Defaced

Understanding late medieval pictorial representations of violence. Destroyed faces, dissolved human shapes, invisible enemies: violence and anonymity go hand in hand. The visual representation of extreme physical violence makes real people nameless exemplars of horror--formless, hideous, defaced. In Defaced, Valentin Groebner explores the roots of the visual culture of violence in medieval and Renaissance Europe and shows how contemporary visual culture has been shaped by late medieval images and narratives of violence. For late medieval audiences, as with modern media consumers, horror lies less in the "indescribable" and "alien" than in the familiar and commonplace. From the fourteenth century onward, pictorial representations became increasingly violent, whether in depictions of the Passion, or in vivid and precise images of torture, execution, and war. But not every spectator witnessed the same thing when confronted with terrifying images of a crucified man, misshapen faces, allegedly bloodthirsty conspirators on nocturnal streets, or barbarian fiends on distant battlefields. The profusion of violent imagery provoked a question: how to distinguish the illegitimate violence that threatened and reversed the social order from the proper, "just," and sanctioned use of force? Groebner constructs a persuasive answer to this question by investigating how uncannily familiar medieval dystopias were constructed and deconstructed. Showing how extreme violence threatens to disorient, and how the effect of horror resides in the depiction of minute details, Groebner offers an original model for understanding how descriptions of atrocities and of outrageous cruelty depended, in medieval times, on the variation of familiar narrative motifs.

This book proposes an alternate theory of media evolution that accounts for the appearance of a new medium in the malpractice of older media. Smallest Mimes addresses complex issues of media transition, the inherent confusion of media definition by use of metaphor instead of phenomenological description, and the impact of individual media function and structure on both textual and imagistic content. Bringing together Majkut’s past speculations on media, Smallest Mimes interweaves a general theory of media, a theory of historical media change and transmission, and a theory of media genesis in technological adequacy/inadequacy.

Sherlock Holmes delves into the world of early cinema as motion picture groundbreaker Eadweard Muybridge begs him to solve a mystery that will keep you up all night… 1896. A new client at Baker Street claims he’s being threatened via the new art of the moving image… Eadweard Muybridge, pioneer of motion picture projection, believes his life is in danger. Twice he has been almost run down in the street by the same mysterious carriage, and moreover, disturbing alterations have been made to his lecture slides. These are closely guarded, yet just before each lecture an unknown hand has defaced images depicting Muybridge himself, which he has discovered, to his horror, only as he projects them to his audience. As Holmes and Watson investigate, a bewildering trail of clues only deepens the mystery, and meanwhile, newspaper speculation reaches fever pitch. The great detective’s reputation is on the line, and may be ruined for good unless he can pick apart a mystery centred the capturing, for the first time, of figures in motion, and the wonders of the new cinematograph.

Defacement asks what happens when something precious is despoiled. In specifying the human face as the ideal type for thinking through such violation, this book raises the issue of secrecy as the depth that seems to surface with the tearing of surface.

Rich... dangerous... disfigured. I had her kidnapped to fix the one thing that has kept me hidden from society my whole life. My face. But, as the days go by, she's affecting the part of me no woman has ever touched. My heart. I'm drawn to her. And I can tell she's drawn to me, too, though she fights it. I see it in the longing glances and the quickening of her breath, even as I hold her down. Lily. They call me Monster through no fault of my own, but she's the only one who's ever made me feel like a man... Additional Keywords: dark romance, romantic suspense, alpha male, kidnapping, fairytale, retelling, birthmark, sexy, Marissa Farrar, Series, Trilogy, abduction, free dark romance novel, billionaire romance

An exploration of a formative chapter in Basquiat's brief career through the lens of his identity and the role of cultural activism in New York City during the early years of the 1980s Jean-Michel Basquiat painted Defacement (The Death of Michael Stewart) in 1983 to commemorate the death of a young, black artist who died from injuries sustained while in police custody after being arrested for allegedly tagging a New York City subway station. Published to accompany a focused exhibition of Basquiat's response to anti-black racism and police brutality, this catalogue explores a chapter in the artist's career through both the lens of his identity and the Lower East Side as a nexus of activism in the early 1980s. With an introduction by Chaédria LaBouvier, Nancy Spector, and Joan Young, and an essay by Johanna F. Almiron are supplemented by commentary from artists, activists, and other cultural figures who were part of this episode in the city's history, which invokes today's urgent conversations about state-sanctioned racism. Ephemera related to Stewart's death, including newspaper clippings and protest posters, and samples of artwork from Stewart's estate are also featured along with paintings and prints made by other artists from Keith Haring, Andy Warhol, David Hammons, in response to Stewart's death.

When the university merged his Department of Linguistics with English, Professor Desmond Bates took early retirement, but he is not enjoying it. He misses the purposeful routine of the academic year, and has lost his appetite for research. His wife Winifred's late-flowering career goes from strength to strength, reducing his role to that of escort and househusband, while the rejuvenation of her appearance makes him uneasily conscious of the age gap between them. The monotony of his days is relieved only by wearisome journeys to London to check on the welfare of his eighty-nine-year-old father, an ex dance musician who stubbornly refuses to move from the house he is patently unable to live in with safety. But these discontents are nothing compared to the affliction of hearing loss, which is a constant source of domestic friction and social embarrassment. In the popular imagination, he observes, deafness is comic, as blindness is tragic, but for the deaf person himself it is no joke. It is through his deafness that Desmond inadvertently gets involved with a young woman whose wayward and unpredictable behaviour threatens to destabilise his life completely. Funny and moving by turns, Deaf Sentence is a brilliant account of one man's effort to come to terms with deafness and death, ageing and mortality, the comedy and tragedy of human lives.