Sillages critiques
http://journals.openedition.org/sillagescritiques
La revue publie des travaux scientifiques consacrés aux littératures de langue anglaise.Shakespeare During Covid-19: Expanding Our Theatrical HorizonsThis article focuses on the digital adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays which have been produced and/or broadcast during the Covid-19 pandemic. It reflects on three assumptions in particular: that digital theatre is not “real” theatre, that audiences were not active participants during these online performances, and that digital theatre was a simple parenthesis which would close as soon as theatres would open again. I argue that, on the contrary, online theatre has taught us about the limitations of physical theatre and should inspire us to make it more accessible. Shakespeare’s plays appear as an experimental ground to implement these changes. ]]>Méline Dumot
http://journals.openedition.org/sillagescritiques/15219
2023-12-10Tracing the Divine Office: On Frames and Patterns in Medieval Latin Psalter ManuscriptsMedieval Latin Psalter manuscripts are closely related to the Liturgy of the Hours and private devotional practices, within which they could be read. The psalms were ideally recited in their entirety within a week, though not continuously from beginning to end, but with interruptions. The Book of Psalms was therefore divided into sections and occasionally single psalms were recited several times. In this respect, access to certain psalms or groups of psalms was particularly important. Unlike modern books, however, medieval Psalter manuscripts usually do not contain page numbers or running titles that would make it easier for the user to find their way through the manuscript. Nevertheless, a closer look reveals other aids that make it possible to find certain sections or highlight individual psalms. In the spirit of Goffman, they can be understood as keys that point to a connection with the potential use of the manuscripts. The aesthetic and content-related keys (or in this case, mor...]]>Karin Becker
http://journals.openedition.org/sillagescritiques/14849
2023-12-10Framing Colonial Australia: A Socio-historical Articulation of the Display of ArtDuring the first half of the nineteenth century European settlement was consolidated in Australia. The industrialisation of convict transportation saw vast numbers of lawbreakers sent unceremoniously to Australian shores, with the newly emergent convict settlements of Hobart Town and Sydney quickly becoming Antipodean slums: untidy, unruly and in dire need of civilising. In this context, the cultivation of the arts was seen as a means of rehabilitation, moving the nomenclature away from “penal colony” to the more desirable descriptor “free society”. Amongst the early arrivals was a small but remarkable group of talented and knowledgeable artists, the most famous of whom was John Glover. These artists disembarked with their trade skills and traditions that included established conventions regarding the display of paintings. In the Western European art ecosystem of the early nineteenth century, it was de rigueur to present oil on canvas works in ornate gilt frames, as without a suitab...]]>Anita Gowers
http://journals.openedition.org/sillagescritiques/15038
2023-12-10The Dividing Sword: Basil Bunting’s The SpoilsThe late celebrity of Briggflatts has tended to subsume the body of Basil Bunting’s poetry into that poem’s themes and expectations and obscured the underlying assumptions that motivate his work. This is his extreme rejection of modernity – manifest in a money economy, the administered state and abstract thought – to which Bunting reacted by adopting an anti-humanist stance that determines both the form and content of his poetry. The basic terms of this position are preliminarily examined in a handful of early short poems, followed by a close reading of The Spoils – a poem that seems to baffle most commentators but represents Bunting’s most trenchant expression of his values and world view. Finally, the implications of this examination are brought to bear on Briggflatts itself to indicate how it is motivated by a systematic negation of the contemporary society that Bunting rejects.]]>Jeffrey Twitchell-Waas
http://journals.openedition.org/sillagescritiques/15314
2023-12-10Framing the Land: Canadian Landscapes Revisited in Jin-me Yoon and Lorraine Gilbert’s PhotographyThe representation of landscapes through survey photography in the mid to late 1800s largely contributed to document Canadian and American expansionist endeavors, to ascertain the documentary and scientific role that photography would play in that expansion and to foster a sense of national belonging and of Anglo-Saxon supremacy which would also find its expression in landscape painting. While the photographers engaged in geographical and topographical expeditionary missions envisioned the land as the epitome of the sublime landscape, the Group of Seven painters of the 1920s and 1930s later sought to express the essence of Canada’s northern identity through the celebration of a mythical wilderness. This manner of framing the land implied that what was kept outside of the frame or conversely included within its bounds, was often informed by hierarchical relations and colonialist visions of the land. I will be looking at the ways in which two contemporary Canadian photographers, Jin-m...]]>Gwendolyne Cressman
http://journals.openedition.org/sillagescritiques/15174
2023-12-10Ceci n’est pas le territoire: Transcending the Visual and Literary FrameThis article explores the concept of frame theory and its relevance in understanding works of literature and art which feature devices traditionally associated with metafiction but which paradoxically avoid purely self-referential modes. By highlighting their aesthetic frames, these works invite audiences to engage in an artistic exchange that collapses the critical distance often associated with conceptual art in favor of a more immersive experience with the work, the artist, or the reality beyond the frame. A new term derived from ongoing research in frame theory, “frame transcendence,” provides a more satisfactory categorization of such works which historically have been incorporated into the realm of “meta-art”. By examining the work of David Foster Wallace and select works in the visual arts previously labeled as “metapainting,” the article seeks to demonstrate that this new categorization resolves critical problems that result when art simultaneously draws attention to its fra...]]>Dane Coult
http://journals.openedition.org/sillagescritiques/15109
2023-12-10Who’s In and Who’s Out? War News from Mexico and the Framing of EvilIn Richard Caton Woodville’s 1848 painting, War News from Mexico, eleven figures crowd in and around a portico. Eight white men occupy the same physical plane and respond to word of America’s victory in the Mexican War. Three other figures – black, female, or both – are outside the portico. That the blacks, who were most directly affected by the war, are ignored by the whites above them, implies a political statement. The painting’s geometry suggests that it is also a painting about painting. The rectangular portico evokes a canvas and, I will argue, the man seated to the left is Woodville. Just as the rectangular portico evokes a canvas, so too the newspaper, perfectly centered within the portico. We have, then, a canvas within a canvas within a canvas. The exclusion of the blacks from the celebration mirrors the fact that the newspaper itself was produced by and for whites. The artist, his right arm cocked in painterly position, takes in the scene that he will frame for us. The wo...]]>Alan Hirsch
http://journals.openedition.org/sillagescritiques/15078
2023-12-10The Reversed Canvas: A Topos of Conflict Between Commercial and Aesthetic Values in Nineteenth-Century Paris and LondonThis chapter concerns the double valency of commercial and aesthetic values in reversed paintings depicted in nineteenth-century French and British paintings and cartoons of academic juries. My concern is not with actual backs of paintings, but with representations of them on the rectos of actual paintings, of which the best-known example is probably the huge canvas back in Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656). Likewise, my concern is not with the frame itself, but with intra-compositional frames of paintings (which I sometimes call versos or “backs”) depicted on the picture plane. Though the topos makes us aware that the painting we are looking at has a frame (which we can see) and a verso (which we cannot), I shall show how, especially when depicted on the move in outdoor settings, the reversed canvas embedded in the illusion may alert us to “extended” or “secondary frames” well outside its enframed setting, such as the studio where the painting was made or the gallery it will han...]]>Richard Read
http://journals.openedition.org/sillagescritiques/15019
2023-12-10In and Out of the Frame: The Construction of Meaning in Henry Peacham’s Minerva Britanna (1612)From 1531, when Heinrich Steiner illustrated Alciati’s Emblemata, the emblematic genre, while it grew and developed along various lines, came to crystallize in a tripartite structure: a motto, or title, a symbolic picture, and a text. To understand the emblem, the reader had to combine the three elements, usually displayed on the same page, but also make use of exterior knowledge. The emblem is a space where various sources from different eras and, at times, geographical areas, collide and coalesce in order to convey meaning. The reader needs to step out of the tripartite frame as the emblem calls upon other texts and images that have to be reassembled. This constant dialogue between the inside and the outside is perfectly exemplified by Henry Peacham’s Minerva Britanna. The 204 emblems of his collection were all engraved by the emblematist himself who took special care to place each picture within one of the eight different frames he designed. The superposition of elements on the p...]]>Cezara Bobeica
http://journals.openedition.org/sillagescritiques/14979
2023-12-10Framing the Golgotha in Renaissance PaintingThe coming together of frames and spaces poses a particular challenge at the dawn of early modern painting. In the master narrative of the period the emphasis is customarily put on the emergence of three-dimensional space. Initially painters aimed at generating homogenous depth within their work, a prerequisite of coherent immersive experience. However, hybridization of perspectivic registers was also explored. The importance of frames cannot be overlooked in this context. They either separate the various incompatible space-segments within the work, or by the virtue of their own fictiveness, they introduce the heterogenous element itself. In this essay, I explore some works that complicate further this dynamic link between frame and space. I will first turn to an example where the frame does not regulate the insertion of an independent register: the Ambassadors by Hans Holbein the Younger. In order to contextualize the radicality of this solution, I will examine a series works by Pi...]]>Péter Bokody
http://journals.openedition.org/sillagescritiques/14888
2023-12-10