WHY PHOTOGRAPHY MATTERS TO THE THEORY OF HISTORY

Georges Didi-Huberman's study is concerned with epistemological and ethical questions that arise from visual representations of the Shoah, while Michael Fried's is concerned with the ontological possibilities explored by contemporary art photography. The books have two things in common: an argument against postmodern skepticism, and an insistence that photography has become a field in which questions of history, truth, and authenticity are being explored with particular acuity. Rather than reject even the possibility that photographs have something to tell us about the Shoah, Didi-Huberman shows that they can offer important insights into the difficulties and the possibilities of apprehending some aspects of the past.
Fried shows that contemporary photographic work has taken on the ambitions of high modernism by accepting the challenge of "to-be-seenness." Photography as a "historical practice" does not escape from the difficulties of evidence and of the "constructed" nature of historical understanding; photography functions neither as a pure trace of the past, nor as a mere invitation to spectacle.     

Cardboard,Conjuring and ‘A Very Curious Experiment’

Abstract

This article argues that overtly theatrical techniques and problems have played a vital part in the design and execution of scientific experiments. Taking as its case-study Michael Faraday’s famed experiment debunking the spiritualist phenomenon of table-turning in 1853, attention is focused on the crucial role played by sleight of hand, patter, misdirection and other theatrical tricks in it. Saturated in the wider culture of stage and parlour magic familiar to Victorians, Faraday’s experiment into ideomotor activity highlights the many connections running back and forth between the worlds of science and theatre in the mid-nineteenth century, in which performativity and theatricality were not only part of flamboyant scientific demonstrations, but at the heart of experiments themselves.     

Distribution,assemblage, capacity: new keywords for masculinity?

Performance and performativity have been the watchwords of gender studies for many years now. What new vocabularies might invigorate the study of Renaissance masculinities? This essay suggests that notions of distribution, assemblage and capacity might help break recent logjams in gender studies and allow greater attention to the social complexities of masculinity as it is constituted in association with a wide range of bodies, life forms and objects.     

“It was like lightning”: the theatrical resonances of Sarah Kane in Eimear McBride’s A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing

ABSTRACT

In 2013, Eimear McBride’s debut novel A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing was published to much critical acclaim. Commentators were quick to highlight McBride’s Joycean influences – but just as McBride is indebted to her Irish literary predecessor, so too is British playwright Sarah Kane a major influence. The strong resonances between the plays of Sarah Kane and A Girl serve to highlight the theatrical nuance of McBride’s original work. This article will investigate the thematic links of sibling love, grief and guilt in McBride’s novel and Kane’s Cleansed (1996), and the linguistic parallels with 4.48 Psychosis (1998). McBride’s experience as a trained actor encouraged a form of “method-writing” which I contend contributes to the inherent theatricality of her writing. This article ventures to uncover a small part of the huge scholarly potential which lies in the works of Eimear McBride, whose writing brings a uniquely theatrical style to Irish modernism.