By Kevin Ohi
ISBN-10: 1403969760
ISBN-13: 9781403969767
To understand the significant function of the erotic baby in decadent aesthetics is to understand the queer capability of literary excitement in aestheticism. Such is Kevin Ohi’s declare in Innocence and Rapture, the place special readings of Pater, Wilde, James, and Nabokov distinction the erotic baby of aestheticism with the blameless baby of up to date sexual ideology. the safety of innocence goals, in particular, to shield certainties of that means and id; at stake is much less the overall healthiness of any baby than an autonomy unruptured by way of equivocal origination. The disorientations of that means and identification that this day social gathering panic and punitive enforcement mark for aestheticist writers not anything wanting the rapturous probabilities of artwork. An attentive interpreting of aestheticist type can't yet confront its queerness; aestheticism’s rapture, this booklet argues, harbors an unexamined political capability, which calls into query modern conceptions of formative years innocence and the ideologies of sexual normalcy that maintain them.
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Extra info for Innocence and Rapture: The Erotic Child in Pater, Wilde, James, and Nabokov
Sample text
The painting figures and anticipates its effect on a spectator; it becomes a mirror reflecting the spectator’s astonished encounter with the painting itself, thus generating fascination: as a meta-figural moment, it presents the fascinating spectacle of fascination en abîme. The strangling snakes “in terrified struggle to escape from the Medusa brain,” by pointing to both the impossibility of escape and the uncanny continuance of that brain, thus figure the potential terror of being trapped in this hall of mirrors.
The effects of uncanny animation as a drama of spectatorial fascination we saw in Michelangelo’s sculpture and Leonardo’s (Caravaggio’s) Medusa are echoed by Winckelmann’s similar power to animate the dead. Like Michelangelo, who animates stone by finding it already alive, Winckelmann divines in ancient culture what seemed dead but is in fact alive: “remote in time and place, he feels after the Hellenic world, divines those channels of ancient art, in which its life still circulates” (158). For Winckelmann, the apprehension of antique art is just such an animation; describing this power of animation, moreover, he ties the capacity to be moved by beauty in art to an appreciation for a male beauty thereby made all but synonymous with culture itself.
Throughout the essay, his direct, even physical, access to this art enables him to incorporate, even to become it: “And that world in which others had moved with so much embarrassment, seems to call out in Winckelmann new senses fitted to deal with it. He is in touch with it; it penetrates him, and becomes part of his temperament” (154). Rather than have embarrassment shut down sense perception, he allows the ancient world to “call out . . new senses fitted to deal with it”; his receptiveness is a power of incorporation.
Innocence and Rapture: The Erotic Child in Pater, Wilde, James, and Nabokov by Kevin Ohi
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