LITERATURE AND OTHER ARTS:

FINAL SYNTHESIS

STUDENT: SMEHAN ES SAHEB EL BYAD

INSTRUCTOR: LORETA ANNA PAOLA DE STASIO
COURSE YEAR: 2020-2021
DUE DATE: 17/05/2021
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction .................................................................................................................. 3

Sister Arts ..................................................................................................................... 3

Roland Barthes: Mythology ......................................................................................... 4

Horkheimer and Adorno: Enlightenment ..................................................................... 5

Marshal McLuhan ........................................................................................................ 5

Walter Benjamin ........................................................................................................... 6

Bakhtin ......................................................................................................................... 6

Grotesque and other theories: Midsommar Movie ....................................................... 7

The Comedy of Art ....................................................................................................... 8

The Barber of Seville .................................................................................................... 9

Luis Buñuel .................................................................................................................. 9

Pier Paolo Pasolini ...................................................................................................... 10

Final Reflexion ........................................................................................................... 11

Introduction

From the beginning of the course, we have been mentioning different concepts and
movements in the recent history of literature and specifically its relationships with the
other sister arts. We have carried out theoretical classes as well as practical classes in
which the spotlight was on one of us and we had to speak up and provide a presentation
about a certain topic related to the unit we were at the time. In this synthesis, my
intention is to synthesise all the activities and theories that we have studied in class
relating them to each other along with personal reflexions and opinions about the
course.

Sister Arts

The first of the units of this course was related to the relationships among the ‘Sister
Arts’ and the ongoing discussion about the leading status of one form of art upon the
others.
Literature, music, painting, sculpture... these arts have been predominantly some of
biggest parts of the history and culture of the world. They have been widespread and
common since the beginning of time and thus have been scrutinized and analysed since
one can remember. As it may come as obvious, the focus on all these once independent
arts clearly creates the question of what has been and what is the relationship between
these arts, and are they as mentioned, independent or is there some interdependency
among them that group them together as ‘Sister Arts’? The author Pope described these
arts as "congenial" and "kindred" arts which "each from each contract new strength and
light" and where "images reflect from art to art.
As regards to poetry and painting there were these twin notions that describe poetry as
"word-painting" and painting as aspiring to be "poetic". Poems are readings as well as
painting can also be read and the angle that a viewer can take when reading a painting is
independent and unlikely to match another’s. There have been many poetry writings
about paintings as well and these have presented a wide view of the angles poets can
take towards their thoughts and interpretations. Paintings and poetry illustrate each
other. Narrative ways are used to read poetry and the viewers of painting use narrative
to make sense of the things they are seeing. The narrative of what one sees is
accessorized by the story that the narrative means the viewers use to make meaning.
There are shared characteristics between these two arts such as metaphors, a convention
we can find in both forms. However, they can be seen in painting in a quicker way than
incrusted in a poetic text. Here is where our first class-activity took place. Our task was
to find a work of art, it could be a painting or a sculpture or a picture and we had to
present it in class along with our interpretations and our thoughts about it. My personal
choice was Sorolla’s ‘Instantánea’ which, like all the other presentations, originated a
conversation in class where everyone, the teacher and the students shared their opinions
and thoughts regarding the works. This class exercise was proof of the different
interpretations that a work of art can have and that the viewers of such piece of art resort
to narrative means in order to put their ideas together and to share them.
The uniqueness of the sister arts is better learned by acknowledging the interdependence
among them. The arts make us experience beauty and other nice or bad feelings. The
long-lasting study of the sister arts considers the understanding of aesthetics and arts.
On a different note, poetry is also at times analysed regarding its relationship to sound
and its engagement in musical form. Music and literature are arts that go way back and
are considered to be religious and cultural practices, as well as popular leisure activities.
It has been argued that one of the most remarkable qualities that create the close
relationship between music and literature and that may differ from the other sister arts
like sculpture for instance is that they develop or unwind within time in a sort of
narrative that can be easily observed and understood.
The fine arts are sisters: painting, sculpture, architecture, music and literature; they live
together, and their coexistence creates an infinite number of aesthetic harmonies which,
always present, extend and acquire life through infinite eras. These harmonies are
constantly changing because the arts do not evolve in unison, but each one of them, in
its own way and in its own time, changes.

Roland Barthes: Mythology

The second part of the course included concepts, roles and function of artwork and
media in current times. First of all, it is important to introduce the renowned French
philosopher Roland Barthes (1915-1980) who was one of the first who studied the
myths of the current world that are within the deep roots of today’s society.
According to Roland Barthes, words and objects are different concepts with an
organized ability to describe a thing from different points of view. One of his biggest
ideas is that myths, their creation and evolution and the way we look at them create a
distinction in class society. These myths are also representations of social functions and
norms. In addition, Roland Barthes composed a collection of short stories written
between 1954-1956 titled Mythologies. The focus of this book was the examination of
20th century bourgeoisie life in France as well as the comparison to other contemporary
western societies. For example, Barthes’ concept of myth is comparable to the concept
of ideology composed by Marx in German Ideology. Roland Barthes had the
opportunity to examine the ideological nature of culture. Nevertheless, the term myth is
indeed a satire because of its connotations of Greek Gods and Goddesses that were part
of a world very much afar from humans. Also, the term is real as well since he believes
myth to be the aggrupation and usage of language and images. That is, anything with
meaning that is projected through history can be considered a myth.
In other works, ‘Myth Today’ for instance, myth is described as a speech. Barthes states
that it is not an object/concept, but rather a means of communication. It is this
communication that sets the concept’s realness. With this Barthes includes every
symbol with meaning in the ‘myth’. The norm of meaning is changeable, it evolves as
social change takes place. In reality, the language or the materials of myth are old, the
meaning is what can be new. That is because myth is a form of signification, and it is in
fact different from human day-to-day speech and ordinary languages.
To finish, it is believed that the myth nowadays is controlled by signs, symbols and
images and as the latter is already set, the myth and sign backing these images can
evolve and transform. We are all surrounded by signs, literal or virtual, like food or
beverages. The way in which we perceive these objects changes over the course of time.
Roland Barthes presents the process of signification of the products and objects humans
use day to day. The myth is evolution.

Horkheimer and Adorno: Enlightenment

On a similar note, Horkheimer and Adorno, also constituted a big important part of the
20th century critical thinking. In their work Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), they
discussed that the 18th century Enlightenment had brought technologically developed
governments that at the same time would also be oppressive and inhuman. These were
clearly seen in the fascism and totalitarianism present in the 20th century.
The critical theorists of the time had the belief that they could free people from false
beliefs that included ideologies that aimed to support the political and economic
situation. They had the idea of conducting this ‘liberation’ by means of showing them
that these ideas had been acquired with unreasonable methods, for example,
indoctrination. Finally, some of these theorists came to question if the sources of
support aiming at promoting ideological conformity in capitalist societies had blinded
most individuals and their perception and reasoning so much that all intents at ‘waking
them up’ or freeing them would be effective.

Marshal McLuhan

In the second part of the 20th century there was also a big change in literature and
critical thinking. Writing as it is, is a fixed means, literature is read by one person and
can be reread or skipped or moved forward as the reader pleases. However, radio,
television and cinema are more fluent means, the audience is a group of people that
relies on time, and pausing, going back or forward was not something one could do in
the 20th century. In fact, Marshall McLuhan with his book Understanding Media (1964),
he proposed an entire system of aesthetic, sociological and philosophical hypothesis
based on this idea. Marshall McLuhan was a Canadian theorist and educator whose
doctrine could be summarized as ‘the medium is the message”. He believed in the
incredible impact of television and new technologies and their effects on modelling
ways of thinking in all aspects of culture. He considered printed literature as a means
that was soon to be made useless. McLuhan’s view and critical thinking of the 20th
century society’s changes caused him to be one of the most important predictive
mouthpieces.
Walter Benjamin

Walter Benjamin was one renowned European thinker that influenced Marxist ways of
thinking about art. He was a big advocate of Marxist humanism and appreciated the big
influence of Marxist ideas on aesthetics in the examination of labour and in the critique
of the fake consciousness that human beings had adopted when subjected to capitalism.
Walter Benjamin’s collection The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
(1936) explained the affairs of art in those days as a victim to a process of corruption
and debauchment, the rise of Fascism where art is not an instructive tool but rather just
a matter of satisfaction, desire and preference. Quoting Benjamin, “Communism
responds by politicizing art”, in other words, art becomes the instrument by which
the false consciousness of the people is to be subverted.

The next section of the course was composed by the concepts of the Grotesque and the
Bakhtinian theories. This was completed in class with a personal presentation of a
media piece that showed the characteristics of the grotesque, which I will be explaining
in the next section.

Bakhtin

Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975) was a Russian literary theorist and philosopher, his range
of ideas was wide, and they exponentially made a big impact on Western thinking in
cultural history, linguistics, literary theory, and aesthetics. The book we mainly
discussed in this course was Rabelais and His World (1965). This book examines the
ideologies of the Middle Ages and Renaissance as presented by the French writer
François Rabelais, specifically in the work Gargantua and Pantagruel (1534). Bakhtin
states that Rabelais’ words have not been fully understood and he tried to explain and
show the real intentions of Rabelais by providing parts of his work that were not given
enough attention to together with an analysis of the social system at the time. Bakhtin
discovers two different implications: carnival and grotesque realism. The first, he spoke
of as social intuition, and the latter he describes as a literary mode. His book explores
the relationships between the social and the literary together with the body.
According to Bakhtin, carnival is linked to collective. The people going to a carnival,
are not just a group, they are regarded as a whole, aggregated in such a way that it
challenges the socioeconomic and political situation. During a carnival, there was
equality. The lower-class life was considered important for the carnival rather than the
higher roles like thought or soul. In carnivals the people attending felt part of a
collective thanks to the special sense of space and time and in that moment, they stop
being individuals as they become a whole. Thanks to costumes and masks the bodies are
regenerated and it is then when an intensified consciousness of their carnal, earthly and
corporal unity becomes community.
On the other hand, in the Grotesque realism there is focus on the overt, the degradation
of all things abstract, noble or idealized to a material level. Bakhtin stated that the
grotesque realism was a celebration of life and that the were was a comic symbol with a
deep contraposition. The positive connotation of the grotesque is connected to birth and
revival, whereas its negative connotations are grouped together with death and
deterioration. Exaggeration, hyperbole, and excessiveness are all important
characteristics of the grotesque style. Some parts of the body are often referred to in the
grotesque, elements that are produced in the body or an overt part of the body that can
be entered. Grotesque can also be described as the reproaching of specific social
phenomena angrily and abusively. The grotesque causes displeasure to the public by an
impossible or improbable nature of the image.

Grotesque and other theories: Midsommar Movie

This is where our next class activity took place. The activity consisted of applying the
theories learnt in class to a current audio-visual text (short film, advertisement or video
clip), and present it in class. The video I chose was a scene from the 2019 movie
‘Midsommar’.
The focus of the scene is this group of people who could be described as a ‘cult’
electing their queen from a group of friends that went there to visit. They eventually kill
all the people that came with her, including her boyfriend which you can see is inside a
bear’s skin burning. This exaggeration of female empowerment and male punishment
because those were, from my point of view, the two aims of this movie, is elevated to
the point where the queen is given the power to control everyone surrounding her, and
her boyfriend, who we know is a bad person, ends up dead. They drug him and burn
him inside a bear’s skin. As mentioned before the grotesque is a celebration of life and a
contradiction of life/death. Here Bakhtin’s ideas are represented clearly. The group of
people are in a sense of euphoria celebrating the start of their new era with their newly
chosen queen while at the same time her boyfriend is being burned alive. Moreover,
another idea of the grotesque is that of the body, what goes out of it and what penetrates
it. In here, we have the male and toxic figure punished, put inside a bear’s body, that it,
he is penetrating the animal’s body and being burned inside it. On another note,
something that can be slightly seen in the clip is also a carnivalesque idea: the sense of
community. This group of people are a cult, they are part of a collective and there is no
sense of individualism present with them. They wear their own style of clothes, hair
pieces and even masks and they are elevated into a state of awareness of their bodies,
their carnal and sensual connections as a community and that is a something we see
along the whole movie; for example, in a scene where many women are having sex with
one man or when the queen is having a nervous breakdown and the other women come
and cry with her: they are all liberated. In relation to other theories, this sense of
community I just mentioned can also be related to the theories of Walter Benjamin; in
this movie we see art, in forms of songs and poetry, be used as an instruction tool as
well as a means for pleasure. They are singing to educate each other, especially the
queen who is new to all of this, and they are expressing themselves reaching a summit
of pleasure and enjoyment. This joins the two concepts of Walter Benjamin, that
capitalist society had turned art into just an issue of taste and that communism would
bring together the sense of instruction that was missing. In the movie, they are a
community, brought together to learn and to enjoy. The concepts of McLuhan are not so
easy to apply here because the community that appears in this movie is totally away
from technology and television. However, they have a storytelling medium that is
painting; at the beginning of the movie, they show a painting with all of the scenes of
the movie in chronological order. If we had known how to interpret the painting, it
could be called a spoiler. But it is not until the end that you realize what that first
painting was. These paintings are all throughout the movie and they all explain what is
about to happen. Even though television is not present in this movie, the concept of the
medium being the message could be applied here as well, as the paintings introduced
along the movie can also have an impact on the viewers. In its full splendour, we can
find a representation of the ideas of Horkheimer and Adorno. This movie is about a
group of people defying the social norms and living as a community away from
everyone else. These people are aware of the inhumanity and danger that is present in
post-modern societies with capitalism, and they are away from all of it. In the process,
they choose a queen to guide them, a girl who is still very well ‘not free’, bound to the
capitalist society in which she has grown up. The group tries to show her the better way
to defy the capitalist and individualist system and to join them as a community. They
clear her perception of the society and induce her reasoning. To finish, related to
Barthes’ Mythology, there are also many symbols in the movie that showcase the
different things that are about to happen and different concepts important to it. The
people of the group that turn 72 years old must kill themselves in a ritual, this represents
death and a start of life as a new era for the group begins. What is more, there are small
symbols that represent the deterioration of the relationship between the two of them;
when it is her birthday, the boy is unable to light a candle for her, representing that he is
no longer able to provide the flame or light of life for her. In addition, the dancing in
circles seen in the scene represents the endless toxic relationship she had with him and
when she is able to get free from the circle, she is crowned queen, representing the
freedom and liberation from him.
The next part of the course was related to The Comedy of Art and different examples
and works related to that type of artmaking.

The Comedy of Art

Commedia dell'Arte is a type of popular theatre born in mid-16th century Italy and
preserved until the early 19th century. As a genre, it mixes elements of Italian
Renaissance literary theatre with carnival traditions (masks and costumes) and small
acrobatic skills. The commedia dell’arte emphasized ensemble acting,
its improvisations included masks and stock situations, and the plots were often taken
from the classical literary tradition of the commedia erudita. Commedia dell’Arte is a
crucial referent for the current spectacle and contemporary comic opera. An important
example we have seen in class is Gianni Schicchi, a comic opera by Puccini. In this
work, Puccini aimed at representing the society of the time and the changes that were
happening. Innovation and uprising were taking over, and Puccini wrote about it. This
phenomenon was influenced by the just mentioned Bakhtin and his theory of the
carnival. In Gianni Schicchi, the comedy is presented by means of ostracism and
degradation of the new societal classes. We can see also find characteristics like the
comedic overthrow that serve to elevate the play to its summit. These characteristics
being incorporated into opera brought an elaborate reappearance of that genre, and, at
the same time, conveyed a message of social critique.

The Barber of Seville

In class, we used the Barber of Seville to explain how fidelity in the representation of
other’s opera can work and the changes or improvements the author can make in
representing an old work nowadays. For us, we were presented with Rossini’s writing
and the staging of Dario Fo. In the Barber of Seville there is a key element that is music.
It is vital for communication and it guides the acting as Dario Fo intended to render
Rossini’s work. At the same time, he was able to represent and reproducing a whole
time period with its philosophical trends in its entire perspective. In Fo’s version of the
work, we see that he interrupts the operatic scene, in the way that he makes the opera
singers act, enacting the arrangements with body-movements that constitute a
remarkable change for the opera buffa and it makes it noticeable. Fo’s representation
relies on fidelity to aspects like the music, narrative and thematic nature of the libretto
but regarding the figuration, he was not as faithful. His initial aim was to provide a
representation of the Barber of Seville to the people considering the cultural context the
time, never forgetting to maintain the superficiality of Rossini’s work unscathed. The
way to present this work is an example of the modern theatrical representations that
Roland Barthes loathed, which contained characteristics like the surprise effect. The
most remarkable instance of this idea is the overture, a moment that can be considered a
plain carnivalization of Rossini’s initial music. Nevertheless, the outfits, ensembles, the
tinctures and the mise en scene are energetic, flamboyant, resonant and idyllic,
converting the setting into a symbol of the surreal and a true ballet at the same time.

Luis Buñuel

Luis Buñuel (1900-1983) was a Spanish filmmaker and a strong figure of Surrealism, a
movement that had a big influence on him and his work. Buñuel he was an atheist who
made use of themes like unjustified cruelty, carnality, and religious mania on many
occasions; for example, in Un Chien Andalou. Buñuel paid for the film with help from
her mother and the writing took place in company of Dalí, another strong icon of
Surrealism. This short film was influenced by many, but a remarkable one is Freud and
his psychoanalytic theory. This idea claimed that the wellness of people could be
achieved by converting their unconscious thoughts and motivations into conscious. This
would be done by means of sharing their repressed emotions and experiences so as to
achieve extrasensory perception. The ID was also a factor to take into consideration in
this piece of work. As regards to Freud, the ID is the part of the human unconscious that
searches for pleasure, the fragment of the mind in which humans’ primitive instincts are
guarded. The ID is not a part that is aware of reality or of the difference between evil
and good, these ideas are present in many scenes in the movie for example when a man
attacks a woman carelessly. In order to fight this identity, we find the ego and the
superego. The ego is what balances the suffering and the enjoyment and keeps the
person’s perception of reality by dominating the identity’s primal cravings. On the other
hand, the superego introduces society’s moral rules and is what stops people from
acting the way the ID may indicate. In Un Chien Andalou the characters behave as they
please and give in to the primary instincts of the human body in the interest of obtaining
satisfaction. A satisfaction that is obstructed in real life by the norms in society that stop
humans from surrendering to their primal desires. All these topics can be spotted during
the short film and it is what makes this great and renowned piece of art exactly what it
is.

Pier Paolo Pasolini

Pier Paolo Pasolini, (1922-1975), was an Italian motion-picture director, poet, and
novelist, famous for his socially critical, stylistically unorthodox films.

The film discussed in class, La Ricotta, is a short film written in 1962. It is part of a
four-piece movie, RoGoPag and it is considered the most memorable part of it. La
Ricotta is the apogee of Pasolini's creative powers and social criticism. On the outskirts
of Rome, a film "troupe" is shooting a film about the Passion of Christ; actors,
machinists, the saints, the apostles, the director are part of the scene. The poor local
people submit to various humiliations in order to get a little food. In the film, the art and
history are associated with divinity and the marginalised bodies, as we can also find an
eroticisation of suffering. The sacred is located within the carnivalesque, the comic and
corporeal reality of Stracci, with his outworn hunger, whose bodily desires are simple,
earthly and honest. For Pasolini, this is truly worthy of veneration, which is why he
gives it the ultimate meaning through Stracci's unforgettable death on the cross.

Pasolini was a man who raised his voice to question what everyone else was obeying, to
denounce the devastation and spiritual poverty in capitalism and in the omnipresence of
commercial television. He saw an even worse future coming and that was what he spent
his years condemning. Moreover, Pasolini was dedicated to creation and life, he
invested in culture and vision. Another one of his works which we spoke about in class
is the film Che cosa sono le nuvole? It is a stimulated metaphor of life. The story is a
reinterpretation of Othello, performed by a group of puppets, who, on stage, play
Shakespearean roles, but backstage, they wonder about why they do what they do. This
"puppet" comedy will come as a new excuse for Pasolini to present the audience with
some of his most beloved themes throughout his artistic career: the daily coexistence of
reality and appearance, the search for oneself, the illusion of freedom in the lives of
ordinary people always controlled by the higher people, the complexity and beauty of
life and the inevitability of death.
Final Reflexion

To finish, I must say that the situation in which we have found ourselves in in this
course was not very favourable. The COVID-19 virus has made education a difficult
field both for instruction and learning. In this course, there have been many things that I
have liked. For starters, I liked the presentations, all of us had the chance to share our
views and ideas every week and not just once a month like in the other subjects. Most of
the classmates had wonderful ideas and it was great to be able to hear from them. The
short films that the teacher showed us were also very interesting and made the classes
more dynamic. Some of the things that I did not like, was maybe the lack of
PowerPoints or written explanations during the classes. The only reason for this is
because most of us were following the classes from home, and the audio sometimes was
not so good, and we could not understand everything. A visual aid to help us follow the
explanations would have been useful. Nevertheless, we learned many things that will be
useful for us in the future, and I recommend this course to everyone who has a special
interest in art and the history of it.