chateaubriand ou rien

Anonyme asked:
"On what grounds did you decide to compare Riefenstahl to Hugo? There's no basis for the comparison, and while intertextuality is v sexy, there literally isn't any there, because a. Riefenstahl was not a contemporary of Hugo, and any kind of discourse would be one sided, and b. Riefenstahl was not a novelist. Author's fallacy is one thing, but this is just way too much of a stretch, and just comes across as a bit pretentious. But mb elaborate b/c I'm kind of intrigued."

i wasn’t comparing riefenstahl to hugo; i was borrowing sontag’s critique of fascinating fascism and what she saw as the beautification overhaul (key words) riefenstahl employed in her films/photos and leveling it to what hugo was guilty of in his romanticizing » re: different subjects, same treatment

it wasn’t meant as a piece on comparative literature, just a basis for a reading of tropes typologically embedded and found in any sort of media. i think i was pretty clear that i was highlighting the artistic tendency to perpetuate “discursively fixed structure[s]” and not giving you a play-by-play thesis that les mis was equivalent to triumph of the will

idk; bolded the “overlapping” from my intro:

if youre familiar with sontags essay about the fascist aesthetic and her accusation that riefenstahl buys into a discursively fixed structure of hyper-masculinity, machismo eroticism, and absolute dominance (where there is no room for self-exposure), then youll understand that hugo is guilty to a degree of the same cavalier revisionism and sensationalism regarding the underground world of parisian crime in the figure of montparnasse (only that hugo is much more self-reflexive and slyly subversive than riefenstahl in his discourse)

it’s a theory you can apply to almost any work; just look at any hollywood film (re: steven spielberg) or the vein of american romanticists (re: sir walter scott — “for it was he that created rank and caste down there, and also reverence for rank and caste, and pride and pleasure in them… that the south was itself in bondage to its own romantic vision”)

↳tl;dr it was a criticism not a close-reading comparative analysis of different texts… so idk there are no methodological concerns

→ let me know when you read this, anon, so i can delete it off my blog. i don’t mind addressing questions, but i’d rather do it on a person-by-person basis off-anon because i can only stand to have so much academia on my blog and i can stand even less bombarding the circulation of other people’s dashes with this ivory tower bullshit

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#ask #about #delete later

Anonyme asked:
"why are you so fucking intelligent"

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#les mis #delete later #greek myths on roman sarcophagi #it signified that death could be overcome and the the love of a married couple could extend beyond death

did u kno in the visual pictorial tradition of roman funerary iconographic formulae a couple holding hands before “departure”/death/hades is code for marriage and concordia this post is about leS MISÉRABLES

Reblog / il y a 1 mois

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#delete later