Garry Leonard

The Landscape of Emotion in Literary Encounters

This study examined the effects of emotional subject matter and descriptive style in short story excerpts on text (e.g. rich in meaning) and reader response-oriented (e.g. liking) ratings. Forty-eight subjects, including equal numbers of trained and novice male and female students, read two examples of each text twice and either generated or received interpretations between readings in a within-subjects design. In general, intellectual challenge slowed the pace of reading, whereas suspense-based arousal increased it. Emotional subject matter had a more powerful effect than descriptive style on both cognitive (challenging, rich in meaning) and affective (expressive, personally relevant) scales and were read more quickly. Generating interpretations fostered subjective reactions to the Emotional excerpts (images), whereas Descriptive texts were less amenable to subjective responses. Consistent effects were also found for background and gender. As in everyday life, subject matter had a dominant effect in enga...

The City, Modernism, and Aesthetic Theory in "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man"

-But we are just now in a mental world, Stephen continued. The desire and loathing excited by improper esthetic means are really unesthetic emotions not only because they are kinetic in character but also because they are not more than physical. Our flesh shrinks from what it dreads and responds to the stimulus of what it desires by a purely reflex action of the nervous system. Our eyelid closes before we are aware that the fly is about to enter our eye. -Not always, said Lynch critically. (Joyce, Portrait 206)

‘The Famished Roar of Automobiles’: Modernity, the Internal Combustion Engine, and Modernism

As Modernism/modernity—the title of the leading journal in modernist studies—makes clear, the major catalyst in the ongoing reassessment of modernism is the need to factor in ‘modernity.’ New Criticism, since it concentrated on the text ‘as text’ and forbade the reader from looking up, delayed our now hyper-acute awareness of the constitutive interplay between modernism and modernity. Recently, Tom Gunning has characterized modernity itself as the result of cyclical opposition between the explosive energy of constant change and relentless mutability in modernity, and the equally tireless design of a systematic organization designed to not only contain that energy, but convert it into a useable force for some kind of forward motion: ‘Modernity involves systems of containment and control as much as a new, explosive energy’ (Gunning 310; L. Marcus).1 He goes on to illustrate this dynamic in the development of cinema where the explosive shots of Eisensteinian montage are both utilized, and yet contained, by simultaneous developments in the narrative cinema of D. W. Griffith and others.

Advertisements: Multileveled in Word and Image and in the Mind of the Beholder

This study compared cognitive and psychodynamic perspectives on responses to simple and complex advertisements for perfume and liquor products. In simple ads, copy/image relations are concordant and sentimentalized, while in complex ads relations are discordant and ironic. It was hypothesized that writing story outlines based on simple ads would provide a means for projecting compensatory fantasies onto the scenes, while analyzing copy/image relations in complex ads would make viewers more aware of stimulus qualities in the ads. Thirty-one male and twenty-one female undergraduates viewed four perfume and four liquor ads. Commodity (perfume, liquor) and Advertising Style (simple, complex) were factorially combined in two blocks of four trials each. In a within-subjects design, subjects either wrote story outlines first and analyzed copy-image relations, or vice-versa. They then rated each ad on thirteen 7-point scales measuring perceived stimulus properties (e.g., quality of the ad) and subjective processes (e.g., liking or experiencing fantasies). Results showed that three factors underlined the judgments: Compensation (enhanced feelings of success, confidence, power, and masculinity/femininity), Effectiveness (ad was liked, perceived as good, stimulated fantasies, and an intention to purchase the product), and Action (everyday use of perfume/after shave or liquor products). Writing stories in response to simple perfume ads had a facilitative influence on scales loading on the Compensation factor. Content analysis showed that simple perfume ads elicited romantic stories, while analyzing copy-image relations fostered seduction themes and a sensitivity to metaphor. These findings provided support for Lacans idea that people need to compensate for self-perceived inadequacies, but also fit with cognitive/empirical ideas.

'Without Contraries There is No Progression': Cinematic Montage and the Relationship of Illustration to Text in William Blake's The [First] Book of Urizen

My claim is that Blake’s illustrations are not a supplement depicting what happens in the text, but a translation into visual terms of his central tenet, at play throughout The [First] Book of Urizen, that ‘[w]ithout Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence’ (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Plate 3). And I am claiming further that this strategy is comparable to the cinematic technique of montage: whereas the collision of two contrary images in montage creates an explosion famously described by Benjamin as ‘the dynamite of the tenth of a second’. Blake, too, creates tension and ‘collision’ in his illustrations in order to depict not the actual image of Los delivering his hammer blows, for example, but rather the hoped for effect of these blows – the breaking apart of Urizen’s ‘solid without fluctuation’ (The [First] Book of Urizen, Plate 4). This ‘solid,’ if allowed to stand, imposes a restrictive view of the cosmos that reduces our visionary capacity to that of ‘two little orbs. . .fixed in two little caves/Hiding carefully from the wind. . .’ (The [First] Book of Urizen, Plate 12).

Tears of Joy: Hollywood Melodrama, Ecstasy, and Restoring Meta-Narratives of Transcendence in Modernity

There is critical consensus that modernity is characterized by a lack of meta-narratives, by de-sacralization, by the sequestration of people from the meaning contained in their life experiences, and by a crisis in valuation. This paper argues that Hollywood melodrama compensates for these aspects of modern life by locating the sacred within the secular. Part of the compensatory function served by this genre is effected through the emotional impact that melodramas have on audiences, which can be usefully contextualized in relation to religious ecstasy. A comparative analysis of the two films Broken Blossoms (1919) and American Beauty (1999) reveals how the evocation of ecstasy through film can reinstate meta-narratives, present an alternative means of valuation to capitalism, and manifest an opposite logic to that of investment - that of sacrifice.