Just as the category of “baroque” suggests excess, accretion, fluidity, and counter-classicism in general, our panelists present projects that are fundamentally interdisciplinary and, importantly, offer examples of the kind of “discursive porosity” that can innovate fields, as Mieke Bal suggests in her 2010 guest column in the PMLA (“Exhibition Practices” 10). Focusing on the exchanges between different scientific, literary, and performance disciplines in the twentieth-century, this panel offers three approaches to analyzing how modernity’s excess, and the implications of this for the humanities, can be aesthetically re-configured, and critically analyzed, in terms of baroque bodies.
In The Culture of the Body: Genealogies of Modernity (2000), Dalia Judovitz locates the body—conceptually and materially—as an historically- and culturally-bound entity that has, nevertheless, been disembodied by Cartesian modern thinking. Examining texts by early modern thinkers, however, Judovitz excavates the “baroque body” as an alternative paradigm for “conceiving and representing the body” as always-becoming, as plural, and as attached to and constructing the world (12). The reward of considering the “baroque body” as an alternative framework for approaching humanism is to reunite the metaphysical and the physical in an understanding of modern subjectivity and identity as both contingent and provisional; to conceive of embodiment as expressive of culture and also as potentially transformative of social order. The baroque body also enables us to trace the historical permutations of resistance to Cartesian/normative bodies and their representations.
While twentieth-century aesthetic responses to the crisis of embodiment are often expressed as fracture, fragment, and disassociation, the baroque persists in a mode of accrual. We propose that literary studies stands to benefit from the pressures and challenges of interdisciplinarity, particularly around the case of “the human.” Here we have the baroque body across dance, music, and literature, recalibrating the possibilities of how we “read” bodies in relation to the art they produce (and by which they are produced). These papers represent the convergences of aesthetics across art forms, focusing not only on the expanding and interrelated ways that humans are/become; but also offering expanding approaches to literary analyses that draw on multiple aesthetic disciplines.
Margaret Araneo’s paper, “New York Salomania and the Disclosure of the “Nervous” Modern Subject,” begins at the turn of the twentieth-century to examine how the intersection of scientific discourse with cultural performance resulted in modernist performances of the “nervous” modern subject. Specifically, she examines the early-twentieth-century New York entertainment phenomenon of “Salomania” for examples of performances that foregrounded neuropsychological impairment. These Salome acts aestheticized through their choreography and narrative neuropathologized conditions, most notably hysteria and epilepsy. Building upon Giorgio Agamben’s discussion of “gesture” and his corresponding concepts of “potentiality” and “means without ends,” she considers the twitching, jerking, “hysterical” bodies of the New York Salome dancers as cultural locations for disclosing the paradoxical model of modern subjectivity that coalesced within the context of turn-of-the-twentieth-century U.S. neurology. When approached in this way, the Salome acts surface as contested sites where modernity’s dominant paradigms of the normative, rational, contained humanist subject can be challenged, and their legacy in the twenty-first century reimagined.
Shareese Johnson’s paper, “Embodied Dis-ability: Dmitri Shostakovich’s ‘Seven Romances on Poems by Alexander Blok,’ Op. 127,” will look at the “late” work of one of the twentieth-century’s most important composers in order to investigate the nature and extent of Shostakovich’s physical, sensory, and cognitive “limitations,” which may have manifested in his musical setting of the Blok Romances. Bringing together literary and musical analyses, this paper will draw on Joseph Straus’s argument in his article, “Disability and ‘Late Style’ in Music” (2008), which challenges predominant critical definitions of “late style” and instead poses the idea that, in musicology for example, the style transformations in a composer’s later works may actually be the result of the composer’s changing bodily or mental condition. Although controversial, there may yet be validity in this term regarding the change in a way a composer writes based on physical, sensory, cognitive, and mental processing limitations. Shostakovich was familiar with the poems of Alexander Blok, but it was only after his heart attack that he finally proposed to set them to music. A close encounter with death may have given this composer a new perspective on the poems and transformed his compositional style.
Monika Kaup’s “Neobaroque Bodies in Nicole Brossard’s Baroque at Dawn” will bring our session to the end of the twentieth century while also directly engaging with the aesthetics of the historical Baroque. Kaup traces the ways that Brossard’s 1995 novel harnesses baroque aesthetics for a postmodern project of articulating queer bodies and queer passion. Brossard turns to hypersensualistic Baroque religious art, and more specifically to the Counter-Reformation Baroque’s iconography of martyrdom, whose depictions of ecstasy oscillate between pleasure and pain, divine and physical love. The novel’s exploration of water and fluidity evokes Cuban neobaroque writer José Lezama Lima’s comment that “the earth is classical and the sea is baroque,” satirizing Eugenio d’Ors, whom Brossard quotes. It also summons fellow francophone writer Édouard Glissant’s poetics of relation, which identifies fluidity and unfinished becoming with the rebellious, transculturating "New World baroque," the work of colonized subjects who steal the art of the colonizer and turn it into an expression of their own. Countering the European "state baroque" as a technology of power, Baroque at Dawn retrieves the baroque as a creative force of cultural renewal. Kaup argues that the novel’s baroque poetics of transgressive deformation generates alternative blueprints of the human.