BSJ

The Butler Scholarly Journal

Category: Art

  1. Take Courage, Have Hope: A Creative Piece by Charlotte Watson

    Charlotte Watson creatively explores Anne’s unique character in this moving and brilliantly- written piece. Featured image credit: Barley, Flickr Creative Commons [https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/] Note from the Author I first read The Tenant of Wildfell Hall during my last year of secondary school, and from the very beginning, it struck me as a hugely engaging, critical, dare-I- say- it feminist text. It was bold and subversive, revolutionary and impactful, and yet still maintained a sense of the Victorian sensibility of feeling. In short, it seemed to me to be the very opposite of the way in which Anne Bronte is primarily characterised….

  2. Jane Eyre: A novel of resistance and rebellion? by Millicent Jarvis- Scott

    In this thoughtful and incisive essay, Millicent explores resistance in Jane Eyre. Featured Image is Jane Eyre by Liz Lux, flickr creative commons. Literature which can be described as rebellious and resistive should be willing to go beyond social norms in a revolutionary way for the time period, something I would argue that Bronte is successful in doing in her novel ‘Jane Eyre’. Even the action of writing ‘Jane Eyre’ in 1847 could easily be considered to be an action of resistance, against both a literary culture which placed less value on female narratives, and a society which reinforced these…

  3. Agnes and Adam: Emily and Anne Brontë’s Politics of the Animal Kingdom. An essay by Jack Probert.

    One of the brilliant entries for our Anne Brontë competition. Jack Probert expertly explores the animal kingdom in Anne and Emily’s works. Featured image is a sketch of Keeper, Emily Brontë’s dog, by Emily herself. In the work of both Emily and Anne Brontë, animals form part of a wider moral and political scheme in which both sisters examine the growing individualism of their own modern, industrial world. In exploring this, the distinction between wild animals and pets is crucial: for Emily, there is a separation between the animal and the human that Anne resists in her more compassionate approach…

  4. Star-crossed lovers crossing cultures: a comparative anthropological analysis

    This study proposes to examine the invention and reinvention of the classic tragic story of love in various cultural settings and how it the story was affected by the local environment. Shakespeare’s phenomenal Romeo and Juliet and its incarnations as the American West Side Story and Russian Could One Imagine? will be examined. This study is anthropological in nature as it is interested in the cultural context of the stories. Firstly, the notion of love as we understand it must be interrogated. Romantic love in Euro-American society is understood as the deep feelings shared by two individuals who idolize one…

  5. Bob Dylan-Voice of his Generation and Late-Modernist Alien

    Although Bob Dylan is more often discussed as a musician, as the ‘song and dance man’ he once described himself as [1], his 2016 Nobel Prize Award draws attention to the literary qualities of his work. From the first publishing of his complete lyrics in The Lyrics 1961-2012 in 2016 to Christopher Ricks’ colossal book of criticism on Bob Dylan as lyricist, Dylan’s Visions of Sin, growing interest in his songs as forms of literature has brought both fruitful insights and a lot of confusion as to the status due this ambivalent figure. This article is not an attempt to…

  6. The problem with the Turner Prize: Deciphering criticism of Britain’s most prestigious art competition

    Ever since its conception in 1984 the Turner Prize has long been a source of controversy, both within and outside of the artistic sphere. Many specific works have provoked a strong public reaction; Tracey Emin’s bed, Damien’s Hurst’s formaldehyde shark and Anthea Hamilton’s recent sculpture, have all excited and appalled in equal measure. However, it is not the controversial nature of the pieces that will be discussed here, it is the debate surrounding the very nature of the prize itself. The right-wing press, particularly the Daily Mail, has long been critical of the prize. Quentin Letts, Mail correspondent, described this…

  7. Interview With An Artist: Alan O’Cain

    During the 2015-2016 academic year Alan O’Cain has been the artist/writer-in-residence shared between Josephine Butler College and St. Cuthbert’s Society. In this interview with Kiran Kaur he discusses ‘The Bikini Line’, an art installation created in collaboration with students, staff and SCRs from both colleges and situated in Durham Botanic Garden from 16th June to 25th July 2016. KK: What is the nature of the installation and what inspired it? AO: In 1946 a total of 167 inhabitants of Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Marshall Islands were relocated by the US Government in order to carry out nuclear bomb testing in the…

  8. The use of portraits as political tools in the courts of early modern Europe

    The infamous painting of Henry VIII by Hans Holbein is one of the best-known images in English history. Instantly recognisable in the modern era, the portrait successfully exemplifies the authority and power of the Tudor king. It still springs to mind at the mention of his name, five hundred years on from the painting’s completion. However, in the early modern period, portraits had political dimensions beyond that of mere representation. The Florentine humanist Leon Battista Alberti contended in the fifteenth-century that ‘painting possesses a truly divine power which…makes the absent present’. (1) Early modern portraits of sovereigns were employed precisely…

  9. The Emergence of Time Within the Spacial System of Comics

    To define the concept of emergence as ‘a process whereby larger entities, patterns, and regularities arise through interactions among smaller or simpler entities that themselves do not exhibit such properties’ (1) helps us to better understand print as Marshall McLuhan saw it: a fundamentally emergent technology. The new oil base for printing came ‘from the painters rather than the calligraphers’, and ‘the smaller cloth and wine presses embodied most of the features required by the printing press… the primary problems of innovation centered around the arts of engraving and casting…’ The goldsmiths and many others were needed to make up…

  10. The story behind ‘Cry for Justice– The Scream’

    A large number of you will have seen or heard about Palatinate’s efforts to reveal the threefold budget spent on art in and around the new Palatinate centre on the science site. New additions to the university’s collection are worth £1.4 million, and include, amongst others, original works by the likes of Henry Moore, Pablo Picasso and Andy Warhol. These are largely on the ground floor and thus open to visiting students – in fact I would greatly recommend a stroll though – when else will you have a chance to explore a free art gallery by master artists, and…