Anatomy of an IconJohnson, Ryan Kurt
doi: 10.1163/15685292-03003001pmid: N/A
AbstractExamining the German artist Fidus’s Lichtgebet, this study builds off previous examinations of his work by focusing on the popular success of Lichtgebet following its breakthrough at the Free German Youth Conference in 1913. Rather than view the artist as an example of proto-Nazism or cultural pessimism, the author contends the widespread popularity of Lichtgebet was due to its effectiveness in addressing the ‘disenchantment’ felt by many Wilhelmine Germans by offering them the possibility of ‘reenchantment.’ The author contends that Fidus’s Lichtgebet, which situated a nude, androgynous youth in a redeeming embrace of a sacralised Nature, offered Wilhelmine Germans a spiritual experience in the natural body without foregoing the sanction of science, specifically evolutionary science. By doing so, Lichtgebet combined the contemporary longing for spiritual renewal with an acceptance of modern science to weld itself onto a wide variety of new forms of spirituality, leading to its success.
“That Unique Springtide”—or—“The Course of History Is Indeed a Reality”Makowsky, Reid
doi: 10.1163/15685292-03003002pmid: N/A
AbstractOften labeled a knee-jerk reactionary, Evelyn Waugh’s relationship to twentieth-century Catholicism has been misunderstood. One recent study has shown that Waugh was influenced, at least indirectly, by mid-century Nouvelle Theology, or Ressourcement, which sought to rediscover the theology of the Fathers of the Church. In so doing, the theologians of the Ressourcement described what Hans Boersma has called a “sacramental ontology,” in which nature is inextricably linked to the supernatural, and history, and the human acts that comprise it, is nothing less than the story of creation’s return to its Creator. This, I argue, is precisely what Waugh portrays in his novel Helena, which chronicles the life of St. Helena, mother of Constantine and Finder of the True Cross. In making this claim, I aim to correct a prominent reading of Helena, which sees Helena’s personal salvation as an escape from a changeless and futile history.
The Young and the DepthlessTardif, Stephen
doi: 10.1163/15685292-03003003pmid: N/A
AbstractPaolo Sorrentino’s The Young Pope features lavish reproductions of art, ludic postmodern parodies, and stunning cinematic sequences, all in a series built around an off-putting pontiff who, nevertheless, enjoys a reputation for saintliness. This article offers a framework for understanding how these disparate elements of the series work together. It first shows how Sorrentino’s self-subverting postmodernism creates the conditions for his audience to take flat surfaces—of transmediated art and of the show’s enigmatic protagonist—seriously. It then shows how the series’ irreverent reproductions of painting and sculpture mediate important moments in the history of the arts, and how these traditions inform its most visually striking scenes. Finally, it considers how the show’s aesthetic resources are deployed in depictions of the eponymous young pope in prayer. In these scenes, what seems to be a flat character emerges as a superficial saint as Sorrentino engages the perennial artistic challenge of depicting holiness in compelling ways.
Chinese TibetSingh, Vijay Prakash
doi: 10.1163/15685292-03003004pmid: N/A
AbstractToday, Tibet is a beleaguered land with seventy-five years of grossly manipulative, exploitative, and cruel annexation by China in 1950. According to one estimate in the cultural revolution alone about 1.2 million people were killed and 6000 monasteries plundered. A section of Tibetan society that came under particular acts of repression and torture were members of the monastic order, whether monks or nuns. Several sagas of inhuman torture have come to light, either in written accounts or as published oral narratives. This paper looks at interviews given by nuns and monks under the “Tibet Oral Project” and painful accounts of nine nuns entitled Tibet in Chains: The Stories of Nine Tibetan Nuns published by the International Campaign for Tibet (ICT). Daily torture and humiliation were an unmitigated routine of their imprisonment but all these nuns miraculously survived to tell their story. Monks have suffered a similar treatment but “nuns are singled out for special treatment” in the words of Patrick French. My paper will show how Tibetans have borne tyranny for decades by the Chinese merely for voicing their aspirations for a free Tibet and how this suffering born of attachment to that possibility seems to have no remedy while the larger world has averted its gaze from their suffering.