There is a good chance that “each critic becomes a Pygmalion” (as Leo Curran put it) when they bring the work of art to life in their narcissistic (and almost amorous) attention, unfolding its meaning so that they should be able to write their own interpretation. The starting point of the present text is the perfection of sculptural forms, and the author discusses “traditional” aesthetic concepts: the beautiful and the sublime along with the difference and interplay of the two (...) qualities, bearing in mind their variations and relations. The framework is provided by the occurrence of these two in the discourses on the self and taste in the eighteenth-century while the focus is on subjective criticism concerning the beautiful versus the sublime in the artistic and sensual experience of statues. Within the given framework, the author is planning to force Edmund Burke, stiffened by the experience of the sublime, and Winckelmann, softened by the sight of the Greek statues, into a dialogue on individual taste. (shrink)

This study reports the results of a survey designed to assess the impact of business education on the ethical beliefs of business students. The study examines the beliefs of graduate and undergraduate students about ethical behavior in educational settings. The investigation indicates that the behavior which students learn or perceive is required to succeed in business schools may run counter to the ethical sanctions of society and the business community.

We create the characters that people our lives. Although others appear to us to be who they just 'are', there are complicated unconscious psychological processes that lead us to experience people in ways that we ourselves construct. This book analyzes how four pairs of people, central in each other's lives, 'create' one another. It demonstrates how each of us is like a theater director, casting others into roles on our stage, even as others are casting us into their dramas.

The "Pygmalion effect" applies to humans. It is a phenomenon in which their own expectations of themselves or what other people expect from them can influence their behavior and performance. Moreover, this works even at the most basic, primitive physiological level — in an enriched environment, the brain becomes larger in volume, and the density of its nervous tissue increases, while provoking severe stress or depleted conditions reduce the number of nerve cells in the brain. People in the USSR (...) had absolute confidence that in the end good would win (the Pygmalion effect or placebo in the language of medicine), while from the 1990s to the present day, inclusive, the opposite attitude (program) totally prevails in Russia — evil will still prevail (the Golem effect or nocebo in the language of medicine). The proof of the Pygmalion effect in Soviet times is modal personalities — those who realized all the best of their (Soviet) era. There are countless of such examples in Soviet times. One of the most prominent of them in the philosophical environment was Professor V.A. Kutyrev. Anyone could become an academician, philosopher, engineer, officer or cosmonaut, etc. It was the Pygmalion effect in action. (shrink)

‘Femininity’ is a concept formed by structures of class difference: to be ‘feminine’ is to fit into an idealised higher-class position. Working-class women, without the financial or cultural capital to successfully perform femininity, are regularly cast down into the realms of the grotesque. This ‘fall from grace’ has repercussions on the representation and lived experiences of women who are then defined negatively. Contemporary British media stories are full of demonising depictions of working-class women deemed grotesque for not presenting themselves with (...) sufficiently ‘classy’ femininity. This article provides a rereading of the images made by British photographer Richard Billingham of his mother Liz, against the grain of much classist and misogynistic critical writing. The author discusses what happens when women reject the aspiration to transcend their supposedly faulty working-class femininity, and instead of trying to ‘better themselves’ through class-passing choose to present aspects of a working-class identity that firmly situate them within an undesirable class position. By employing an auto-ethnographic approach, the author offers new receptions of such images that have often been dismissed and discussed derogatorily, by bringing to bear her own lived experience of being a woman from a working-class background to offer narratives rarely explored in academic texts. The author shows that by thinking through an alternative femininity, via an ‘Anti-Pygmalion’ aesthetic, we can reclaim the negative descriptions of working-class women as grotesque, and begin to question the constructions of femininity itself. (shrink)

This paper explores the deeply interwound histories of art and robots from their roots in the Greek myth of the sculptor-king Pygmalion to the work of contemporary artists, such as Norman White. By analyzing the myths of Pygmalion, the Golem, Frankenstein's monster, and other notable automata of legend, a framework emerges for understanding how various cultures have expressed desires and fears about technology and the future and defined values with respect to human. This context offers insight into the (...) role of artists in creating metaphors and working models of a posthuman, cyborgian future. (shrink)

Using a Solomon four-group design, we investigate the effect of a case-based critical thinking intervention on students’ critical thinking skills. We randomly assign 31 sessions of business classes to four groups and collect data from three sources: in-class performance, university records, and Internet surveys. Our 2 × 2 ANOVA results showed no significant between-subjects differences. Contrary to our expectations, students improve their critical thinking skills, with or without the intervention. Female and Caucasian students improve their critical thinking skills, but males (...) and non-Caucasian do not. Positive performance goals and negative mastery goals enhance and decrease improvements of their CTA scores, respectively. ACT and age are related to pre- and post-test. Gender is related to pre-test. GPA is related to post-test. Results shed light on the Pygmalion effect, the Galatea effect, ability, motivation, and opportunity as signals for human capital, and business ethics. (shrink)

Plastik - einige Wahrnehmungen über Form und Gestalt aus Pygmalions bildendem Träume ist ein unveränderter, hochwertiger Nachdruck der Originalausgabe aus dem Jahr 1778. Hansebooks ist Herausgeber von Literatur zu unterschiedlichen Themengebieten wie Forschung und Wissenschaft, Reisen und Expeditionen, Kochen und Ernährung, Medizin und weiteren Genres. Der Schwerpunkt des Verlages liegt auf dem Erhalt historischer Literatur. Viele Werke historischer Schriftsteller und Wissenschaftler sind heute nur noch als Antiquitäten erhältlich. Hansebooks verlegt diese Bücher neu und trägt damit zum Erhalt selten gewordener Literatur (...) und historischem Wissen auch für die Zukunft bei. (shrink)

The Mongol in Our Midst F G Crookshank Originally published in 1925. "A brilliant piece of speculative induction" Saturday Review Combining anthropology, psychology, geography, science and medicine, this volume was a ground-breaking study in the area of race, ethnicity and eugenics, when first published and has to be read in the appropriate historical, social and scientific context of the early twentieth century. 120 pp, 24 b&w plates Prometheus or Biology and the Advancement of Man H S Jennings Originally published in (...) 1925 "This volume is one of the most remarkable that has yet appeared in this series." Times Literary Supplement "An exceedingly brilliant book." New Leader This volume provides a lucid summary of the striking advances of the early 20 th century in biological knowledge, genetics, and the theory of evolution. 88pp Metanthropos or the Body of the Future Ronald Campbell Macfie Originally published in 1928 "An exceptionally stimulating book…" Saturday Review "Should certainly be read by a large public." The Lancet Drawing on the history of evolution and geology, this volume examines the role of society on physical, emotional and psychological changes in the population of Western Europe during the early twentieth century, whilst attempting to predict genetic developments of the future. 88pp. Pygmalion or the Doctor of the Future R M Wilson Originally published in 1925 "No doctor worth his salt would venture to say that Dr.Wilson was wrong." Daily Herald "Dr Wilson has added a brilliant essay to this series." Times Literary Supplement The author foresees an evolution in the personality of the doctor, who will become less of a scientist, more of a humanist, and use every spiritual agency, as well as every practical measure, to restore the human body and soul to health. 66pp. The Conquest of Cancer H W S Wright Originally published in 1925 "Eminently suitable for general reading. The problem is fairly and lucidly presented." F G Crookshank Whilst affirming that the causes and treatment of cancer will never be solved by the efforts of the medical profession alone, this volume provides an accessible source of information on cancer and proposes routine examination for those people aged 40 and over as the best means of defence against cancer. 82pp. (shrink)

Approaching the Ovidian story of Pygmalion, scholars mainly focus on the moment in which the artist carves his ideal woman out of ivory. But the reasons that led him to sculpt the statue tend to remain in the background. Ovid informs us that, before giving toeburthe shape of auirgo, the ‘Paphian hero’ (Met. 10.290), shocked by the lascivious conduct of the Propoetides, had declared war on the whole of womankind (Met. 10.238–46):sunt tamen obscenae Venerem Propoetides ausaeesse negare deam; pro (...) quo sua numinis iracorpora cum forma primae uulgasse feruntur;utque pudor cessit, sanguisque induruit oris,in rigidum paruo silicem discrimine uersae.quas quia Pygmalion aeuum per crimen agentesuiderat, offensus uitiis, quae plurima mentifemineae natura dedit, sine coniuge caelebsuiuebat thalamique diu consorte carebat. (shrink)

The Internet is like a new country, with a growing population of millions of well educated citizens. If it wants to keep track of its own cultural achievements in real time, it will have to provide itself with an infostructure like a virtual National Library system. This paper proposes that institutions all over the world should take full advantage of the new technologies available, and promote and coordinate such a global service. This is essential in order to make possible a (...) really efficient management of human knowledge on a global scale. (shrink)

A key question in the art debate in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was whether color should be used for sculpture. Recent archaeological research had shown that the sculpture in ancient Greece was polychrome, but skepticism about applying paint to one’s own work was widespread among modern sculptors. Some scholars explain this reluctance as a consequence of racial prejudice: the Greek athlete was an image of white Europeans. This article will try to show that a re-reading of Johann Gottfried Herder’s (...) book on sculpture can give us a different and more probable explanation. Herder shared Roger de Piles’s view that the essence of sculpture was form, while color was most characteristic of painting. What set Herder apart from his predecessor, however, was his attempt to give the theory a scientific rationale. He found this in contemporary accounts of visually impaired persons’ relationship to the sensory world and not least in empiricist philosophy’s distinction between primary and secondary sensory properties. (shrink)

"The eye that gathers impressions is no longer the eye that sees a depiction on a surface it becomes a hand, the ray of light becomes a finger, and the imagination becomes a form of immediate touching."-Johann Gottfried Herder Long recognized as one of the most important eighteenth-century works on aesthetics and the visual arts, Johann Gottfried Herder's Plastik (Sculpture, 1778) has never before appeared in a complete English translation. In this landmark essay, Herder combines rationalist and empiricist thought with (...) a wide range of sources-from the classics to Norse legend, Shakespeare to the Bible-to illuminate the ways we experience sculpture. Standing on the fault line between classicism and romanticism, Herder draws most of his examples from classical sculpture, while nevertheless insisting on the historicity of art and of the senses themselves. Through a detailed analysis of the differences between painting and sculpture, he develops a powerful critique of the dominance of vision both in the appreciation of art and in our everyday apprehension of the world around us. One of the key articulations of the aesthetics of Sturm und Drang, Sculpture is also important as an anticipation of subsequent developments in art theory. Jason Gaiger's translation of Sculpture includes an extensive introduction to Herder's thought, explanatory notes, and illustrations of all the sculptures discussed in the text. (shrink)

Agalmato-eroticism is usually shown in the ancient world as a literary myth; it had lasted in the works of those poets such as Ovid and those writers of varia variorum like Pseudo Luciano in his Amores, who devoted to it their analyses and reflections. The best known example of Agalmato-eroticism is certainly the one which refers to Pygmalion’s story, who carved an ivory statue of a maiden and fell in love with it, then asked the ancient Greek goddess of (...) love and beauty Aphrodite, to change it into a woman. What appears emblematic in this story — that we might call of Metamorphosis — is its collocation: that is, between the prior event in the story of the Propetidi, and the conclusion referring to the story of Adonis, after a series of events deriving from the transformation of the statue in human being. Every event of agalmato-eroticism is a disruption of the natural order of things which cannot be without consequences. Through the illustration of Agalmato-eroticism the authors provided a very strong account of what it meant for a man to love a statue: to loose himself; and suicide and oblivion were the fundamental aspects of the defeated subject who remained confined in his own solispism. (shrink)

Social Deviations, Labelling and Normality This paper discusses the issues of labelling, normality and social deviation. I focus on the sociological and socio-psychological aspects of these topics in light of their importance for pedagogy. Labelling mainly concerns the ways in which the formal and constitutive institutions of social control, including schools, respond to behaviour. Mainly children and young people are "marked" or labelled according to both their existing and presumed patterns of deviant behaviour. School, as a social institution, expects its (...) students to be normal. It has the power to define normality and, moreover, a network of social control to achieve it. However, from the perspective of the school it is very important not to prematurely label pupils negatively during the selection process. On the contrary, school should enable as many pupils as possible to contribute successfully towards the requirements of a knowledge society. Research indicates that there is a correlation between a child's school performance and the perceptions and expectations held by the teacher. Recent studies, concerning for example violence at school, have shown how strongly the aggressive behaviour of pupils is connected to the teacher's behaviour. The theory of labelling is concerned with the fundamental question of why some individuals and groups are branded as deviating from norms more often than others. Stigma is a relative phenomenon; it is the result of successful labelling, delivering a punitive and disapproving response. In order to better understand labelling, the concepts of social norms and social deviance also require clarification. (shrink)

The day has arrived that genetic tests for educational outcomes are available to the public. Today parents and students alike can send off a sample of blood or saliva and receive a ‘genetic report’ for a range of characteristics relevant to education, including intelligence, math ability, reading ability, and educational attainment. DTC availability is compounded by a growing “precision education” initiative, which proposes the application of DNA tests in schools to tailor educational curricula to children’s genomic profiles. Here I argue (...) that these happenings are a strong signal of the geneticization of education; the process by which educational abilities and outcomes come to be examined, understood, explained, and treated as primarily genetic characteristics. I clarify what it means to geneticize education, highlight the nature and limitations of the underlying science, explore both real and potential downstream bioethical implications, and make proposals for mitigating negative impacts. (shrink)

John Ogbu has studied minority education from a comparative perspective for over 30 years. The study reported in this book--jointly sponsored by the community and the school district in Shaker Heights, Ohio--focuses on the academic performance of Black American students. Not only do these students perform less well than White students at every social class level, but also less well than immigrant minority students, including Black immigrant students. Furthermore, both middle-class Black students in suburban school districts, as well as poor (...) Black students in inner-city schools are not doing well. Ogbu's analysis draws on data from observations, formal and informal interviews, and statistical and other data. He offers strong empirical evidence to support the cross-class existence of the problem. The book is organized in four parts: *Part I provides a description of the twin problems the study addresses--the gap between Black and White students in school performance and the low academic engagement of Black students; a review of conventional explanations; an alternative perspective; and the framework for the study. *Part II is an analysis of _societal and school factors_ contributing to the problem, including race relations, Pygmalion or internalized White beliefs and expectations, levelling or tracking, the roles of teachers, counselors, and discipline. *_Community factors_--the focus of this study--are discussed in Part III. These include the educational impact of opportunity structure, collective identity, cultural and language or dialect frame of reference in schooling, peer pressures, and the role of the family. This research focus does _not_ mean exonerating the system and blaming minorities, nor does it mean neglecting school and society factors. Rather, Ogbu argues, the role of community forces should be incorporated into the discussion of the academic achievement gap by researchers, theoreticians, policymakers, educators, and minorities themselves who genuinely want to improve the academic achievement of African American children and other minorities. *In Part IV, Ogbu presents a summary of the study's findings on community forces and offers recommendations--some of which are for the school system and some for the Black community. _Black American Students in an Affluent Suburb: A Study of Academic Disengagement_ is an important book for a wide range of researchers, professionals, and students, particularly in the areas of Black education, minority education, comparative and international education, sociology of education, educational anthropology, educational policy, teacher education, and applied anthropology. (shrink)

Machine generated contents note: -- PART I: THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK AND INTRODUCTION * Introduction * PART II: ANALYSIS OF LITERARY TEXTS * Pygmalion as allegory for transformational adult learning: Ovid, Shaw and Hughes * Educating Rita and Oleanna * The Winter's Tale * PART III: BIOGRAPHICAL DATA * Interview with Joe * Interview with Jane * Interview with Sarah * SECTION IV: AUTO/BIOGRAPHICAL DATA * Interview with Lilian * Autobiographical Writing * Final thoughts.

This essay explores claims made frequently by artists, critics, and philosophers that artworks bear personifying traits. Rejecting the notion that artists possess the Pygmalion-like power to bring works of art to life, the article looks seriously at how parallels may exist between the ontological structures of the artwork and human personhood. The discussion focuses on Arthur Danto’s claim that the “artworld” itself manifests properties that are an imprint of the historical representation of the “world.” These “world” representations are implicitly (...) embodied in the artist’s style. The “world” that is stamped on the people of a historical period entails a point of view that influences how they might act, something like the logic that guides a conversation. This “conversational” logic is also extant in the artworks that artists of a given period create. This analysis of Danto’s account of how people are connected to their world clarifies Danto’s assertions that a parallel structure of personification in the artwork and the human exists. It also explains his claims that artworks themselves appear to be in a kind of dialogue. (shrink)

Film is the supreme medium for mythmaking. The gods and heroes of mythology are both larger than life and deeply human; they teach us about the world, and they tell us a good story. Similarly, our experience of film is both distant and intimate. Cinematic techniques--panning, tracking, zooming, and the other tools in the filmmaker's toolbox--create a world that is unlike reality and yet realistic at the same time. We are passive spectators, but we also have a personal relationship with (...) the images we are seeing. In Cinematic Mythmaking, Irving Singer explores the hidden and overt use of myth in various films and, in general, the philosophical elements of a film's meaning. Mythological themes, Singer writes, perform a crucial role in cinematic art and even philosophy itself. Singer incisively disentangles the strands of different myths in the films he discusses. He finds in Preston Sturges's The Lady Eve that Barbara Stanwyck's character is not just the biblical Eve but a liberated woman of our times; Eliza Doolittle in the filmed versions of Shaw's Pygmalion is not just a statue brought to life but instead a heroic woman who must survive her own dark night of the soul. The protagonist of William Wyler's The Heiress and Anieszka Holland's Washington Square is both suffering Dido and an awakened Amazon. Singer reads Cocteau's films--including La Belle et la Bête, Orphée, and The Testament of Orpheus--as uniquely mythological cinematic poetry. He compares Kubrickean and Homeric epics and analyzes in depth the self-referential mythmaking of Federico Fellini in many of his movies, including 8½. The aesthetic and probing inventiveness in film, Singer shows us, restores and revives for audiences in the twenty-first century myths of creation, of the questing hero, and of ideals--both secular and religious--that have had enormous significance throughout the human search for love and meaning in life. (shrink)

An introduction to the paragone -- The archetype of beauty : Narcissus and the birth of the beau idéal -- Pygmalion and Galatea : the battle between iconophobes and iconodules -- Salomé versus Medusa.

"En 1754, dans le Traité des sensations, Condillac s'efforce de démontrer que "toutes nos connaissances et toutes nos facultés viennent des sens, ou plutôt des sensations" Pour cela, Condillac développe une fiction, celle d'une statue dont il éveillerait progressivement les sens. Il demande au lecteur de se penser à la place de la statue, de s'imaginer n'avoir qu'un sens lorsque celle-ci n'en a qu'un seul d'éveillé, d'examiner successivement les cinq sens, isolément puis en les associant l'un à l'autre. L'attention, l'imagination, (...) la mémoire, l'entendement ne seraient pas les facultés d'un ego mais seraient distribués sur chaque sens. Au lieu de déterminer des facultés comme les pouvoirs d'un moi substantiel dans une métaphysique créationniste, Condillac construit le paradigme d'un moi pluriel, effet des opérations qu'il effectue. Le présent livre réévalue ainsi ce qu'une tradition philosophique, des idéologues aux positivistes, a décrit comme le sensualisme. Pour interroger cette interprétation, la fiction condillacienne de la statue peut être confrontée aux hypothèses qui lui sont contemporaines La Mettrie et son homme-machine. Diderot et l'idée d'anatomie métaphysique, Boureau-Deslandes et son Pygmalion, l'histoire naturelle de Charles Bonnet et l'homo duplex de Buffon, à des titres différents, retravaillent l'anthropologie. Cette pensée du sensible qui déplace l'homme dans la nature et dans l'histoire inquiète théologiens et moralistes et convoque les lecteurs d'aujourd'hui dans leur critique du subjectivisme."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

Chaque fois que nous "donnons forme" à quelque chose, cette représentation nous figure, par signes, l'objet évoqué, mais nous confirme également qu'il ne s'agit que d'un simulacre. D'où le besoin, à chaque époque, de créer du vivant pour pallier cette déception : tel est le sens du mythe de Pygmalion. Ce livre s'organise donc autour de deux pôles : d'un côté la nécessité de figurer, et de figurer l'acte même de la perception (voir le chapitre "Un oeil immense artificiel") (...) ; de l'autre, l'impératif de dépasser le signe. Il s'agit d'un défi radical, qui concerne l'avenir même des arts. C'est la raison de ce titre, A vif, qui témoigne d'un "coup d'oeil" : un regard et une incision pratiquée à vif dans l'objet, un désir de définitif qui ne caresse plus la forme, mais qui pénètre, met à nu, éviscère dans les paroles et dans les actes. Dedans et derrière l'oeil, comme dans l'un des plus impassibles traités d'anatomie du Cinquecento. Aujourd'hui, est-il encore vif notre oeil qui cherche le vivant? N'est-il pas lui-même défiguré par l'informe qui s'est logé en nous? Où est la pupilla viva qui illumine le Paradis et qui, de Dante à Baudelaire, a animé, de longs siècles durant, tant de quête mentale? Il faut remonter à ces origines, parcourir les espaces séculaires et sidéraux dans lesquels le cosmos était ordre, beauté, compréhension ; où, justement, il était nécessaire de "captiver les yeux pour avoir l'âme". Cet essai se voudrait une parabole déployée au fil de l'ardente soif humaine d'"exorbiter", de brûler la distance du point de vue, pour accéder, maintenant et à jamais, au vivant. (shrink)

Les fractures du temps laissent-elles paraître la durée? Face à l'impossible " omnitemporalité ", l'expérience de la durée. Le geste créateur, l'idée instantanée ou la satisfaction inspirée des artistes interrogent notre lien charnel au monde, qui oscille entre l'abandon au temps morcelé et des synthèses imaginaires. Quand Vénus exauce le désir de Pygmalion, le sculpteur, de voir sa création accéder à la vie, le poète atteste son rêve d'incarnation. Des paradoxes de la physique à la musique répétitive, du cinéma (...) documentaire à la poésie de Michaux, de la synthèse autobiographique de Paul Valéry ou des réflexions de Merleau-Ponty sur l'intersensorialité aux méditations de Heidegger, ces esquisses indiquent les modalités contemporaines de notre présence au monde, dont le cinéma de Wim Wenders ou l'œuvre de Georges Perec portent particulièrement la marque. La sensibilité n'est qu'un autre mot pour dire notre présence au monde. Cet ouvrage approche l'expérience de la durée à travers diverses expressions où s'entrelacent l'attente et l'oubli, le rêve et le récit. Ce souci anime l'action des commissaires d'exposition et des artistes d'aujourd'hui. (shrink)

Il semble que, surtout dans les pays de langue anglaise influencés par un idéal industriel, un assez grand nombre de phi-losophes, nouveaux Pygmalions sans le savoir, aient caressé le rêve pourtant glacial d'une logique toute mécanique, qui organiserait le savoir en se substituant à la pensée. Le désir de transporter en philosophie les victotres sans réplique du calcul et de la technicité, où le génie humain se dissimule mais se sent sûr de soi comme un dieu, le culte de l'objectivité (...) rationnelle joint au scepticisme sur l'Esprit et à ce genre d'aversion qu'on pourrait appeler misopsychie, car il s'y mêle la crainte de l'erreur et l'antipathie pour les royaumes du coeur ou de l'imaginaire, ont contribué à enfanter et à répandre, entre autres choses, ce nouveau « rêve de pierre » hélas sans beauté! Que serait une « science sans conscience »? N'est-ce pas là une notion aussi contradictoire, et même dont 1'objet s'avère plus radicalement impossible, que celle d'un carré-rond? Néan-moins quand on parcourt la litterature contemporaine sur le sujet, on serait en droit de conclure qu'un assez grand nombre de philosophies, qui cependant passent leurs journées ou leurs veilles à s'in-terroger sur les conditions de la science, ont cessé de se le demander. (shrink)

In the tenth book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses there is a moving story which explores the relationship between the artist and his work of art. It is the myth of the sculptor Pygmalion. The story of the Cypriot artist for whom the ivory statue of his ideal woman came to life knew a very widespread transmission. The myth inspired authors and artists to reflect about love, idolatry, lifeless matter, the artist vis-à-vis the one Creator, and so on. The secondary literature (...) which has been published on the reception of this metamorphosis is proportionately plentiful. However, it mainly takes Pygmalion as its starting point. Scant attention has been paid to the other figure: the woman, who is silent in Ovid’s tale, but increasingly became the mouthpiece for a Western vision of the image of women. The Middle Ages ascribed to Pygmalion all the vices they could come up with. Already in the early Christian period there was mention of a Cypriot artist who had intercourse with a statue of Aphrodite. He was adduced as an exemplum warning of the madness of idolatry in Antiquity. With the development of humanism these Christian interpretations are swept away and the simple love-story comes into its own again. Pontormo paints the female figure as a woman of flesh and blood who gazes, not towards the kneeling Pygmalion, but towards the viewer and the painter. For various reasons this painting fits into the so-called paragone, which was in full swing at this time: the struggle for rank between the arts of sculpture and painting. For the art of painting can do what the art of sculpture cannot: paint skin, suggest movement, paint the art of sculpture itself, etc. The influence of the Pygmalion myth reaches a peak in the eighteenth century. Rousseau gives the female figure what Voltaire, in his poem of love for an actress, had not: a name. She is Galathea, after the nymph, the image of perfect inner and outer beauty. The beloved thus acquires an identity? Well, she does speak, in any case. Rousseau’s musical play – in the eighteenth century the arts of the stage recognize new challenges in the Pygmalion theme – endswith the words of the beloved: “c’est moi” , “ce n’est pas moi” , “aussi moi” . This points to a complete amalgamation of the beloved with her creator. Diderot subscribes to the same body of ideas, and again relates them to the paragone. But for him it is sculpture, and not painting, which provides the ultimate access to Nature, and thus to the Divine. For the third dimension is the most direct emanation of the internal image of the artist, his muse, in reality. For him, Falconet’s Pygmalion et Galathée is the sculpted group which on all fronts revives the supremacy of the discipline. He even claims that Falconet is the eighteenth-century Pygmalion. In the nineteenth century we see the first signs of change. Galathea begins to reject Pygmalion. In literature she is portrayed a the cold and unattainable woman. From the point of view of gender we see indeed that women’s self-image had come to a crisis. She could not mirror herself in the past. The woman of the nineteenth century had to put an end to a male ideal image. Christina Rossetti’s poems express this impasse. Galathea – who had in the meantime herself become a “metaphor” for the plastic arts – becomes the fitting cue to mark the beginning of the new, “modern” art. Rodin has her looking away from Pygmalion in disgust. Goya portrays himself as the sculptor who, as it were, rapes Galathea. This moribund Galathea was intended to express criticism of the academic “dictatorship” of mimesis, but also the social responsibility of the artist in a society wracked by civil war. Paul Delvaux reads another subjection into his Pygmalion . The domination of the artist by his mother, who segregates him from the female sex. He puts himself in Galathea’s place as a helpless torso; his mother embraces him. Here we pick up the trail of the psycho-analytical archetypes in the myth. They are not so clearly established as in the case of Narcissus, for example, but they relate to the feminine attributes which the beloved has personified throughout the ages: from lust-object to frigidity. Ever since her awakening, the story of her tranmission has been fed on the evolving images of woman herself. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Creating Life: The Aesthetic Utopia of Russian ModernismJohn GoodliffeCreating Life: The Aesthetic Utopia of Russian Modernism, edited by Irina Paperno and Joan Delaney Grossman; x & 288 pp. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994, $39.95.In describing the history of a country’s literature, one may well be tempted to divide it into separate compartments and so lose sight of the continuity which is, in the final analysis, more worthy of (...) attention. Historians of Russian literature have often succumbed to this temptation and it became almost commonplace to read that in Russia the Realism of the nineteenth century gave way to the Symbolism which began in the twentieth; that Symbolism gave way to Futurism; and that in due course all the earlier “-isms” were swept aside by the Socialist Realism of the Soviet period. For Marxist-oriented Soviet [End Page 371] historians such preoccupation with compartmentalization was obsessive. This makes more than welcome a series of essays which is at pains to emphasize the essential connections and kinship between these various “-isms.”Four of the seven essays are intended to demonstrate how the Symbolists, while ostensibly breaking with the earlier tradition of positivism (the idea that art’s essential purpose is to help build a better world), were, in a number of important respects, continuing and even reinforcing what they claimed to despise. Thus, regarding art and life as indissolubly linked, they attempted to turn life into art and art into life. Their endeavors frequently led them into behavior that now appears “eccentric, at times even ridiculous” (p. 166). Olga Matich describes how Blok, Bely, Dmitry Merezhkovsky, and Zinaida Gippius attempted to model their sexual relationships on the pattern of the “erotic utopia” described by Vladimir Solov’ev in his seminal The Meaning of Love (1892–94). Joan Delaney Grossman discusses Nina Petrovskaia’s relationships with Bely and Valery Briusov. Michael Wachtel shows how Viacheslav Ivanov attempted to overcome his grief at the death of his first wife by using his creative powers to make contact with her “beyond the grave.”Irene Masing-Delic traces the Pygmalion myth through Pushkin, Baratynsky, Turgenev, and Chernyshevsky to the Symbolists who were especially attracted by a myth which showed how an artist could create life and even conquer death. In “Andrei Bely and the Argonauts’ mythmaking,” Alexander Lavrov considers the role of the “Argonaut” circle in establishing a Russian Symbolist culture in the first years of the twentieth century. The Argonauts’ credo was “life-creation” rather than “art-creation,” and they claimed to make no distinction between “talent for living” and “talent for writing.” Lavrov argues that the failure of the relationship between Bely and Nina Petrovskaia marked the disintegration of “Argonautism” and the culture they sought to create. It is left to Irina Gutkin in the concluding essay to guide us through the grotesqueries of Futurism into the apparently diametrically opposed, sanitized world of Socialist Realism, by way of Constructivism, Marxism, and Meyerholdian bio-mechanics, leaving us in little doubt that, appearances to the contrary, each of these movements was concerned with turning art into life and using it to create a better world. So ultimately, as she neatly sums up the thesis of the whole collection, “The aesthetic utopian ideal of art creating life, which took shape at the beginning of the twentieth century, was fused with the utilitarian tradition of the 1860s” (p. 181).I have deliberately reserved for the end comment on Irina Paperno’s introduction and opening article (“The Meaning of Art: Symbolist Theories”) in order to emphasize the manifest contribution she and her co-editor, Joan Delaney Grossman, have made to ensuring the coherence of this admirable collection. Professor Paperno’s clear and concise coverage of her topics makes it evident that she was determined that the book should not turn into the kind of bits-and-pieces patchwork that too many publications of this sort tend to [End Page 372] become without a firm editorial hand at the helm. Her earlier book on Chernyshevsky (Chernyshevsky and the Age of Realism, 1988) and Irene Masing-Delic’s Abolishing Death; a Salvation Myth of Russian Twentieth-Century Literature (1992), form the first two parts of... (shrink)