Seibu Department Store: Cultivating the Avant-Garde Consumer in 1980's Bubble-Era Japan

Multisensory and cross-modal perception have been recognised as crucial for shaping modernist epistemology, aesthetics, and art. Illustrative examples of how it might be possible to test equivalences (or mutual translatability) between different sensual modalities can be found in theoretical pronouncements on the arts and in artistic production of both the avant-garde and high modernism. While encouraging multisensory, cross-modal, and multimodal artistic experiments, twentieth-century artists set forth a new language of sensory integration. This article addresses the problem of the literary representation of multisensory and cross-modal experience as a particular challenge for translation, which is not only a linguistic and cross-cultural operation but also cross-sensual, involving the gap between different culture-specific perceptual realities. The problem of sensory perception remains a vast underexplored terrain of modernist translation history and theory, and yet it is one with potentially far-reaching ramifications for both a cultural anthropology of translation and modernism's sensory anthropology. The framework of this study is informed by Douglas Robinson's somatics of translation and Clive Scott's perceptive phenomenology of translation, which help to put forth the notion of sensory equivalence as a pragmatic correspondence between the source and target texts, appealing to a range of somato-sensory (audial, visual, haptic, gestural, articulatory kinaesthetic, proprioceptive) modalities of reader response.

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The Spanish Reception of Le Sacre du Printemps (1913–1936)

Dance Research ◽

10.3366/drs.2018.0220 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 36 (1) ◽

pp. 48-66

Author(s):

Idoia Murga Castro

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Civil War ◽

Spanish Civil War ◽

Original Work ◽

Silver Age ◽

Avant Garde ◽

Ballets Russes ◽

Rite Of Spring ◽

Le Sacre Du Printemps ◽

Cultural Expansion

Centenary celebrations are being held between 2016 and 2018 to mark the first consecutive tours of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes in Spain. This study analyses the Spanish reception of Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring) (1913), one of its most avant-garde pieces. Although the original work was never performed in Spain as a complete ballet, its influence was felt deeply in the work of certain Spanish choreographers, composers, painters and intellectuals during the so-called Silver Age, the period of modernisation and cultural expansion which extended from the end of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the Spanish Civil War.

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Misreading Egypt

10.3366/edinburgh/9781474424776.003.0002 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Jesse Schotter

Keyword(s):

New Media ◽

Narrative Form ◽

Experimental Film ◽

Tower Of Babel ◽

Avant Garde ◽

Sergei Eisenstein ◽

History Of ◽

The One ◽

The Relationship ◽

Modern Technologies

The first chapter of Hieroglyphic Modernisms exposes the complex history of Western misconceptions of Egyptian writing from antiquity to the present. Hieroglyphs bridge the gap between modern technologies and the ancient past, looking forward to the rise of new media and backward to the dispersal of languages in the mythical moment of the Tower of Babel. The contradictory ways in which hieroglyphs were interpreted in the West come to shape the differing ways that modernist writers and filmmakers understood the relationship between writing, film, and other new media. On the one hand, poets like Ezra Pound and film theorists like Vachel Lindsay and Sergei Eisenstein use the visual languages of China and of Egypt as a more primal or direct alternative to written words. But Freud, Proust, and the later Eisenstein conversely emphasize the phonetic qualities of Egyptian writing, its similarity to alphabetical scripts. The chapter concludes by arguing that even avant-garde invocations of hieroglyphics depend on narrative form through an examination of Hollis Frampton’s experimental film Zorns Lemma.

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Avant-Garde Meat

Film-Philosophy ◽

10.3366/film.2002.0027 ◽

2002 ◽

Vol 6 (2) ◽

Author(s):

Jake Kennedy

Keyword(s):

Avant Garde

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Readies for Bob Brown's Machine

10.3366/edinburgh/9781474455053.001.0001 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Robert Carlton Brown

Keyword(s):

Text Messaging ◽

Gertrude Stein ◽

Ezra Pound ◽

William Carlos Williams ◽

Public Attention ◽

Avant Garde ◽

Internet Media ◽

Facsimile Edition ◽

Viewing Screen ◽

Writing Technology

This is the much-anticipated new edition of the important volume of avant-garde writing, Readies for Bob Brown's Machine. The original collection of Readies was published by Brown’s Roving Eye Press in 1931. Despite including works by leading modernist writers including Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Kay Boyle, F.T. Marinetti, and 35 other writers and artists, this volume has never been re-issued. Like the ‘talkies’ in cinema, Brown’s machine and the ‘readies’ medium he created for it proposed to revolutionise reading with technology by scrolling texts across a viewing screen. Apart from its importance to modernism, Brown’s research on reading seems remarkably prescient in light of text messaging, e-books, and internet media ecologies. Brown’s designs for a modernist style of reading, which emphasised speed, movement, and immediacy, required a complete re-design of reading and writing technology. Complete with a new Preface by Eric White and a new Introduction and a separate chapter on the contributors by Craig Saper, this critical facsimile edition restores to public attention the extraordinary experiments of writing readies for a reading machine.

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