Look Back in Anger.pptx

University of Chotral Journal of Linguistics and Literature, 2019

Anger is a basic human emotion which has a force for constructive or destructive ends. Its expression in any circumstance can be a trigger for a desire to change a prevailing situation. In all cases, anger is a fundamental component of art. This study examines the use of anger in Osborne's Look Back in Anger and Osofisan's The Chattering and the Song. Osborne and Osofisan are two writers who are very anxious to change their societies through their art. In spite of differences in their origin (Osborne was a Briton while Osofisan is a Nigerian), they wrote at a time of certain social and political upheavals in their countries. They also share similar concerns and attitude towards art. My focus in this paper is on the early plays of Osborne and Osofisan where anger is strongest and where their artistic triumph is most poignant. Working within the formalist approach, the paper reveals that in Osborne and Osofisan, extreme anger is both material and style and is what marks their art out. The reification by the intellect provides a potent instrument for investigating society. Anger becomes the point of departure for their art, it is not mere hysterics but a cerebral one and it is the motivating force for their writings.

A Palavra e a Imagen, Alcinda Pinheiro de Sousa, Alda Correia et Teresa de Ataide Malafaia (eds.), 2007

My intention here is to turn to recent developments in the field of English art and writing which may afford a different form of purchase on the dominant reading of modernity and what is all too often misread under the vast and ill-defined notion of post-modernity. These recent developments have directed our gaze away from the overexposed common places of affirmative and consensual culture, whether they be Frank Gehry's space Odyssey architecture or the mass marketed heritage culture of Hollywood adaptations, the facile radicalism of global literature or Bob Wilson's chic and glossy opera productions of Wagner; they have, in the field of visual arts, fiction and documentary writing, tried to reappropriate some of the dark corners of culture, some of the ill-lit spaces of the English political unconscious. In that respect, the title of this paper may just as well have read "Looking at the Overlooked," in hommage to Norman Bryson's remarkable essay on still life painting 1 in which he examines the aesthetic hierarchy that until the advent of modern painting in the middle of the 19th century ruled over painting and according to which still life was but the poor and distant relative of the grander and more aristocratic genres: historical painting and mythological scenes. For Bryson, looking at the overlooked implies that, with the masters of still life, we turn our gazes to the blind spots of our surroundings, to the areas of experience which remain all too often mis-represented, when they are not literally overlooked, ignored, our trained gaze failing to acknowledge them as meaningful, as signs to be deciphered.

If language is not pure signification, as Merleau-Ponty suggests, what is the contaminant? At Mid-Twentieth Century painters rejected babbling kitch in favor of existentially loaded gestures. A decade later, Conceptualism rejected such grandiosity and returned to language. I posit that both Conceptualism and Abstract Expressionism were stuck in immanentism. Abstract Expressionists iterated familiar psychoanalytic conflicts, only superficially individuated; 70’s Conceptualism frequently relied on mere puns or inane systems. Similarly, Badiou reminds readers that contemporary art is neither pure form nor psycho-sexual catharsis. As postwar commerce and communication media intensified the inundation of corporate slogans and news headlines, examining the slippages in meaning in the translation between mass dissemination and individual meaning gained social urgency. Artists in the second half of the Twentieth Century included letterforms in their images to speak directly to this bifurcation. Through formal devices, like the expressiveness of Basquiat’s scrawl, or conceptual devices such as Corita Kent’s appropriation of the General Mills logo, these artists foil the interpellation of pure language to reveal peculiar affects and individuated understandings.

2015

Metaphor, as Jan Zwicky has argued, is the basic form our understanding of the world takes, writing how, "To mean is always in some measure, to carry across: meta pherin" (2003: 51), following the logic of what she calls "seeing-as": "I am interested in the phenomenon of 'seeing-as' because it encapsulates the mystery of meaning. The moment of recognition happens as if by magic; and yet, when we reflect on it, we see-its very name tells us thisthat it is impossible without prior experience. What becomes puzzling then is the phenomenon of insight, the creation (apparently) of new meaning. Here, we forget that to recognise can mean to rethink , as in think through differently. It need not always signify mere repetition of a former cognition", (2003: 1). Zwicky's sense of understanding entails the passing of something already experienced being perceived in relation to something else and in this carrying across there occurs: "an act of contextualisation, a sensing of connexions between aspects of immediate experience and other experiences" (2003: 1). Metaphor, for Zwicky, speaks to the spatiality of understanding that is inflected with time. Simply by placing things beside each other, a burgeoning realisation can dawn. Such is the form Zwicky's own philosophical text Metaphor and Wisdom takes, where a quotation occupying the right-hand page is accompanied on the left hand page by a short but dense philosophical thought of her own. Rather than the reader's understanding being drawn by explicit connections, the possible relations are held in movement, back and forth-where meaning is not determined, fixed, set in place, but lies in this crossing between the gutter, and indeed, between other components of the book. It is a gesture of understanding Zwicky calls "resonant", one which retunes our sense of clarity from the "light" of enlightenment thinking, to the root of "clear" as "kal"-"to shout, resound" (Zwicky 2014: 16). Thought not as "truth", or "method", but "attunement": "Lyric resonance is a function of attunement. It requires an open structure with distinguishable aspects or distinguishable axes of experience that stand in a nonlinear relation to one another. Being drawn apart,

The play, first produced at the Royal Court Theatre, London, in May i 956 by the English Stage Company, is concemed with a group of young people living in a tumble-down, squalid one room attic in the Midlands in the mid-1950's. The atmosphere of the opening setting is dark, dingy and rather miserable. The visual impact ofthe set, with its water tank disguised as a sturdy dining table, shabby old armchairs, gas stove, chest of drawers littered with clothing and books, light from a skylight, invites the audience directly to look into the world which is indeed very unpleasant but nonetheless realistic. At the same time, this sort of domestic setting demonstrates in an immediate and visual way that the play is dealing with the realities of life and the current social problems in a workiIıg-elass environment(l).