works mark the lifting of all remaining covid restrictions in England on 19 July. The nightclub was one of many venues across the country that opened for the first time since March 2020. The UK is forecast to soon have more new SARS-CoV-2 …

In 1996, the novelist David Foster Wallace suggested that “Lynchian” might best be defined as “a particular kind of irony where the very macabre and the very mundane combine in such a way as to reveal the former’s perpetual containment within the latter.” In a narrative sense, we can observe that containment in Lynch’s exploration of the “dark side” of idealized American locales, be those archetypical small towns ( Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks) or Hollywood ( Mulholland Drive, Inland Empire). This tension between macabre and mundane is a resilient typology in theoretical responses to Lynch’s oeuvre, labeled by critics as “uncanny,” “nightmarish,” or simply “Americana.” Given this prevalence in both work and reception, then, it is unsurprising that Wallace identifies this as the theme in Lynch’s films worthy of the eponymous adjective. However, the degree to which Angelo Badalamenti’s music might exhibit the same themes remains critically underexplored—a surprising omission given the prominence of American generic tropes in his scores. In the Lynchian universe, what does sight share with sound, and vice-versa? Following media-theoretical analyses of digital ontologies, in this chapter I argue that cross-modal resonances have acquired new significance in the internet age; subsequently, renewed attention on sensory distinctions offers new ways of engaging with familiar critical paradigms. I further suggest that critical attention to popular responses to Lynch and Badalementi’s collaborations indicate that audiences might consider the two inextricable, and, as such, a mode of analysis that engages with intersensory slippages accounts for the vernacular philosophies of their viewership.

Análise dos temas macabros expostos na famosa pintura O Triunfo da Morte (c. 1562) de Bruegel, o Velho (c. 1525-1569). Minha proposta interpretativa é a de apreciar as imagens a partir das sugestões musicais que o artista representa, e que a densidade do drama da existência diante da morte nessa obra de Bruegel pode ser compreendida de forma mais aprofundada com a confrontação das imagens do quadro com a musicalidade dos instrumentos e sonoridade das cenas.

La situación de Colombia durante la crisis de la pandemia por la Covid-19, en los primeros meses de 2021, donde se presentaron múltiples manifestaciones en el espacio público en contra del gobierno, espacio que se puede describir como un escenario macabro de gran incertidumbre, deja muchos interrogantes sobre lo que significan esas acciones como representación de la sociedad colombiana. ¿El espacio público colombiano ha sido vetado como un escenario de dialogo necesario en toda sociedad democrática?

O presente artigo traz algumas reflexões iniciais sobre o lugar da morte e o florescimento do macabro no imaginário social entre os séculos XVI e XVII, a partir do diálogo com as obras de Delumeau, Arriès, Mâle e Chanu, dentre outros. Em seguida, examina a grande difusão da imagem do corpo na cultura seiscentista, que traz como corolário o papel de destaque da anatomia, a qual transcende o âmbito das práticas médicas e invade outros campos do saber, revestindo-se de sentidos metafóricos, tal como na expressão “anatomia moral”, muito empregada na época.Para abordar o lugar do púlpito na difusão do conceito de morte propagado pelo catolicismo no século XVII, será analisada a obra sermonística do jesuíta Antônio Vieira, tendo como foco a sua construção de um memento mori a partir da retomada do lugar-comum bíblico de que o homem é pó e ao pó voltará, tão reciclado por pregadores e poetas do período. Esse tema escritural é desenvolvido nos três sermões vieirianos da Quarta-Feira de Cinzas, que são discutidos na parte final deste texto.

This chapter examines the short tales of terror commonly known as Gothic chapbooks. These tales appeared as a result of the popularity of works by Matthew Lewis and Ann Radcliffe and were read by readers of all classes. The small pamphlets were sold individually and appeared in both periodical and serial form. While some chapbooks were adaptations both of popular Gothic novels and melodramas, the majority were original tales by authors including Isaac Crookenden and Sarah Wilkinson. Their influence extended not only to larger collections of macabre and sensational anthologies, but in countless periodicals as short tales of terror.

In the culture of any group of people, language, as a potent means of communication, cannot be relegated to the background. Every good play reflects the people for whom it is written. Esiaba Irobi’s Cemetery Road is not an exception. This essay, therefore, considers the employment of language as one of the major tools of revolt in Esiaba Irobi’s Cemetery Road in the dramatist’s attempt to restructure and build a new egalitarian society. The essence of this study is to reveal how Esiaba Irobi, has been able to deploy language as a revolutionary weapon in his play, Cemetery Road. The study, thus, showcases the ideological concern of the playwright in the play. The play is ideological because it takes a radical position on the issue of change in certain aspects of the Nigerian society. This essay, therefore, seeks to unveil the different aspects of language used in Cemetery Road. An examination of the text reveals that the dramatist employs macabre language or language of violence, persuasive language, wit, mockery and sarcasm, proverbial language, imagery, language of abuse and insensitivity, and language of despair.

The phone rang 30 minutes before my talk. It was a familiar number—my fertility doctor's office—and I picked up, expecting a nurse to tell me that my pills and injections were ready for my next treatment. Instead, the nurse asked me to hold for the doctor, who told me I was pregnant. It should have been joyous news, but he quickly tempered my enthusiasm by telling me that, given the results of other tests, he wasn't sure the pregnancy would go to term. I felt a complicated wave of emotions: relief that our fertility treatment worked, anxiety at the prospect of starting my new job pregnant, worry that I'd have a miscarriage—and stress about my imminent talk. > “It was a macabre preview into parenthood as an academic.” My husband and I had started fertility treatments during my postdoc years, unable to conceive on our own. The process was exhausting. I had to go into the doctor's office a few times per week for blood tests and appointments—all before my hourlong commute to work. The costs stretched our finances. I began to convert every price tag I saw to a portion of a doctor's visit. During the same time period, my professional life had started to fall into place. I completed my postdoc and landed a faculty job in the same city where we were living. When the doctor's office called that day, I was 1 month away from starting my new position and changing my email signature to “Assistant Professor.” Somehow, I managed to give my talk. But as I delivered my practiced monologue, I was having a very different conversation in my mind. I tried to imagine taking maternity leave during my first year as a professor. I also fretted about the viability of the pregnancy. Follow-up doctor's visits didn't yield positive news. The pregnancy would almost certainly end in a miscarriage. I contemplated termination. But because we'd had such a tough time getting pregnant, my husband and I decided to wait to see what happened. Over the next month, my appointments for blood draws and invasive ultrasounds increased to nearly every other day. During one appointment, we heard a heartbeat. My stomach sank all the way down to the stirrups holding my feet. It was painful to hear that heartbeat—because it provided a glimpse into the excitement of pregnancy that I knew would likely be cut short. We left the office still waiting for the supposedly imminent miscarriage. But I wasn't waiting at home. I was waiting during my first faculty meeting. I was waiting in the lab while teaching interns how to prepare samples. I tried my best to silo my personal and professional lives. As time wore on, though, the barrier between “waiting for miscarriage Logan” and “shiny new professor Logan” became less and less distinct. I was worn out physically and emotionally. It was a macabre preview into parenthood as an academic. I found myself constantly struggling to balance my career goals with my personal life, which featured many more doctor's appointments than visits with friends. I missed deadlines and meetings. I had trouble focusing. And I cried in my office, worried that I was already failing as a professor—feelings intensified by hormones that would bear no fruit. Then, roughly 7 weeks into my pregnancy, I went into the doctor's office—and this time there was no heartbeat. I'd never experienced such a visceral combination of sadness and relief. I swallowed two doses of the abortion pill and waited for my pregnancy to be officially over. I dealt with my grief, in part, by speaking openly with trusted colleagues, including my postdoc adviser and others who'd known me for years. And I'd had time to prepare. Difficult as my experience was, I can't imagine how someone feels when a miscarriage catches them totally off guard, or it happens for the second, third, or eighth time. Ten months have passed, and my husband and I are still working with the fertility doctor. It isn't easy to be open about my personal struggles. But I know many academics are in the same boat: starting their first faculty appointment while trying to start a family, and dealing with the conflicting emotions that even a better outcome can bring. I want them to know they're not alone.

In contrast with the many luckless physical falls elsewhere in Alex de la Iglesia’s oeuvre, the protagonist’s macabre plunge onto a steel spike in La chispa de la vida (2011) is more than a cartoonish gag staged merely in the service of dark humour. The resultant form of immobility wrought upon the body of Roberto, an unemployed advertising executive, allegorically serves as the socio-economic conceit at the heart of the film, and (following Mitchell and Snyder’s theory of disability as ‘narrative prosthesis’) as an unlikely source of the film’s very motion as a screen story. At once contextualizing La chispa in relation to a long tradition of Spanish cine inmobiliario (cinema discursively engaged with immovable property), this essay will examine the film’s timely and unusual satirical take on Spain’s recent ladrillo bust, as well as its self-conscious reflections on media and popular culture’s narrative representations thereof: stories caught up, like the main character’s own body, in the machinations of inmobiliaria, much as La chispa itself is a screen story predicated on professional, financial and physical immobility.

The early stage of creativity of Ukrainian artist Olexander Gnilitsky (1961–2009) has been studied in the article. It is shown that his works should be viewed in close connection with the historical and everyday context, taking into account the circumstances, time, social and creative environment. It is noted that the early stage of creativity, and eventually the final formation of Gnilitsky as an artist, took place at crucial times in the history of Ukraine—when the established canons of painting prescribed by the Soviet Totalitarian regime prove to be archaic and are subjected to shattering doubt by the younger generation of artists. It is emphasized that the Gnilitsky’s works of the period are characterized with subjectivism, citations, self-irony, cynical rethinking of literary subjects, the use of grotesque techniques, motifs of macabre eroticism. On the material selected for processing, a historical and cultural and art criticism analysis was carried out in the context of the formation of Ukrainian art in the late 1980s and early 1990s, where the artist’s personality seems particularly relevant, since it symbolizes the specificity of this art: from surprise to shock, from complexity to the grotesque, from incorruptibility to despair and even blasphemy. An attempt is made to show all the genuine, heroic sacrifice of a true master. This is particularly eloquent in relation to contemporary art, whose fundamental self-appraisal is fixated in the judgments and statements of its representatives. The general picture of Gnilitsky’s life and work, his personality fit perfectly into the ideal or, rather, the norm of the “avant-garde”, with both its artistic and philosophical definitions. Analyzing the artist’s works shows, in particular, his creative formation in the context of the “New Wave” movement and the “Paris Commune” group.

Article is devoted to the last vocal works a cappella created Gyorgy Ligeti in 1980 — the 1990th years: “Drei Phantasien nach Fridrich Holderlin”, “Magyar Etudok” and “Nonsense Madrigals”. The author traces relationship between the previous and last choral opuses by the master, between Ligeti’s choral works and choral creativity of his predecessors and contemporaries. So the author reveals features of ligeti’s late choral style: at the levels of relationship between word and music, the texture and timbre organization. The author pays special attention to studying of Ligeti’s neomadrigalism. This phenomenon proves in the organization of musical texture, in interaction of musical and literary texts and also in the general organization of compositions. The opposition of love and death (immemorial categories of human life) is the cornerstone of the dramaturgic organization of a cycle and typical for Ligeti’s vocal works “polyphony of meanings” is shown in the constant present genre and style game with the recipient. The composition intended for “The King’s singers” embodies diverse style hints, corresponding to the wide performing range of this ensemble and own musical interests of the composer. In this last vocal work by Ligeti also his love to literary world of Lewis Carroll with the atmosphere of absurdity, so conformable to the music world of the author of “Le Grand Macabre” was reflected.

In July 1922, theNew York Timesreported that the “encouraging little film”Danse Macabrewas screening at the Rialto Theater in New York City. Directed by filmmaker Dudley Murphy, it starred dancers Adolph Bolm and Ruth Page in a visual interpretation of Saint-Saëns'sDanse Macabrethat synchronized perfectly with live performances of the composition. While film scholars have occasionally citedDanse Macabreand Murphy's other shorts from this period as examples of early avant-garde filmmaking in the United States, discussions of the films are mired in misunderstanding. In this article, I use advertisements, reviews, and other archival materials to trace the production, exhibition, and reception of Murphy's Visual Symphony project. These films, I argue, were not Murphy's alone: rather, they were a collaborative endeavor guided as heavily by musician and film exhibitor Hugo Riesenfeld as by Murphy himself. Recast in this way, the Visual Symphony project highlights evolving approaches to sound–image synchronization in the 1920s, the centrality of theater conductors and musicians to filmmaking in this period, and the various ways in which filmmakers, performers, and exhibitors conceptualized the relationship between music and film, and the live and the mediated, in the final decade of the silent era.

Humour, as one of the most vital phenomena of human nature and culture, has maintained the status of a special category, which evades being defined accurately. Esti Sheinberg thinks that a prerequisite for experiencing a musical piece as comic is the existence of certain incongruity among its meaningful units. She considers musical irony, satire, parody and the grotesque as correlatives of semantic ambiguities, which use two or more layers of meaning. She emphasises irony as a structural prototype for all other modes of ambiguity. Regarding irony as a phenomenon based on mutually excluding components of semantic opposites, Sheinberg makes a distinction in relation to the grotesque, which originates as a result of juxtaposition of aesthetic units, when contradictory semantic pairs are formed. The irresolvable ambiguity of the grotesque is the result of acceptance, not negation of all aspects of the representing subject. The hyperbolical nature of the grotesque in music is manifested through heightening the extreme within the framework of given parameters, while the exaggerations are noted as such in relation to the standard perceived as a human body and voice. The Dance of Death brings to the fore one of the most significant features of the grotesque - the acknowledgement and accumulation of contradiction, with no tendency to their conciliation. The selected compositions for this study are the examples of macabre waltzes in Alfred Schnittke's opus. After their analysis, a certain level of incompatibility among the meaningful elements of the piece has been located and determined, as well as the relationship between the form and content, and the level of deviation from the set norm. Taking into account the importance of the relationship between the body and movement in general and the grotesque, the significant part of the paper is devoted to Hatten's theory of musical gesture.