5 Conclusion: you know many things ‘Writing what you know’ is a large and rich project, one that provides an endless resource, and one that can be undertaken in all the types of writing discussed in this unit – poetry, fiction and life writing. The skill lies in reawakening your senses to the world around you, and then using what you find with discrimination. By realising the potentials of your own life experience, you will be collecting the materials necessary in order to write. ‘Writing what you know’ can amount to
4.2 Raiding your past The more you write, the more you will raid your own past. These incursions won't diminish or reduce your memories – rather those recollections can be enriched and become more fully realised. As Jamaica Kincaid says of her writing: One of the things I found when I began to write was that writing exactly what happened had a limited amount of power for me. To say exactly what happened was less than what I knew happe 4.1 Using memories to order narrative The philosopher John Locke made the assertion that individual identity is inextricably linked to memory – we are only what we remember being. Memory is a central part of how we think of ourselves, and indeed a central strand of what we might know. Memory is not simply a mechanical process. It works in various ways and you will use it in various ways in your writing. If you study A215 Creative Writing, the course from which this unit was extracted, you will have the opportunity to think abou 4.2 Further reading The complete text of Isaiah Berlin's essay ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ is contained in his Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford University Press, 1969). This book also contains an essay on John Stuart Mill's theory of liberty. A wider-ranging selection of Berlin's essays is The Proper Study of Mankind (Pimlico, 1998). This also includes the full text of ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’. The best commentary on Berlin's writings is Isaiah Berlin (Fontana, 1995) by John Gray. Altho 3.4 The misuse of the concept of positive liberty One of the main claims that Berlin makes in ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’ is a historical one. It is that positive theories of freedom, or perversions of them, have been more frequently used as instruments of oppression than have negative ones. These positive theories typically rely on a split between a ‘higher’ and a ‘lower’ self, or between a ‘rational’ and an ‘empirical’ self as Berlin sometimes puts it. Coercion is justified on the grounds that it leads to a realisation of 6.2 A sense of sumptuous hedonism In the sphere of painting, decoration and architecture, Orientalist schemes of decoration, which were all the rage in the eighteenth century among those who sought a more colourful and sumptuous life, attained a particularly florid mode of expression in the early nineteenth century. This was a considerable development from the early Enlightenment Rococo, which had included Oriental subjects with graceful curves and conventional, theatre backdrop landscapes designed to complement elegant gold 5.2 Sardanapalus – passion and futility For many of Delacroix’s Romantic contemporaries, versed in Byronic despondency and melancholic ruminations on the futility and transitory nature of worldly pleasure, Sardanapalus expressed the condition of ennui, (melancholy or listlessness) – a kind of inner emptiness, languor, stultification and world-weariness. (The term ennui had been used in medieval French to signify profound sadness, disgust and personal anguish from the seventeenth century onwards it was used 2.11 Birth of the ‘Romantic’ The ‘ardent and animated’ aspects of Delacroix’s work made commentators describe his large canvases of the 1820s as ‘Romantic’. By the end of the decade, he was regarded by many younger artists as the leader of a new, modern school of painting that in a spirit of revolutionary fervour had thrown off the shackles of a worn-out classicism. And yet, when a stranger who had seen Sardanapalusreferred to Delacroix as the ‘Victor Hugo of painting’, the artist responded, ‘You a 2.8 Colour and light – exercise Compare the effects of colour and light in Sardanapalus with those in David’s Andromache mourning Hector (Plate 3). What similarities and differences can you see? (You may find it helpful to look also at Plat 2.2 Sardanapalus – subject and composition The following explanatory text was published in the booklet accompanying the paintings at the 1827–8 Salon, where Delacroix’s canvas was exhibited: Death of Sardanapalus. The rebels besieged him in his palace … Lying on a superb bed, atop an immense pyre, Sardanapalus orders his eunuchs and palace officers to slit the throats of his women, his pages, and even his horses and favourite dogs; none of the Introduction What influenced Goya? Did Napoleon's invasion of Spain alter the course of Goya's career? This unit will guide you through the works of Goya and the influences of the times in which he lived. Anyone with a desire to look for the influences behind the work of art will benefit from studying this unit. This unit is an adapted extract from the Open University course From Enlightenment to Roma Introduction If you visit the Louvre museum in Paris and choose the route leading to the Denon wing, you will find on the first floor two vast galleries, the Daru room and the Mollien room, devoted to late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century French painting. Although they also contain many comparatively small works, notably portraits, these galleries are dominated by colossal pictures depicting historical and mythological subjects. Many of the images that we will be discussing in this unit belong to 6.2.1 Studio conventions in street photography Look at Images 81 and 82. Given your knowledge of conventional studio portraiture, can you see any similarities between studio and street practice? 5.5.4 Confirmation You may find it difficult to read the ver Idealisation If we look at the surprisingly small range of items commonly used as accessories we notice that they, too, confer prestige by association or continue the limited positive characterization. Children are often pictured with prestigious, manufactured toys. Do you remember Walter Eastwood's classy tricycle in Image 16? Boys hold whips or hoops suggestive of street games and the outside world; girls clutch dolls or baskets of flowers which evoke the domestic realm. The book probably appears 4.6 Touch and feeling Images 27 and 28 represent the conventional pose of the newly-wedded couple who would visit the studio sometime after marriage to commemorate the event with a portrait. (We shall look at wedding portraits again later in the 4.5 Touch Let's consider more closely the nature of touch and physical contact normally displayed in Victorian studio portraits. Compare Images 25 and 26, which are portraits of Edward, Prince of Wales and his fiancée Alexandr 4.4 Groups If we agree that the posing of individuals carried messages for the viewer it makes sense that the posing of family groups can similarly be made to convey suggestions about the family and its character. 4.2 Pose Pose followed expression on the list of the portrait photographer's priorities. A sitter's pose was intended to assist idealization by highlighting physical beauty. Photographers were required to select a pose that displayed the sitter to advantage. If your sitter be tall and thin, or short and stout, select a pose which may render such peculiarities least prominent …A sitter's personal defects may be frequently Activity 3 Various stock types of difficult sitter recur in the literature. Painters, of course, posed the biggest threat. Other difficult customers included those accompanying sitters: the gentleman with the lady, the mother with the child, the owner with the pet.
Exercise 2
Activity 23
Activity 12
Activity 11
