#marina warner

[onwolves]

[pissbataille]

iwtv * tvc * TVL * Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Tatsumi Hijikata training Korichi Tamano :: Tokyo, 1972 :: Eikoh Hosoe

* * * *

"The states of mind or feelings that art can excite have been helpfully distinguished in Sanskrit aesthetics, where they are called rasas, from a word meaning 'juice' or 'essence'. A fully achieved work of art should flow with all nine of them: their names might be transposed into English as wonder, joy, sexual pleasure, pity, anguish, anger, terror, disgust and laughter."

- Marina Warner

"Monsters of Our Own Making"

whiskey river

[yvain]

The Red Shoes (1948) dir. Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, based on the fairy tale of the same name by Hans Christian Andersen

From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers by Marina Warner

[chthonic-cassandra]

The marvels and prodigies, the seven-league boots and enchanted mirrors, the talking animals [...] the stars on the brow of the good sister and the donkeytail sprouting on the brow of the bad - all the wonders that create the atmosphere of the fairy tale disrupt the apprehensible world in order to open spaces for dreaming alternatives. The verb 'to wonder' communicates the receptive state of marvelling as well as the active desire to know, to inquire, and as such it defines very well at least two characteristics of the traditional fairy tale: pleasure in the fantastic, curiosity about the real. The dimension of wonder creates a huge theatre of possibility in the futures: anything can happen. This very boundlessness serves the moral purpose of the tales, which is precisely to teach where boundaries lie. The dreaming gives pleasure in its own right, but it also represents a practical dimension to the imagination, an aspect of the faculty of thought, and can unlock social and public possibilities. [...] The enchantments also universalize the narrative setting, encipher concerns, beliefs and desires in brilliant, seductive images that are themselves a form of camouflage, making it possible to utter hard truths, to say what you dare. The disregard for logic, all those fairy tale non-sequiturs and improbable reversals, rarely encompasses the emotional conflicts themselves: hatred, jealousy, kindness, cherishing retain an intense integrity throughout. The double vision of the tales, on the one hand charting perennial drives and terrors, both conscious and unconscious, and on the other mapping actual, volatile experience, gives the genre its fascination and power to satisfy. At the same time, uncovering the context of the tales, their relation to society and history, can yield more of a happy resolution than the story itself delivers with its challenge to fate: 'They lived happily ever after' consoles us, but gives scant help compared to, 'Listen, this is how it was before, but this could change - and they might.'

Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers

[iphigeniacomplex]

Elements of Greek romance, Roman moralities, Arabian nights, animal fables, medieval jests, pious saints’ lives jostle and unite with unbuttoned lack of inhibition in the fairy tale. The nature of the genre is promiscuous and omnivorous and anarchically heterogenous, absorbing high and low elements, tragic and comic tones into its often simple, rondo-like structure of narrative. Motifs and plotlines are nomadic, travelling the world and the millennia, turning up on parchment in medieval Persia, in an oral form in the Pyrenees, in a ballad sung in the Highlands, in a fairy story in the Caribbean.

— Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers

[bestbookcover]

round 1, poll 320

click for better quality & to see the full image. sometimes they get cut off weirdly!

which cover do you like best?

Once upon a time by Marina Warner

les miserables by victor hugo

Voting ended onJan 21

remember, you're voting for the cover, not the author or the book!

[riverlarking]