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Apostrophe, witnessing, and its essentially theatrical modes of address – Maria Dermôut on Pattimura and Kara Walker on the New Orleans flooding
Apostrophe is best known as a punctuation mark (’), or as a key poetic figure (with a speaker addressing an imaginary or absent person or entity). In origin, however, it is a pivotal rhetorical
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Literature may deal with historical events, and in dealing with them, relate these to a present, which is not only the present of the moment of publishing but any moment of reading. In this respect
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Witnessing appears to have an awkward relation with either rhetoric or aesthetics, because of the dominance of manipulation in rhetoric and of form in aesthetics. Rhetoric got a bad name because of
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In the humanities, apostrophe is best known for its uses in relation to lyric. In famous articles by Barbara Johnson and Jonathan Culler poetry was defined generically on the basis of apostrophe.
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The contrast with other major generic modes of speaking is that in narrative somebody is speaking about something to an audience, and that in drama characters are addressing one other, speaking with
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With regard to apostrophe’s powers to affect an audience, the Quintillian-passage may serve to illustrate how apostrophe works in terms of theatricality. In a real theatre the characters on stage
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The “wonder” involved consists, in part, in a change of situation that is not an event. An event can be described as a change of situation, or better, the shift from one situation into another
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Maria Dermôut was born in Pekalongan, in 1888 as a member of a family that had lived in the Dutch Indies for generations. She would have liked to stay in the Indies, but was forced to leave in 1933,
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The making of a drawing can be considered as an icon for apostrophe, since the maker of the drawing has to look at the one to be portrayed and turn away to the paper of the sketch. He is addressing
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Kara Walker (1969) is an Afro-American artist who has become famous especially for her installations with large scale paper cut outs, the dominant theme of which reflects back on the perverse history
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The work that Walker made shortly after hurricane Katrina had caused the flooding of New Orleans takes centre stage, firstly, in focusing on how addressing something in terms of attention may be
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Addressing the past maladies in her work, Walker’s attempt may be to restore or make possible a form of witnessing that is less troubled by the sick ghosts of the past, which is not the same as
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The point is ironically illustrated by some of Walker’s pieces that depict the biblical flood or people drowning. It concerns Jean Audran’s The Flood from the early eighteenth century, Joshua
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Walker’s solution, by digging in history and archives and turning the objects she has found into an installation in which we are involved, is to re-theatricalize the situation, splitting it up in
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One pivotal aspect with regard to theatricality is that it manifests itself in a present, in the presence of the participants involved. Especially in terms of presence it may be the case that
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Barilli R (1989) Rhetoric (trans. G Menozzi). Minnesota UP, Minneapolis.
Berg van Sapoera C J G L van den (1948) De tragedie op het eiland Saparoea in het jaar 1817 tijdens de opstand in de
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