Fascination

Noch nie war so oft von Faszination die Rede wie heute. Gleichwohl haben sich die Kulturwissenschaften bislang kaum eingehender mit dem Begriff der Faszination und seiner Geschichte auseinandergesetzt. Zu Unrecht, denn im Verlauf des 20. Jahrhunderts erlebt die Faszination einen beispiellosen Aufstieg und läuft verwandten Begriffen wie dem Erhabenen, Interesse, Enthusiasmus oder dem Wunderbaren den Rang ab. Faszination – so die These, die diesem Band zugrunde liegt – ist mehr als nur ein inflationär gebrauchtes Schlagwort der Erlebnisgesellschaft: Sie bildet eine entscheidende Produktivkraft der modernen und postmodernen Kultur. Und sie kann von den Kulturwissenschaften als Schlüsselkategorie für das Verständnis medialer, ökonomischer und künstlerischer Prozesse operationalisierbar gemacht werden.

Aristotelians, British
Case, John
Cavendish, Charles
Digby, Kenelm
Twisse, William
Wilson, Thomas
Montaigne, Michel de
Lascari, Costantino
Novella in Renaissance Literature
Translation in the Renaissance
Vernacular languages
Appetite, Renaissance Idea of
Baldi, Bernardino
Botanics, Renaissance Concept of
Causality, Renaissance
Copernicus, Nicolaus
Diophantus in the early modern period
Engineer in Renaissance Science
Fascinatio
Flow and Ebb in Renaissance Science
Human Senses in Renaissance Science
Intensio and Remissio
Pacioli, Luca
Psychology, Renaissance
Humanism, Civic
Academy, of Fame
Persio, Antonio
Censorship in the Renaissance
Birgivi
Renaissance Avicennism
Angels in the Renaissance
Immortality of the Soul, Renaissance Problem of
Dissection of Animals
Emotion in Renaissance Psychology

Roberto Zucco de Bernard-Marie Koltès est d’habitude présentée comme pièce à scandale, inspirée de la vie d’une personne réelle. En y regardant de plus près, on trouve par contre une pièce complexe, avec de nombreux éléments intertextuels. Même si elle est beaucoup étudiée, la pièce est généralement abordée de la même manière : une fois le fond historique évoqué, on le laisse de côté afin de s’adonner à une étude plutôt littéraire. Nous partons ici de l’hypothèse qu’une sorte de traumatisme initial, causé à la fois par la mort de l’auteur et par de violentes protestations, rend les commentateurs plus disposés à accentuer la frontière entre la réalité et la fiction, afin de défendre l’œuvre dans sa valeur artistique et esthétique. Avec ceci, nous semble-t-il, on adoucit le choc que l’auteur souhaitait partager avec nous, en étant lui-même fasciné par l’ordinaire et la beauté d’un tueur en série et en nous montrant que dans notre vie quotidienne le mal n’est pas toujours visible dans la monstruosité des choses.

Fotografiet er som en firkantet skive af rum og tid.  Firkanten kan fastholde erindringer, traumer og drømme, altså vores mest af alt tavse udtryk. Den virkelighed, der helt uomtvisteligt viser sig på fotografiet, åbner op for andre billeder, nemlig erindringens, traumets og drømmens udtryk - altså fjerne, ubevidste og tavse billeder. Denne åbning bliver muliggjort ved, at virkeligheden fikseres som billede og denne fiksering er paradoksal: tiden og rummet bliver både fastholdt og ophævet ligesom i de indre billeder. De kan forenes i det øje, der med Roland Barthes tænker. I artiklen skelner jeg ikke mellem analoge og digitale fotografier, fordi jeg for det første mener, at der er tale om en kontinuitet. Fr det andet var det digitale fotografi kun i sin begyndelse med navne som Nancy Burson og Aziz/Cucher.
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English:
The photograph is like a square slice of space and time. The square can retain memories, traumas and dreams, ie our most of all silent expressions. The reality that unequivocally appears in the photograph opens up other images, namely the expression of memory, trauma and dream - that is, distant, unconscious and silent images. This opening is made possible by the fact that reality is fixed as an image and this fixation is paradoxical: time and space are both maintained and abolished, just as in the inner images. They can be united in the eye that thinks with Roland Barthes. In the article, I do not distinguish between analogue and digital photographs because, firstly, I believe that there is a continuity. Second, digital photography was only in its infancy with names like Nancy Burson and Aziz / Cucher.

The book consists of 17 chapters, each of which discusses a separate phenomenon: approximation, nonsense, falsification, fascination, infantilism, mannerism, simulation, etc. The last chapter of "Varia: Extracts and Comments" is an appendix to the whole. Short texts, reminiscent of microblogs, and sometimes microfelietons, contain analyzes of non-trivial, underground or aberrant cases of using language in communication -- in journalistic, promotional, artistic and colloquial discourses.
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With the rise of Northern and Central European Protestant thought, Portugal and Spain, under the constant heavy influence of the Catholic Church, found themselves under a long intellectual blockade on new knowledge arising from outside their own borders. This situation, in time, signified that Iberian knowledge became trapped in a kind of self reference loop of classical scholasticism. Particularly in the area of medical knowledge, this situation in term meant that there was a gradual approach and blurring of academic knowledge and magical/traditional healing, generating a complex landscape of health professionals both sanctioned and unsanctioned.
Eventually, by the end of the 17th century and beginning of the 18th, with the growing Enlightenment movement in Europe, a number of physicians, by acquiring positions of relevance as familiares of the inquisition so as to aid in the persecution and conviction of non-academic magical healer, began to have access to European medical literature, leading them to gradually implement and assimilate new medical knowledge into their traditional Galenic formation. As this new stream of knowledge collided with traditional Portuguese Galenic medicine, several physicians can be observed to attempt to negotiate their personal position along a spectrum of traditionalism vs. progress, a gradual movement which would eventually lead to the violent reformation of the Jesuit run University of Coimbra and the banishment of that particular religious order from the country by the Marquis of Pombal in 1759.
This thesis hopes to expose this particular transitional moment in Portuguese medical and chymical knowledge. In particular, given the position of several physicians as familiares of the inquisition, how these articulated and defined concepts such as magic, sorcery and witchcraft into their own transitional practices; from where do these concepts arise (from adherence to traditional Catholic doctrine or more modern concepts of Natural Magic), what powers they attributed to these and how these could be medically treated and remedied.
For this end a number of physicians will be analyzed who can be observed to place themselves on various positions along the traditionalism vs. progress spectrum: João Curvo Semedo, a famous and influential physician, chymist and segredista, by far the most innovative of the analyzed group; Francisco da Fonseca Henriques, personal physician of King John V and harmonizer of tradition and progress; and finally Bernardo Pereira, a strict catholic traditionalist attempting to salvage what he sees as the collapse of traditional knowledge.

Undisclosed Desires of the Images: The Medusa Effect

The article explores the power of fascination of images and its connection to the mythological Medusa figure. What are the secrets of certain captivating images? Why are some images more powerful than others? Image's ability to create a vortex than can absorb the beholder and to arrest its movements literally killing the life, is a sign of power or weakness? What creates a very profound communication between the image and the beholder? I will try to answer these questions under the teachings of Lacan, Diderot, Aristotle and by a vast research of literature.

In Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Kurtz is constantly described as an exceptional figure: after excelling in the colonial enterprise in an outstanding way, he becomes its extraordinarily horrific incarnation in the eyes of the company and of the narrator Marlow, who each give expression to contemporary colonial anxieties concerning atavism and “going native”. Kurtz’s exceptionalism thereby gives rise to the fascination with colonialism itself that structures the text. However, Conrad undermines this fascination by inviting us to read the figure as the most banal and ordinary product of Western civilization, neither remarkable nor terrifying. This paper argues that the banalization of Kurtz is key to any critique of colonialism that might be read in this text. It then examines Francis Ford Coppola’s reprisal of the figure in the 1979 film Apocalypse Now to show that by exacerbating Kurtz’s exceptional nature, the film encourages fascination with the colonial enterprise and absolute power once again.

W artykule omówiono książkę Adriana Glenia „Andrzej Stasiuk. Istnienie”, która odwołuje się do tradycji hermeneutycznej w badaniach literackich. Perspektywę, z której Gleń analizuje prozę Stasiuka, w dużym stopniu wyznaczają problemy podjęte przez Martina Heideggera, a także postulaty „krytyki identyfikującej się” przedstawiciela szkoły genewskiej Georges’a Pouleta. Praca ukazuje szerszy kontekst zagadnień dotyczących autobiografizmu, polemizując z zaproponowaną przez Glenia interpretacją „bez biograficznych natręctw”. Omówione zostały również trudności metodologiczne związane z uprawianiem krytyki literackiej pod wpływem fascynacji analizowaną twórczością. Autor szczególnie wyeksponował te praktyki literaturoznawcze, które eksplorują kategorię doświadczenia.

For American Balkan music tourists, it is disillusioning to reconcile the Balkan village (a long-imagined source of fascination) with the urbanity they encounter in Bulgaria. The Koprivshtitsa festival, however, does offer visitors images of the " folk. " Based on fieldwork and surveys conducted with tourists, the article examines the varied expectations that festival attendees hold for Koprivshtitsa as timeless village, cultural center, and contemporary town, and calls for an ethnomusicological consideration of the nature and role of fascination within musical tourism. It concludes by relating " meaningful blindness " (integral to these tourists' fascination) to their imaginings, arguing that sonic encounter in situ brings fascination not to an end but rather to a more self-aware stage of subject-to-object relationship, through the reciprocal witnessing of Selves and Others.

This unpublished essay explores the way the frequently noted association between horror and fascination is tied to the eeriness or uncanniness that arises in the experience of place and landscape. Central to my argument is the idea that the real connection between horror and fascination is founded in our essential embeddedness in place – an embeddedness that is sometimes manifest in a form of melancholia (most obvious in the experience of nostalgia), but in its more extreme forms carries over into a horror from which we are nevertheless unable to turn away.

Meyer's (2012) qualitative research on motivation of German karateka initiated the coordinated research project Why Martial Arts? (WMA) to analyse motives in various martial arts styles, like jūdō, taiji, krav maga and wing chun. In 2017, the Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) supported the transposition of the research question to Japanese karatedō and jūdō practitioners. For the German sub-study, 32 interviews were conducted about entry/participation motives, fascination categories, and reasons for choosing karatedō. The design of the Japanese sub-study was based on the aforementioned German study, but due to the higher number of participants (n = 106), a mixed method questionnaire was used and distributed via paper and online versions. The results demonstrate that many motivation categories of Japanese and German karatedō practitioners share similarities in importance and content, although the characteristics of motives can be very different-partly due to cultural specifics.

Last year Samsung introduced a mobile phone called "Soul" made with a human touch and including itself a “magic touch”. Through the analysis of a Nokia mobile phone TV-commercials I want to examine the function and form of digital technology in everyday images.
      The mobile phone and its digital camera and other devices are depicted by everyday aesthetics as capable of producing a unique human presence and interaction. The medium, the technology is a necessary helper of this very special and lost humanity. Without the technology, no special humanity, no soul - such is the prophecy. This personification or anthropomorphism is important for the branding of new technology. Technology is seen as creating a techno-transcendence towards a more qualified humanity which is in contact with fundamental human values like intuition, vision, and sensing; all the qualities that technology, industrialization, and rationalization, - in short modernity – have taken away from human existence. What old technology has removed now comes back through new technology promoting a better humanity.
      The present article investigates how digital technology and affects are presented and combined, with examples from everyday imagery, e.g. TV commercials and internet commercials for mobile phones from Nokia, or handheld computers, as Sony-Ericsson prefers to call them. Digital technology points towards a forgotten pre-human and not only post-human condition.

Bottom: I see a voice. Now will I to the chink To spy an I can hear my Thisbe’s face. Thisbe? (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 5.1.191–3) The revels have begun. After long rehearsals, the artisans finally perform their play in honour of Theseus and Hippolyta’s wedding: ‘A tedious brief scene of young Pyramus / And his love Thisbe: very tragical mirth’ (5.1.56–7). The play within the play provides a comic reflection of the communication situation in the theatre insofar as it creates another space-within-a-space wherein observers observe other observers observing. But, as Theseus notices (‘“Merry” and “tragical”? “Tedious” and “brief”?’ (5.1.58)), it also reconciles the irreconcilable: it makes the tragic comic; it makes visible what can only be heard; and it disembodies what can usually only be seen. In the following, I will take up Bottom’s cue and provide new perspectives on voices and faces as well as their interaction and translation in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. As I will argue, much...

The article contains an edition, French translation, and study of a text discovered in 1964 by Lynn Thorndike in the manuscript Vat. lat. 1121. The text is an unfinished, anonymous, and undated question that addresses the power that the imagination has on external bodies. The study of the question’s sources and argumentation sheds light on the profile of the anonymous author, his intellectual environment, and his period of activity. It can be shown that the text was written after Franciscan and Dominican debates of the end of the 13th century about the relations between the soul and the body, after Peter of Abano’s Commentary on Aristotle’s Problemata (1310) and after the Council of Vienne (1313). Thus, this text is a good example of the scholastic literature on the power of fascinatio. Nevertheless, contrary to Thorndike’s suggestion, its author is unlikely to have been Nicole Oresme.

This essay discusses Adrian Gleń’s book "Andrzej Stasiuk. Istnienie", which refers to the hermeneutical tradition in literary studies. The perspective from which Gleń analyzes Stasiuk’s prose is largely determined by Martin Heidegger’s philosophy, as well as postulates of "self-identifying criticism" by Georges Pulet of the Geneva School. The essay presents a broader context for issues related to autobiographism, polemizing with Gleń’s interpretation "without biographical intrusions". Additionally, methodological issues related to literary criticism under the influence of fascination with the analyzed works are discussed. The essay focuses on literary studies practices which explore the category of experience.

Although embedded in radically different historical and cultural contexts, the spectacular theatrical productions of the English Restoration and the present-day digital film industry provide a rich testing ground to explore the intersections of visual artifice with negotiations of the heroic. My paper analyses how these configurations of media, technologies and audiences interact with the (affective) modes of relatedness which determine heroic figurations as well as cultural concepts of the heroic. Using Dryden’s Conquest of Granada (1669) and Settle’s Empress of Morocco (1673) as case studies, the first part sets out to analyse how (competing) modes of heroic effect and audience response are negotiated, and how affective responses are tied to allocations of power. 21st-century cinema, and digital 3D in particular, is similarly characterized by paradigmatic shifts in media cultures and perceptual habits, and constantly operates on the boundaries of illusion. In a close reading of Cuarón’s Gravity (2013), I will analyse how the photorealistic and stereoscopic expansion of space as well as the intersection of image and narrative comes to unhinge the spectators’ position and inflects established tropes of heroic exceptionality.

Éva Pataki
Atmospheres, Fascination and Phantasmagoria in Sunetra Gupta’s The Glassblower’s Breath Investigating the literary representation of urban spaces and identities, my paper untangles the complex psychological and emotional relationship between the heroine and her beloved and hated cities in Sunetra Gupta’s The Glassblower’s Breath (1993). Drawing on Gernot Böhme’s (1993) theory of the atmospheric qualities of space,
Steve Pile’s psychogeographical approach to reading cities, Walter Benjamin’s concept of phantasmagoria and various interpretations of fascination, the paper explores the creation of atmospheres in the novel and the role of fascination in the perception of London and Gupta’s female protagonist as phantasmagorias. I argue that – as urban imaginaries – the emotional fabric and atmosphere of the cities portrayed are as much created by their spaces and places, their inhabitants and visitors, as are manifested and formulated in emotional states of being, whether real or fictional, phantasmagoric or imaginary.

What is it that makes research fascinating? Is it the lure of the unknown, the attraction of taking risks, or is it the desire to gain insight into areas of knowledge that are yet unexplored? 
This weekly calendar for 2016 shall provide an answer to these questions by providing insight into current research projects while trying to transport some of the fascination elicited by the sciences and humanities. The images collected in this calendar derive from an international photo contest (Visions and Images of Fascination: Sciences and Humanities Visualised, 2013), organised by Die Junge Akademie in collaboration with the young academies of the Netherlands (De Jonge Akademie), Russia (The Council of Young Scientists), Scotland (RSE Young Academy of Scotland) and Sweden (Sveriges Unga Akademi).

Reflections about Fascination, Affect, Interaction and Sensoric Images in Digital Culture and New Technology. I come up with a new term - 'In-Between-Images', which are the images created in between the perceiver and the perceived. We are active and interactive with these images, which are created out of all perceptual and sensoric material and stimuli in our surroundings.: https://www.scribd.com/doc/29786523/Bent-Fausing-In-Between-Images-Reflections-on-Fascination-and-Affect-and-Sensoric-Images