The Body and the Arts

Transcription

1 The Body and the Arts

2 Also by Corinne Saunders RAPE AND RAVISHMENT IN THE LITERATURE OF MEDIEVAL ENGLAND THE FOREST OF MEDIEVAL ROMANCE: Avernus, Broceliande, Arden A CONCISE COMPANION TO CHAUCER (editor) CULTURAL ENCOUNTERS IN THE ROMANCE OF MEDIEVAL ENGLAND (editor) MADNESS AND CREATIVITY IN LITERATURE AND CULTURE (co-editor with Jane Macnaughton) PEARL: A Modernised Version by Victor Watts (co-editor with David Fuller) A COMPANION TO ROMANCE: From Classical to Contemporary WRITING WAR: Medieval Literary Responses (co-editor with Françoise le Saux and Neil Thomas) CHAUCER (editor) Also by Ulrika Maude BECKETT, TECHNOLOGY AND THE BODY BECKETT AND PHENOMENOLOGY (co-editor with Matthew Feldman) Also by Jane Macnaughton BIOETHICS AND THE HUMANITIES: Attitudes and Perceptions (with Robin Downie) CLINICAL JUDGEMENT: Evidence in Practice (with Robin Downie) MADNESS AND CREATIVITY IN LITERATURE AND CULTURE (co-editor with Corinne Saunders)

3 The Body and the Arts Edited by Corinne Saunders, Ulrika Maude and Jane Macnaughton Palgrave macmillan

4 Introduction, selection and editorial matter Corinne Saunders, Ulrika Maude & Jane Macnaughton 2009 Individual chapters contributors 2009 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act First published 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number , of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin's Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave and Macmillan are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN ISBN (ebook) DOI / This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Transferred to Digital Printing 2010

5 To our parents, Keith and Jeannette Saunders, Helena and George Maude, and Margaret-Ann and Callum Macnaughton

6 Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Notes on the Contributors ix xi xii Introduction 1 Corinne Saunders, Ulrika Maude and Jane Macnaughton Part I Thinking the Body 1 Polyclitus among the Philosophers: Canons of Classical Beauty 11 George Boys-Stones 2 Body as Graced or Vile: Tensions in the Christian Vision 25 David Brown 3 The Smoke of the Soul: Anatomy, Medical Spirits and the Rete Mirabile: Richard Sugg 4 The Fizziness Business 55 Steven Connor 5 Flesh Revealed: Medicine, Art and Anatomy 72 Jane Macnaughton Part II Writing the Body 6 The Affective Body: Love, Virtue and Vision in English Medieval Literature 87 Corinne Saunders 7 Victorian Literature and Bringing the Body Back from the Dead 103 Francis O Gorman 8 Modernist Bodies: Coming to Our Senses 116 Ulrika Maude 9 Writing the Body: Modernism and Postmodernism 131 Patricia Waugh vii

7 viii Contents 10 Detective Fiction and the Body 148 P. D. James (in conversation with Corinne Saunders) Part III Viewing the Body 11 Pygmalion, Painted Flesh, and the Female Body 165 Martin Postle 12 Satyrs, Spiders, Jellyfish, and Mutants: Ovidian Metamorphosis in Contemporary Art 186 Marina Warner 13 Body, Space, Time 209 Antony Gormley 14 Une écriture corporelle: The Dancer in the Text of Mallarmé and Yeats 237 Susan Jones 15 The Erotic and the Sacred Body in Opera: The Venusberg to Monsalvat and Beyond 254 David Fuller 16 Celluloid Formaldehyde? The Body on Film 270 Judith Buchanan Index 287

8 Illustrations 1.1 Polyclitus, Doryphoros, The Canon (Roman copy) after Polyclitus (fifth century BC) Giovanni Bernini, Death of the Blessed Ludovica Albertoni (1674) The Angel with a Smile, Cathedral of Notre Dame, Reims, France (thirteenth century) Group of seventeen students at dissecting table with cadaver, Postcard (c. 1910) Operations T-shirt: Incisions (c. 2000) Christine Borland, Bullet Proof Breath (2001) William Etty, Cleopatra s Arrival in Cilicia (1821) Thomas Rowlandson, The Modern Pygmalion (after 1811) Walter Richard Sickert, La Hollandaise (c. 1906) Francis Bacon, version no. 2 of Lying Figure with a Hypodermic Syringe (1968) Jenny Saville, Rubens Flap (1999) Kiki Smith, Harpie (2002) Anish Kapoor, Marsyas (2002) Louise Bourgeois, Maman (1999) Dorothy Cross, Medusae ( ) Antony Gormley, Full Bowl ( ) Antony Gormley, Three Ways: Mould (1981) Antony Gormley, Three Ways: Mould, Hole and Passage (1981) Antony Gormley, Three Ways: Hole (1981) Antony Gormley, Three Ways: Passage (1981) Antony Gormley, Land, Sea and Air II (1982) Antony Gormley, Room for the Great Australian Desert (1989) Antony Gormley, Room II (1987) Antony Gormley, Allotment II (1996) Antony Gormley, Drawn (2000) Antony Gormley, Total Strangers (1996) Antony Gormley, Another Place (1997) Antony Gormley, Exercise Between Blood and Earth ( ) Antony Gormley, Still Running ( ) Antony Gormley, Body ( ) 228 ix

9 x Illustrations Antony Gormley, Insider I (1997) & Antony Gormley, Inside Australia ( ) Antony Gormley, Bodies in Space V (2001) Antony Gormley, Transfuser I (2002) Antony Gormley, Quantum Cloud (2000) Antony Gormley, Domain Field (2003) Antony Gormley, Feeling Material XIII (2004) Antony Gormley, Clearing I (2004) Loïe Fuller in La Danse Blanche (c. 1898) Kirsten Flagstad as Kundry in Wagner s Parsifal The Sideshow Wrestlers (Conseil de Pipelet ou un Tour à la Foire, 1908) The Wizard of Oz (MGM: Victor Fleming, 1939) Possessed (MGM: Clarence Brown, 1931) Rear Window (Paramount: Hitchcock, 1954) 284

10 Acknowledgements This collection of essays stems from a Public Lecture Series held at the University of Durham in , a joint initiative between the Centre for Arts and Humanities in Health and Medicine, and the Department of English Studies. The series followed the model of Madness and Creativity: The Mind, Medicine and Literature (edited by Corinne Saunders and Jane Macnaughton as Madness and Creativity in Literature and Culture, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), and The Arts and Sciences of Criticism (edited by David Fuller and Patricia Waugh, Oxford University Press, 1999). The Series was generously supported by a grant from the Wellcome Trust and by the University of Durham General Lectures Committee, as well as by the Department of English Studies, the Centre for Arts and Humanities in Health and Medicine, and the School of Medicine and Health. We are grateful to the Dean of Arts, Professor Seth Kunin, for his generous contribution to the technological costs of the Lecture Series, and to Mr Archie Heslop, for his mastery of the technology. We should also like to thank the then Vice-Chancellor, Sir Kenneth Calman, for his interest and support. The Department of English Studies, the Faculty of Arts, and the School of Medicine and Health have generously contributed to the cost of the illustrations in this book. We owe particular thanks to Professor Patricia Waugh, then Head of the Department of English Studies, for her unswerving encouragement and participation. We have incurred many other debts in the making of the book. Paula Kennedy and the editorial and production staff of Palgrave Macmillan have been unfailingly helpful. David Fuller generously transcribed the contributions of Antony Gormley and P. D. James, and created the index. Shamus Smith offered invaluable technological advice, and he, Andrew Russell and David Fuller could not have been more generous in their constant encouragement, interest and support. xi

11 Contributors George Boys-Stones is Senior Lecturer in Classics at Durham. He is author of Post-Hellenistic Philosophy: A Study of its Development from the Stoics to Origen (2001), and editor of Metaphor, Allegory, and the Classical Tradition: Ancient Thought and Modern Revisions (2003), both for Oxford University Press. He is also one of the contributors to a major study of physiognomy in Graeco- Roman Antiquity, published by Oxford in David Brown was Van Mildert Professor of Divinity at Durham from 1990 to 2007, and is now Wardlaw Professor of Theology, Aesthetics and Culture at the University of St Andrews. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in His main interest is the relation between theology and other disciplines. His books The Divine Trinity (1985) and Continental Philosophy and Modern Theology (1987) focus on the intersection of philosophy and religion. He has recently completed a series of five volumes for Oxford University Press on the relation of theology and culture more generally, in particular the arts. His God and Enchantment of Place (2004) dealt with subjects such as architecture, pilgrimage and landscape painting; God and Grace of Body: Sacrament in Ordinary (2007) with such topics as body, food and music, culminating in a discussion of the Eucharist. His most recent volume is God and Mystery in Words: Experience through Drama and Metaphor (2008). He has a continuing interest in sacramental theology and spirituality, as reflected in three earlier edited volumes. Judith Buchanan is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies in the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York. She is author of Shakespeare on Film (Longman-Pearson, 2005), of Shakespeare on Silent Film (Cambridge University Press, 2009) and of numerous articles about literary and cinematic texts in conversation with each other. She works on British and American cinema from the silent era to the present and has a special interest in questions of cinematic authorship, literary adaptation, the cultural transmission of fundamental stories across media and moment, issues of cinematic censorship and the material legacies of works of cinema. She is currently working on a study of biblical films of the silent era. Steven Connor is Professor of Modern Literature and Theory at Birkbeck College, London, and the Academic Director of the London Consortium. He is a writer and broadcaster for radio, and the author of books on Dickens and Beckett, as well as of Postmodernist Culture (1989; 2nd edn 1996), Theory and Cultural Value (1992), The English Novel in History (1995), James Joyce (1996), Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism (Oxford, 2000), The Book of Skin xii

12 Contributors xiii (Reaktion, 2003), and Fly (Reaktion, 2006), on the history of the fly in poetry, painting, religion and science. He is now writing a book about the air. David Fuller is Emeritus Professor of English in the University of Durham. He has written on a wide range of topics, from the Renaissance to the Modern period. He has particular interests in poetry, religion and music, and has worked extensively on William Blake. He is the author of Blake s Heroic Argument (1988), James Joyce s Ulysses (1992), and, with David Brown, Signs of Grace (1995). He has also edited Marlowe s Tamburlaine the Great (1998), Blake s poetry for the Longman Annotated Texts series (2000), and, with Patricia Waugh, The Arts and Sciences of Criticism (1999). His current research is on Shakespeare in modern performance. Antony Gormley is an acclaimed British sculptor, and an important promoter of the arts in the North-East. He is the creator of the Angel of the North (1998), Field for the British Isles (1993) and Quantum Cloud (2000). One of his most recent works, Domain Field (2003), was the first to make use of the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art as an art factory. The work was sculpted using the bodies of local Gateshead residents as models. P. D. James is a celebrated writer of detective fiction. She is the author of nineteen books, many of which have been filmed and broadcast on television in the United States and other countries. Most famous for her creation of the Scotland Yard detective, Commander Adam Dalgliesh, she has also written other works of fiction and non-fiction, including an autobiography. She spent thirty years in various departments of the British Civil Service, including the Police and Criminal Law Department of the Home Office. The recipient of many prizes and honours, she was created Baroness James of Holland Park in Susan Jones is Fellow in English at St Hilda s College, Oxford. She is the author of Conrad and Women (1999) and is co-editing Chance for the Cambridge edition of Joseph Conrad. She is currently writing a book on literary modernism and dance for Oxford University Press. Jane Macnaughton is Co-Director of the Centre for Medical Humanities at the University of Durham. She is a qualified GP and has a PhD in Philosophy. Her main interests are in the applications of the humanities to medical education, and how arts and humanities subjects can inform medical and clinical practice. She has published a number of papers on this subject as well as a book, Clinical Judgement: Evidence in Practice (Oxford University Press, 2000). With Corinne Saunders, she has edited Madness and Creativity in Literature and Culture (Palgrave, 2005). She is also a co-editor of the journal Medical Humanities. Ulrika Maude is Lecturer in English at the University of Durham. She has published essays and articles on modernist writing, perception and

13 xiv Contributors philosophies of embodiment, and is the author of Beckett, Technology and the Body (Cambridge University Press, 2009). She is also co-editor of Beckett and Phenomenology (Continuum, 2009). She is currently writing a book on modernism and medical culture. Francis O Gorman is Professor of Victorian Literature at the University of Leeds. His books include John Ruskin (1999), Late Ruskin: New Contexts (2001), Blackwell s Critical Guide to the Victorian Novel (2002), and the Concise Companion to the Victorian Novel (2004), as well as Ruskin and Gender (edited with Dinah Birch, 2002) and The Victorians and the Eighteenth Century: Reassessing the Tradition (edited with Katherine Turner, 2004). His Victorian Poetry: An Annotated Anthology appeared in 2004, and his edition of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle s The Hound of the Baskervilles in He is currently writing about Victorian literature and immortal life. Martin Postle is Director of Academic Activities at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. He was previously curator and Head of British Art to 1900 at Tate Britain. He has worked on many major exhibitions, including William Blake and Thomas Gainsborough. He co-curated Art of the Garden (2004) and was curator of Joshua Reynolds: The Creation of Celebrity (2005). His extensive publications on British art from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries include Sir Joshua Reynolds: The Subject Pictures (1995); Gainsborough (2002); (with William Vaughan) The Artist s Model: From Etty to Spencer (1999); and a co-edited collection, Model and Supermodel: The Artist s Model in British Art and Culture (2006). He is currently working on an exhibition on the eighteenth-century artist, Johan Zoffany, to be shown at Tate Britain and the Yale Centre for British Art in 2010; and another on the Welsh landscape painter, Richard Wilson. Corinne Saunders is Professor in the Department of English Studies at the University of Durham. She specialises in medieval literature and the history of ideas, and has particular interests in the history of women and the history of medicine. Her publications include The Forest of Medieval Romance (1993), Rape and Ravishment in the Literature of Medieval England (2001), a Blackwell Critical Guide to Chaucer (2001), and A Companion to Romance (2004), which considers the transformations of the genre from its classical origins to the present. She has also edited Cultural Encounters in the Romance of Medieval England (2005), and a Blackwell Concise Companion to Chaucer (2006). She has recently completed a monograph, Magic and the Supernatural in Medieval English Romance, and is the English editor of the journal Medium Ævum. Richard Sugg is Fellow in Literature and Medicine in the University of Durham. His publications include John Donne (Palgrave, 2007) and Murder after Death: Literature and Anatomy in Early Modern England (Cornell, 2007). He is currently writing a book on surgery from the Renaissance onwards.

14 Contributors xv Marina Warner is a prize-winning writer of fiction, criticism and history; her works include novels and short stories as well as studies of female myths and symbols. She has a special interest in the visual arts and has curated a number of exhibitions related to her research. Her critical works include Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary (1976); From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers (1994); No Go the Bogeyman: Scaring, Lulling, and Making Mock (1998); Signs and Wonders: Essays on Literature and Culture (2003); Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds: Ways of Telling the Self (2004); and Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media (2006). She was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in She is Professor in the Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex. Patricia Waugh is Professor of English Studies at the University of Durham. Her extensive publications in the areas of intellectual history, critical theory and modern fiction include Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction (1984; 3rd edn 2003); Feminine Fictions: Revisiting the Postmodern (1989); Practising Postmodernism: Reading Modernism (1992); The Harvest of the Sixties: English Literature and its Backgrounds (1995); and Revolutions of the Word: Intellectual Contexts for the Study of Modern Literature (1997). Her reader, Modern Literary Theory, is now in its fourth edition (2001). She has also edited a number of works, including (with David Fuller) The Arts and Sciences of Criticism (1999), and Literary Theory and Criticism: An Oxford Guide (2006). She is currently completing Literature, Science and the Good Society for Oxford University Press.