David Alex Ellison

Aesthetic Experience, Transitional Objects and the Third Space: The Fusion of Audience and Aesthetic Objects in the Performing Arts

Aesthetic experience has been relativized and marginalized by recent social and cultural theory. As less attention has been paid to understanding the nature of aesthetic experience than mapping the distributed social correlates of tastes, its transformative potential and capacity to animate actors’ imaginations and actions goes unexplored. In this paper we draw upon a large number of in-depth interviews with performing arts audiences around Australia to investigate the language and discourse used to describe aesthetic experiences. In particular, we begin with theorizations of the subject-object nexus within object-relations theory to consider the transformative potential of aesthetic experience. Using these literatures, and extending them to others within sociology of the arts and materiality, our focus is on the way aesthetic experience can fuse human subjects with aesthetic objects. We examine how viewers take an aesthetic object into themselves and in turn project themselves into the aesthetic object by various visual and imaginative techniques. Our theoretical and empirical analysis bears out the constructive and productive capacity of aesthetic experience.

How to Make an Iconic Commodity: The Case of Penfolds’ Grange Wine

New approaches to iconicity in cultural sociology link the aesthetic surface of an object with the depths of its cultural meanings. Linking pragmatics and haptics with symbolism and mythology, such innovations offer a way of understanding how the aesthetic surface features of an object or image attract and enroll human interest by way of physical engagements. In addition, these approaches promise cultural analysts new resources to identify how such objects frame, and ultimately concretize in aesthetic form, complex culture structures of myth and narrative. By using the case study of a much-lauded wine, this chapter considers the conditions under which an object assumes iconic form, as well as the uses and understandings made available by this transfigured state. For our purposes, we have selected Penfolds Grange, widely regarded in the popular imagination as Australia’s premier wine. Because of its expense, Grange is tasted relatively rarely, and even then it is only engaged directly by a small group. Yet, while it is not widely circulated among the population at large, Grange is nevertheless generally perceived as a landmark Australian wine. More than this, it draws on a cache of national myths and powerful cultural stories that both elevate and continue to authorize its status as an iconic Australian wine. Thus, like any cultural icon, this wine not only stands as an exemplar of the Australian wine industry, but refers to cherished and valued national stories. Therefore—confirming its iconic status—as much as it is valued for being a premier wine, the wine thus also distinguishes and stands for the history of Australia’s wine industry while simultaneously drawing on, and giving tangible expression to, archetypes, narratives, and coded symbols of important national myths.

The Spoiler's Art: Embarrassed Space as Memorialization

This essay looks at three architectural responses to the task of memorializing the mass murder of European Jewry. Both Daniel Libeskinds Jewish Museum and Peter Eisenmans Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe are tautly theorized and well-defended instances of contemporary architecture that are nevertheless subject to-and to a degree invite-embarrassment in the context of Berlin as a historically burdened location. In contrast, Ern标oldfingers house at 2 Willow Road, Hampstead Heath, London, formulates a different response to the problem of properly acknowledging the historical past, in the form of a permanent threat to the interiors governing aesthetic.

Mobile Homes, Fallen Furniture, and the Dickens Cure

From the beginning of his career, Dickens conceived of the home and in particular the hearth as the reception point for his distinctive narrative transmissions. The relationship between writer and reader was imagined in terms of the most intimate and residentially entrenched exchanges even while Dickens contemplated the very profitable consequences of mass proliferation. In order to contextualize Dickenss entrenchment, this essay explores the means by which he fostered an aesthetic of domestic reception. Here the hearth is seen in lights both familiar and unfamiliar, as source and symbol of Victorian virtue, but also as an integral component of a discursive ensemble integrating reader, furnishings, and architecture. In novels like Dombey and Son, Dickens considers the vexing problem of domestic disquiet-the noisy and volatile insecurity of the middle classes at home-while offering a respite, a cure that briefly bound rapt readers to their chairs.

The ghost of injuries present in Dickens's The Signalman

Written in the aftermath of the Staplehurst rail disaster, Dickenss ghost story ‘The Signalman’ is often read for its uncanny insights into what would later come to be known as trauma theory. This paper revisits that text – in its focus on retrospection, belatedness, repetition and the disarticulation of event from consciousness – to consider the role of other, arguably less intense, but still traumatising experiences. For example, Dickenss fraught editorial relationship with Elizabeth Gaskell; specifically his decision to remove a reference to himself from Cranford that suggested his readers might suffer injury from writing that found its origins in an industrial process of steam and gear train. The ‘Signalman’ anachronistically unites two distinct events – Staplehurst and Gaskells wounding characterisation – within a frame that is recursively haunted by material common to both: rail catastrophe, mortal threats to the public and private self, and fraught miscommunication.