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Undergraduate
Humanities Forum Fellows, 2004-05 |
Cristina V. Alberto I plan to investigate how the rating system in film influences the general perception of what constitutes pornography. Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut is the perfect vehicle for my investigation, because its highly charged sexual content has generated much controversy. This film works within an explicit sexual realm, and yet does not seem to fit the genre of pornography because Kubrick’s portrayal of nudity is devoid of eroticism. The way Kubrick handles nudity in the film departs from any sort of orgiastic viewing pleasure. Eyes Wide Shut, far from being a startling display of carnal pleasures, has a dreamlike quality that inhibits a pornographic reading of the text. Kubrick uses cinematic techniques to set the characters, and the viewers, in “dream mode” so that the film becomes a realm of fantasy rather than a base, mundane, pornographic adventure. The fantasy aspect operates on both a narrative and cinematic level. There are powerful dichotomies operating within this dream-like aspect, such as wishful dream versus nightmare and reality versus fantasy. Julie Brown What role do dreams play in artistic inspiration, and what are some of the problems in translating between textual and visual media. I expect to develop a minimum of one painting for every fully developed dream that is recorded in the past year and a half. I hope to discover why certain images fascinate and how they re-present themselves in artistic practice. Using the paintings as dream charts, one can begin to see the connections between colors, forms, images, relationships, situations, ideas in their manifest form—one can begin to think about how dream elements accrete into meaning. At stake on a personal level is my interest in the notion of originality, and the question of whether one can create something out of nothing. Are artists geniuses who imagine wondrous things entirely of their own creation, or are they sensitive organizational systems who synthesize data culled from the world? If we are the latter, the field for creativity is open and free, and there is no sense in perpetual struggle for something entirely new and original. What we create must always refer to something else, but it must also always be “new” because no two people, as they are separate across time and space, will synthesize data in the same way. Molly G. Cahill Clara W. Chow What if you
slept? And what if, in your sleep, you dreamed? And what if, in
your dream you went to heaven and there plucked a strange and beautiful
flower? And what if, when you awoke, you had the flower in your
hand? Ah, what then? —Coleridge Although virtually unknown in English, Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenburg) was a towering figure in German poetry. He created the Blue Flower, the central symbol of the Romantic movement in Germany and the embodiment of the yearning of the age. I examine the dream vision that transformed Novalis into a Romantic poet: a mystical experience at the grave of his beloved 15-year-old fiancee Sophie von Kuhn. She became, for him, his "Spirit's Guide" and Saviour; Novalis came to identify her with the divine Sophia and with Christ. Through close textual analysis of Novalis's Hymns to the Night and a study of his unique, lyrical dream language, I show how Novalis fused Christianity with his love for Sophie into a religion by which he lived for the remainder of his short life. Joshua Duyan I am using abstract and surreal photography as a means to visually communicate the singleness of dreamlike imagery. By contrasting the two-dimensional and the three-dimensional, I hope to show spatial relations, light, and the tension between symmetry and asymmetry. Imagery abstraction detracts from the sense of normalcy that is often associated with the photographic medium. Abstract and surreal imagery can evoke dreams and represent the emotions and relative cognition associated with them. By employing these truths, parallels in the imagery can be drawn to our lives. The viewer will not only see the photograph as an image, but also experience it with reminiscent emotions. Sidi D. Gomes
(Gregory College House) Is it possible to turn a photo camera into a video camera? Instead of capturing a moment in time, like common photography, I wish to record periods of time in a single negative. In a sense, these photos would actually be more complete than videos, because one sees both the movement taking place, as in videos, but also the history of the movement in one single image. Dreams are a great source of inspiration for the moods, settings, and images I will try to achieve with my pictures. Dana Katz Jacob’s Dream plays an important role in the Biblical tradition as the event in which the patriarch is divinely selected as the father of the Chosen People of Israel. This Old Testament scene appears in two narrative cycles of mosaics set by Byzantine artisans in the twelfth century Cappella Palatina and the Cathedral of Monreale in Sicily. This island has a mixture of artistic traditions reflected in the remaining art and architecture as Sicily was colonized successively by the Greeks, Romans, Arabs, and Normans. This multi-ethnic society was reflected in the court of the Norman ruler Roger II in which Arabic, Latin, and Greek were spoken and the three monotheistic religions of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity were practiced. Dreams play an important part in the narrative of these three faiths and in the legitimization of the chosen leader of the people in its texts. Roger II was a descendent of the Normans who conquered Sicily with papal support in the late eleventh century, built his royal palace with the adjacent Cappella Palatina soon after his coronation in 1130, which was contested, by Pope Innocent II and the Holy Roman Emperor. By incorporating scenes such as Jacob’s dream from the Old Testament in the mosaic cycles of his private chapel, Roger II was attempting to legitimize his kingship. By examining these narrative cycles with a focus on Jacob’s dream, I will attempt to assess the appropriation of the symbolism of dreams by the Norman kings of Sicily Ruth M. McAdams In his two great novels, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, James Joyce represents a spectrum of states of consciousness—from the wakefulness of Leopold Bloom’s morning routine, to the daydreaming of the “Circe” episode, to HCE’s sleeping dreams. Ulysses chronicles the lives of three characters over a single ordinary day in Dublin, while Joyce’s “book of the night,” Finnegans Wake, describes one man’s dreams over the course of a single 628-page night. Joyce’s novels have often been criticized as being incomprehensible and overly obscure, and to me, one of the most interesting aspects of this incomprehensibility stems from non-standard syntactical and formal structures that create Joyce’s distinctive voice. I am researching Joyce’s use of syntax to determine how and why he bends and breaks the rules of the English language, and how these deviations create a grammar and syntax that attempts to mimic the various levels of wakefulness represented by the two novels. I will attempt to determine how distinct these syntaxes are from each other and to what extent they follow predictable rules, in an effort to better understand the relationship between language and consciousness. Kenneth L. Pearce For the last 2,500 years, philosophers have struggled to define the connection between perception and reality. The idea that our perceptions of the world might not resemble the actual world with any great degree of accuracy was a critical force in the development of philosophy and science. As philosophers have puzzled over this question throughout the ages, dreams always seem to have eluded them. Dreams introduce perceptions that the "common sense" thinker will insist do not form a part of the actual world, but how is it that these perceptions differ from those of waking life? When the 18th century Anglican Bishop George Berkeley revolutionized modern thought by constructing a beautifully simple yet wholly counterintuitive metaphysics in which reality is defined by perception and not the other way around, he too was faced with the problem of dreams, and it is a problem that his writings alone may not adequately solve. If, as Berkeley asserted, "to be is to be perceived," does it follow that dreams are real? Jane E.
Silfen (Spruce College House) Recipients of the stigmata—Christ’s wounds manifested on the body—are commonly regarded as either miracles or frauds. Those who view stigmata as a gift from God struggle to explain the inconsistencies of the wounds, both in how they differ from other stigmata and from those received by Christ himself. Skeptics, however, must acknowledge that physicians have closely examined stigmatics, and the wounds have appeared in controlled environments and under close observation. A third alternative is possible, one that explains the stigmata as mentally self-imposed, but real nonetheless. By analyzing the dream imagery described in first-hand accounts of stigmatization, I will show that stigmatics receive the wounds of Christ not as it was, but as they imagine it to be. Stigmata thus remains a mark of faith, received only by those who meditate heavily on the Passion. However, it is also something more: a portal offering remarkable insight into the influence of dreams on the waking state.
Jenny Suen The Cultural Revolution in China (1966–76) was a profound rupture in Chinese history, culture, and society. Imagine a decade in which children did not go to school, but instead were sent away to the countryside to be “re-educated” in revolutionary thought and lifestyle. Imagine a decade in which people were slaughtered for absurd, political reasons. It was a decade of immense trauma, inflicted not only by demagogues from above, but also with the consent and agency of the entire population. How is this decade “remembered” in the so-called “scar literature” of the period? Many Chinese authors have addressed problems of historical memory and the depiction of trauma through dream sequences in their narratives or through dream-like and surreal stylistic forms. Dreams act as a psychological mechanism that complicates the notion of historical memory that is often found in straightforward memoirs, which emphasize objectivity in a subjective experience; it also functions to distance the individuals from their own experiences. I will analyze the way dreams are used in the “scar literature” from the period. My final project will be to write a novel, in which I will explore the application of dreams as a literary device, as well as a paper outlining my findings.
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Undergraduate Fellows
Tiffany Behringer Click here for 2004-2005
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