Reconnecting with darkness: gloomy landscapes,lightless places

This paper investigates the effects and affects of darkness, a condition that is progressively becoming less familiar for those of us in the over-illuminated West. In countering the prevailing cultural understanding that darkness is a negative condition, I draw attention to other historical and cultural ways of positively valuing darkness. Subsequently, in drawing on two sites, a gloomy landscape at a dark sky park in South Scotland, and a tourist attraction in which a simulation of New York is experienced in a completely dark environment, I explore the multivalent qualities of darkness. In foregrounding the becoming of sensory experience in gloomy space, I highlight the mobilisation of alternative modes of visual perception in as well as the emergence of non-visual apprehensions, and suggest that the potentialities of darkness might foster progressive forms of conviviality, communication and imagination.     

‘Startling; Nay,Almost Repulsive’: Light Effects and Nascent Sensation in John Everett Millais’s The Rescue

Taking Pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais’s The Rescue (1855) as a case study of shifting aesthetic and moral frameworks, the essay investigates the ways in which mid-century British debates regarding the proper representation of light effects illuminate anxieties about a physically embodied viewer, one who encountered pictures in individualized ways that required regulation and guidance. Represented light, as an element that had a measurable effect on the senses, clearly stimulated a physical response and therefore brought the body to the fore in the art encounter. Types of painting that forcefully engaged the somatic self could become suspect and consequently subject to a process by which they were designated as ‘sensation’, a category in fraught relation with the disappearing ‘sublime’. Combining close visual analysis, a discussion of The Rescue’s novel subject matter, remarks by its first beholders, and nineteenth-century aesthetic theory, the article reflects on the ways in which discourses of art revealed anxieties about the formation of the modern subject and argues that The Rescue is a node in which the death of the sublime meets the birth of sensation.     

个人性初始风景与心理差异对旅游地选择偏好的影响

本研究首先将个人性初始风景定义为人们未成年时期曾生活的、并受到很大影响的居住地景象,进而探讨了“个人性初始风景”、以及两个心理学尺度对个人旅游地选择偏好的内心影响作用。本研究选择了98位日本女子大学生作为调查对象,使其回答有关个人性初始风景与旅游地选择偏好的问题,并对他们进行了两个心理学尺度（自我监测与刺激欲求）的测度。结果表明,个人性初始风景中较少含有农村性风景成分的调查对象,则具有“逃逸”倾向,多选择娱乐性旅游地作为出行目的地。另一方面,个人性初始风景中,含有较高的农村风景成分,则趋向于选择冒险性旅游地。另外,具有很高自我监测能力的人们多选择自然或自然性的旅游地。     

古村落景区游客拥挤感知维度与游憩情绪影响机制研究——以西递、宏村为例

拥挤感知被认为是影响游客的游憩体验和满意度的重要指标,通过构建拥挤感知的多维度变化来探讨游客情绪的变化对满意度的影响研究仍不成熟。本文以西递、宏村为研究案例地,运用结构方程模型分析方法,构建空间拥挤、人潮拥挤和体验拥挤维度对游客游憩过程的影响模型,探讨了游客拥挤三个维度的影响因素。研究表明：①人潮拥挤对情感依附型游客积极情绪呈正向影响;②空间拥挤增加消极情绪,与游客满意度呈负相关关系;③体验拥挤对游客积极情绪呈显著负向影响;④人潮拥挤-积极情绪-满意度（0.359）之间的相互关系强于人潮拥挤-消极情绪-满意度（0.128）;空间拥挤-积极情绪-游客满意度（-0.241）的关联度强于空间拥挤-消极情绪-游客满意度（-0.142）;体验拥挤-积极情绪-游客满意度（-0.167）之间的影响关系弱于体验拥挤-消极情绪-游客满意度（-0.213）;⑤人口特征对拥挤感知的影响差异显著。     

1. NARRATIVE FORM AND HISTORICAL SENSATION: ON SAUL FRIEDLÄNDER'S THE YEARS OF EXTERMINATION1

Saul Friedländer's magnum opus, The Years of Extermination, has been received worldwide as an exemplary work of history. Yet it was written by a historian who in the last two decades has strenuously asserted the limits of Holocaust representation. At the center of this essay is a problem of historical writing: how to write a historical narrative of the Holocaust that both offers explanations of the unfolding events and also suggests that the most powerful sensation about those events, at the time and since, is that they are beyond words. I explore Friedländer's crafting of such a narrative by considering, first, the role of his attempt in The Years of Extermination to explain the Holocaust and, second, the narrative form of the book. The book is best seen, I argue, not primarily as a work of explanation but as a vast narrative that places an explanation of the Holocaust within a specific form of describing that goes beyond the boundaries of the historical discipline as it is usually practiced. This form of describing goes beyond the almost positivist attachment to facts that dominates current Holocaust historiography. By using Jewish individual testimonies that are interspersed in the chronological history of the extermination, Friedländer creates a narrative based on ruptures and breaks, devices we associate with works of fiction, and that historians do not usually use. The result is an arresting narrative, which I interpret by using Johan Huizinga's notion of historical sensation. Friedländer sees this narrative form as specific to the Holocaust. I view this commingling of irreducible reality and the possibility of art as a required sensibility that belongs to all historical understanding. And in this respect, The Years of Extermination only lays bare more clearly in the case of the Holocaust what is an essential element in all historical reconstruction.     

ARCHITECTURAL GEOGRAPHIES OF THE AIRPORT BALCONY: MOBILITY, SENSATION AND THE THEATRE OF FLIGHT

Contemporary studies within the apparent ‘mobility turn’ focus upon airports as sites indicative of our mobile world, yet they tend to forgo investigations of the contextual architectural geographies that shape and inflect these mobilities. This paper examines the relationship between the architecture of the airport balcony and practices of seeing. While recent scholarship has taken airports to be incredible symbolizers of power and places of heightened visual scrutiny, the paper explores how through the architectural mediation of seeing, early airports were designed to instil specific inspirations, beliefs and messages within the airport user – constructing a new and modern experience. Far from a blank space evacuated of social presence and meaning, the paper investigates how airport design interacts with and shapes social experience. By examining the mobile practices and experiences of inhabiting the airport balcony, the paper advances conceptualizations of moving and seeing by complicating their practice as ‘collective individuations’ of social, architectural and sensual engagements, registers, and percepts.     

Darwin's Flinch: Sensation Theatre and Scientific Looking in 1872

This article explores the relationship between Darwin's The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (London: Murray, 1872) and the debates surrounding audiences of sensation theatre. It takes as its starting point a flinch performed by Darwin in a self-experiment at London Zoological Gardens. Darwin's flinch combined the act of scientific observation with a self-consciously staged emotional gesture. In the 1860s and early 1870s, the passionate and demonstrative audiences of sensation plays were similarly understood to watch themselves feeling. In this economy of emotional surfaces, actors and audience were caught up in unsettling relations between outwards expression and the remote landscape of interior feeling. Entangled in this theatrical instability, Darwin's scientific observation reflected broader cultural concerns about the reliability of the emotional body. Thus the article offers Darwin's Expression as an unusual but nonetheless suggestive artefact of theatrical spectatorship in 1872, while also contributing to recent debates about the history of objectivity and its supposedly unemotional and restrained scientific observer. It argues that the technique of self-conscious emotional spectatorship, shared by Darwin and theatre audiences, constituted a distinctive model of late Victorian emotion and visuality, in which communities of spectators were also spectators of themselves.     

Spying in the British Post Office,Victorian Politics and Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White

In 1844, the British public learned that the government was secretly opening exiled Young Italy leader Giuseppe Mazzini’s private letters and sharing information with continental authorities. For outraged citizens, espionage in that quintessential liberal institution, the reformed British Post Office, appeared un-English, despotic and criminal, the makings of a Gothic plot. Representations of the Post Office Scandal in Parliament and print predict the revision of the Gothic into the sensation novel that occurred with the publication of Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White. Attention to the fields of Anglo-Italian studies, mid-Victorian print culture and the development of narrative form in the mid-nineteenth century illustrates the historical and political implications of letter-opening for the emergence of a new fictional genre. The Post Office Espionage Scandal and The Woman in White share a central place in a mid-Victorian moment of evolution in the mutually constitutive relationship between Italian and British national identities, producing and reflecting a crisis in Britishness focused on the secret tyrannies concealed beneath the surface of Victorian liberalism. The letter-opening scandal reveals a crisis in Victorian liberalism in the political realm and the media, while The Woman in White translates this Victorian crisis of confidence into a literary genre defined by exposing the sordid undercurrents of British society: sensation fiction. Together, the espionage scandal and Collins’s novel respond to and generate a challenge to Victorian complacency that emerged out of the collision of British and Italian politics and culture in the mid-nineteenth century.