The historical gaze has continually reinvented the history of Tuberculosis, interpreting its connections to culture and society in a myriad of different ways. Particular interest has been paid to the Romantic Era, historically framed from the late eighteenth to nineteenth century, and the peculiar relationship that was foraged between society and Consumption (the Romantic era’s term for Tuberculosis). In categorizing the impact that Consumption had on society and individuals, historians have utilized different frameworks of analysis to identify key causal factors and evidence to explain the extent in which Consumption was entangled with everyday life. Thus, this essay engages in a comparative analysis of the work of Charles Lawlor and Akihito …show more content…
This essay explores the relationships between social, cultural, epidemiological, economic causal factors that led to the romantic perception of Consumption. In addition, Lawlor and Suzuki engage in the contemporary intellectual framing of Consumption by problematized Susan Sontag’s theory of illness and social metaphor within her work Illness as Metaphor. Sontag suggests that the existence of the Consumptive identifiers, like pale skin, low-grade fever, listlessness etcetera, occurred simultaneously with social metaphors of romanticizing Consumption. Lawlor and Suzuki challenge this notion by stating that the physical epidemiological identifiers are the building blocks in which metaphor are created, rather than metaphor and physical identifiers always simultaneously existing . Thus, Sontag’s initial theory inadequately represents how diagnostic indicators of illness and social metaphor are related . Through challenging Sontag’s application of social metaphor, Lawlor and Suzuki can critically analyze the cultural meaning of Consumption throughout its history. Allowing them to reconstruct the socio-cultural causal factors that created the consumptive aesthetic in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and …show more content…
In their social analysis of Consumption, Lawlor and Suzuki challenge the regular periodization of consumptive aesthetics by historically periodizing its origins in the early eighteenth century rather than the late eighteenth century. Lawlor and Suzuki identify that before the Romantic perception of Consumption, conceptions of the disease were based in classical medicine, attributing the illness to “the accumulation of putrid blood in the lungs, the corrosion of the organ by ulcerous pus, and the subsequent emaciation of the body”. Culturally, the framing of the disease was still influenced by the garish medical framing, but it was balanced socially, through socially cultiviated images of the heroic death originating in the classical period . This social framing, according to Lawlor and Suzuki, placed Consumption as an ‘other’ in the collective imagining of the disease, refuting Sontag’s theory that the consumptive aesthetic as social metaphor has not always existed within the social perception of Consumption as a disease. Lawlor and Suzuki argue in the Romantic period, that social metaphors changed through a process of aestheticization of Consumption which took place over several years. This allowed for the social conception of the disease to transition from the social interpretation of Consumption as an ‘other’ to having it
Televistas is relatable to modern audiences as it depicts common love stories shown on television in present day portraying the same plot. Dawe raises awareness here, highlighting the influence of television and how we have changed consequently. Dawe’s argument is raised with “Fortunes smiled between commercials” detailing his revolt of televised advertisements. Coincidingly “dreams were swapped, and futures planned” suggests the powerful negative influence of television on our lives; encouraging the purchase of irrelevant materials. The use of big brand tags such as “Samboy” and “Cheezels” implements the idea of increased consumerism of fashionable items, due to televised advertising. Dawe instinctively sets the names of products e.g. ‘Samboy’ to emphasise the perceived value of a product on television, inferring toward the increase of consumerism within the
MacClancy states, “Wrenched out of normal routines by the continuing assault on their mouths, they concentrate on the sensation and ignore almost everything else” (287-288). On the topic of body art, Ruggia states, “The skinny obsession is spiraling out of control as more people risk death to be thin through diet pills and gastric bypass surgery” (318). These statements support that the essays both unveil an underlying message of the endless human search for self-gratification. Using diferent writing styles, the authors similarly impress their person opinion on the
Modris Eksteins presented a tour-de-force interpretation of the political, social and cultural climate of the early twentieth century. His sources were not merely the more traditional sources of the historian: political, military and economic accounts; rather, he drew from the rich, heady brew of art, music, dance, literature and philosophy as well. Eksteins examined ways in which life influenced, imitated, and even became art. Eksteins argues that life and art, as well as death, became so intermeshed as to be indistinguishable from one another.
In chapter seven of The Way We Never Were, Stephanie Coontz focuses on consumerism and materialism. In this chapter, Coontz claims that the root causes of consumerism is affecting Americans in a contemporary society is the mindset of people having an addiction to having the latest and greatest in terms of any goods. Coontz argues that “consumerism and materialism affect working adults and non working ones, both sexes and all ages, people who endorse new roles for women and people who oppose them” (page 223). In our society people buy what they want rather than what they need.
In the Enseigne, art is also shown to serve a function that it has always fulfilled in every society founded on class differences. As a luxury commodity it is an index of social status. It marks the distinction between those who have the leisure and wealth to know about art and posses it, and those who do not. In Gersaint’s signboard, art is presented in a context where its social function is openly and self-consciously declared. In summary, Watteau reveals art to be a product of society, nevertheless he refashions past artistic traditions. Other than other contemporary painters however, his relationship to the past is not presented as a revolt, but rather like the appreciative, attentive commentary of a conversational partner.
The purpose of Priscilla Wald’s book, Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative, is to explore the spread of disease and the effects it has. Wald does not focus on the loss of life or the medical side of disease, instead she chooses to focus on the spread of the idea of a particular disease, which she calls the outbreak narrative. She then looks at how each path leads to the containment of each disease. By doing so, she creates criteria which can be used to evaluate the spread of any idea; including the temperance movement. After exploring the facets of the temperance movement and comparing them to the mold Wald creates, we find that the movement fits into the outbreak narrative. Since the temperance movement took the form of an outbreak narrative, panic and a lack of knowledge plagued the United States and many parts of the world in the 19th century.
In the 1600's and 1700's, the American colonists drank large quantities of beer, rum, wine, and hard cider. These alcoholic beverages were often safer to drink than impure water or unpasteurized milk and also less expensive than coffee or tea. By the 1820's, people in the United States were drinking, on the average, the equivalent of 7 gallons of pure alcohol per person each year (“drinkingprohibition” 1). As early as the seventeenth century, America was showing interest towards prohibition. Some people, including physicians and ministers, became concerned about the extent of alcohol use (“There was one...” 1). They believed that drinking alcohol damaged people's health and moral behavior, and promoted poverty. People concerned about alcohol use u...
In The Rape of the Lock and The Progress of Beauty, both Pope and Swift give representations of the nature and function of cosmetics in eighteenth century society. Their representations are completely contrasting, as the representation of the nature of cosmetics given by Pope is positive, yet Swift represents a negative nature of cosmetics. Pope represents cosmetics to perform the function of enhancing natural beauty. On the other hand Swift’s representation of the function of cosmetics is one that destroys natural beauty. Evidence for these representations can be found in the tones used by both of the poets, in their descriptions of cosmetics and its effects, and in distinct phrases where they offer warnings and speak distinctly about cosmetics and its advantages and disadvantages. Essentially, Pope represents the nature and function of cosmetics in eighteenth century society as positive and as something to enhance natural beauty, whereas Swift represents the nature and function of the same cosmetics as being negative and as something which destroys the natural beauty of women.
The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu was one of the earliest theorists to examine the question of symbolic consumption, outlining in particular the ways in which consumption, s an everyday practice, is implicated in ideology and capitalist hierarchies. (Lewis, J, 2008. P220)
During the nineteenth century, the Victorians had high expectations of their class system to make sure the classes were distinct and properly represented. They “valued controlled, propitious behavior” and would tolerate nothing less (Harding Victorians and Alcohol). There was a “cultural value placed on teetotaling,” total abstinence from alcoholic drinks, but despite this value “alcohol consumption became a popular pastime” (Harding Victorians and Alcohol). Behavior such as drunkenness was strongly disapproved of because of its association with the lower class.
Kevin White pp: 5-8k introduction to sociology of health and illness second edition books.goole.co.uk accessed 11-04-2014
Over a century ago, when Bernard Shaw wrote The Doctor’s Dilemma in 1906, England’s health care was terrifyingly primitive. If one had the misfortune of falling ill during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, essentially, one had the choice of two treatment options. The sufferer could either turn to the local druggist to purchase an expensive patent medicine, of which the ingredients largely comprised of opiates or alcohol and were consequently addictive; or, the patient could visit the equally costly doctor and receive a diagnosis which often led to a treatment involving sharp knives, bleeding, and the prescribing of more addictive drugs. Both treatment options and professions claimed they could cure anything and everything, and save a man from his impending last rites. Bernard Shaw apparently found these claims as quacked as his contemporary audiences as his comedy, The Doctor’s Dilemma, bestows an ironic portrayal of the attempts of the period’s medical professionals’ to play God. This biblical irony which Shaw so wittily scribed could not have been depicted more clearly than through Ken MacDonald’s set design. In particular, MacDonald’s design renditions of Christian symbolism became further pronounced when combined with director Morris Panych’s blocking choices and Shaw’s text.
In the late 19th century decadence was a tremendously popular theme in European literature. In addition, the degeneracy of the individual and society at large was represented in numerous contemporary works by Mann. In Death in Venice, the theme of decadence caused by aestheticism appears through Gustav von Achenbach’s eccentric, specifically homoerotic, feelings towards a Polish boy named Tadzio. Although his feelings spring from a sound source, the boy’s aesthetic beauty, Aschenbach becomes decadent in how excessively zealous his feelings are, and his obsession ultimately leads to his literal and existential destruction. This exemplifies how aestheticism is closely related to, and indeed often the cause of decadence. Although the narrative is about more complexities, the author’s use of such vivid descriptions suggest the physical, literal aspect of his writing is just as important to the meaning of the story.
The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.” (D.G, Wilde, 17). It seems absurd to declare a form that has been admired and practiced for centuries as “useless”. But the paradox in this statement plays on a cultural assumption: in this case, the presumed positive connection between usefulness and inherent value, especially with regard to art.
Within David Hume's Standards of Taste we see the exploration of the idea that the level of beauty of how successful an artwork is relies entirely on the audience's personal response. By approaching this idea from many different viewpoints, although Hume focuses the primary point of his argument from the viewer’s perspective instead of the viewpoint of the meaning that is found when looking at the painting directly, basing his argument on the fact that, “though the principles of taste be universal, and nearly, if not entirely, the same in all men ; yet few are qualified to give judgement on any work of art, or establish their own sentiment as the standard of beauty.” This technique is one that is found to be used prominently throughout Hume's