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Penn Faculty Research Fellows Stefano CracoliciAssistant Professor, Romance Languages Project The Contours of Sleep in the Italian Renaissance (1420-1720) Dr. Cracolici considers the culture of sleep during the Italian Renaissance, in particular, the epistemological prospect of talking about a culture of sleep without addressing the culture of dreams. This qualified approach allows the consideration of sleep not as a threshold that the sleeper crosses to enter the fantastic, but rather as a physiological break between one state of wakefulness and another. Arguing for a definition of sleep as a physical and psychological experience radically opposed to the one we ordinarily live while awake, Dr. Cracolici examines the set of beliefs, discourses, and behaviors—private or public—that Italians historically have developed to incorporate this experience into their daily habits. Presented in these terms, the culture of sleep could be more appropriately specified as a culture of wakefulness that embraces and organizes sleep as the kind of performance we execute every day; a culture, that is, which actually falls into the province of the contours of sleep: those habits, practices, and ceremonies that usually accompany, on the one hand, the moment in which a person goes to bed and starts to fall asleep, and on the other, those moments in which a person wakes up and starts his or her daily life. What are the ways in which the contours of sleep were acknowledged and subsequently handled in Italy between approximately 1420 and 1720? This period begins with the discovery of optical perspective, which stimulated the emergence of an epistemological skepticism towards the oneiric experience, and ends with the elaboration of a new historiographic paradigm that valued that same oneiric experience as raw material for a cultural and anthropological investigation—in synthesis, from Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472) to Giambattista Vico. Dean Cruess Assistant Professor of Psychology Project Dreaming and Expressive Writing (journaling) Studies have found that expressive writing (or journaling) can reduce stress and improve a person’s mental and physical health. Such studies typically require people to write about the most traumatic or stressful event in their lives for 15–20 minutes over a period of three consecutive days. Although this technique has helped people, not much is known about what actually causes them to feel better. One theory is that it helps people confront unresolved issues and make sense or meaning out of them. Some have compared expressive writing to free association, producing a catharsis and insight into some previously unresolved issue. A major theory regarding dreams also suggests that the act of dreaming allows us to process things that consciously we often cannot, perhaps making sense or constructing meaning out of the events in our lives in a symbolic way. In this Project, Dr. Cruess builds on earlier work in which he explores the connection between expressive writing, dreaming, and sleep. Results will provide the basis for a larger study to evaluate physical and mental health outcomes. Heather Love Assistant Professor of English Project Cultural Fantasies and Queer Lit In a book Project tentatively titled: Marked For Life: Modernity and Its Others, Dr. Love plans to connect her earlier work on cultural fantasies and same-sex desire with a broader study of the ways modernity has marked particular bodies as “other.” In attempting to construct a positive genealogy of gay identity, queer critics and historians have often found themselves at a loss about what to do with the difficulties of the queer past. Some have disavowed such difficulties, arguing that a “true” history has not yet been written and focusing on the more heroic episodes in queer history and representation. Others admit such difficulties in order to imagine themselves as the heroic rescuers of isolated queer figures in the past. In contrast, Dr. Love argues that queer critics and historians need to address such fantasies of rescue directly and develop a form of historiography that acknowledges the damage of social exclusions, past and present. Dr. Love’s work on fantasy in psychoanalysis and cultural studies includes an article on the figure of the lesbian in Mulholland Drive. Many have identified David Lynch’s representation of female same-sex desire in this 2001 film as a textbook example of male fantasy. Dr. Love argues that the film offers a significant reworking of twentieth-century plots of the lesbian—as either a tragic or failed lover or as a fantasy figure thoroughly identified with the image of jouissance. Mulholland Drive insists on the importance of clichés “in dreams”; through its insistence on taking fantasy seriously, the film warns viewers against dismissing any representation as “mere” fantasy. Dr. Love believes that categories of identity cannot be separated from the cultural clichés—both positive and negative—that surround them. In this Project, she traces out the ways that society’s “others” are marked off as different and at the same time made to appear as visible representatives of difference itself. Carol A. Muller Associate Professor of Music Project Dialogues on Dreams, Western and “Third-world” Ideas of Dreaming Dreams have provided a subtext for much of Dr. Muller’s work on South African expressive culture. For example, dreams were the site where in the early twentieth century, ancestors passed on to Isaiah Shembe, black South African prophet and healer, a new indigenous hymn repertory. It is in dreams that jazz performers are periodically guided through their compositional and performance experiences. It is through dreams that many imagined the possibilities of a new political dispensation in South Africa. Dreams authorize behavior and direct the lives of several subjects of these studies. The problem with dreams, however, is that they occur when the human body is at its most passive, while the dreamer is asleep and the body is in a state of temporary “death.” In Western thinking, dreaming has been pathologized; it works only as an indicator of the well being of the individual psyche. In contrast, it is in this state of sleep or temporary “death” that many in the “Third” world connect to ancestors through dream journeys. As sleep allows for the renewal of the physical body, dreaming enables spiritual connection. Dreaming provides a privileged access to the past and to the present, and directs individuals and communities to a future place. Dr. Muller will juxtapose “Third world” ideas about dreaming with contemporary psychological and psychoanalytical literature on the subject. Intertwining these distinctive groups of ideas about sleep and dreams will create a textual dialogue between the two domains. The hope is to reconcile the epistemological differences embedded in both, and perhaps to forge a more comprehensive or at least integrated dialogue on the nature of sleep and dreams in the contemporary world. Sara Nadal-Melsió Assistant Professor Romance Languages Project André Bazin and Luís Buñuel: Film as an Eschatological Dream The strategic functions of death and physicality in Luís Buñuel’s only “documentary,” Las Hurdes (1932), can be read as an instance of André Bazin’s critical concept of “corporeal realism.” Corporeal realism would seem at odds with Buñuel’s self-professed surrealism and its immersion in a dream of the unconscious. However, in Buñuel’s eschatological imagination, death emerges as the materiality of the dream itself. Thus, Buñuel’s Las Hurdes takes the form of a litany of the dead, an eschatological dream that challenges surrealist escapism in the 1930s. Corporeal realism functions in the film as radical political intervention that challenges surrealism’s limitations and emerges as an expression of Buñuel’s fidelity to the hurdano reality as “event.” Such an event is signified by the hurdanos unique proximity to death, as they lay waiting, asleep, dreaming of their eschatological nightmare. Las Hurdes bears witness to both their sleeping and their dying and constantly underscores the camera’s inability to distinguish between the two. Thus, corporeal realism in film emerges as the interruption of the mimetic as repetition, as a redemptive invocation to the impossibility to repeat because the corporeal is always at the mercy of time, i.e., death. Both in Bazin’s theory and in Buñuel’s praxis, film’s eschatology emerges as a form of redemption, as an expressive dream and as a testimony to its own corporeal defeat. Dr. Nadal-Melsió underscores both the possibilities and the epistemological limitations of film as an aesthetic form with ontological aspirations. Christian Lee Novetzke Assistant Professor, South Asian and Religious Studies Project Use of Dreams in the Varkari and other Religious Traditions in India The use of dreams in the Varkan religious tradition and in other religious traditions in India constitute a kind of historiography, a way of recalling the past that is authoritative, grounded in evidence, and linked to a reputable “author,” or the receiver of the dream. India in the Orientalist imagination has long been a place of dreams and a place situated in the dreams of the West. In The Philosophy of History, Hegel famously referred to India as a woman peacefully dreaming after giving birth. Contemporary travel guides to India still refer to the country as a land of dreamy mystery. Dr. Novetzke shows that, at least in one case, an Indian understanding of dreams is something more akin to a paranormal archive than to an occidental fantasy. Here the past has a medium of that sidesteps the usual course: the technologies of writing, the economics of textual preservation, and the professional intervention of the historian. It is a transmission even beyond language to a realm of bodily and mental experience. This study of dreams is part of an exploration of historiography in religious traditions in India. Peter Struck Assistant Professor, Classical Studies Project Natural Supernaturalism: Ancient Explanations of Dream Divination Ancient theorists who try to explain divination by dreams consistently investigate their physical selves. Plato tells us that the gods communicate to us in dreams by reaching into the very center of the body cavity. In numerous classical accounts, including those by Synesius, Aelius Aristides, Cicero, Artemidorus, and Macrobius, dreams consistently bring about a conversation between the gods and our physical natures. The dream then stands as a remarkably durable bridge between human bodies and human aspirations for the divine—the very bookends of imagined human identity. Why should theories generated to explain divination by dreams over-represent physicalist solutions? Prof. Struck explains this using a three-fold approach. On a phenomenological level, dreams are so intimate an experience as to call for body-centered explanations. They are deeply personal experiences that cannot be shared and seem to provoke thoughts on the human self. Second, longstanding uses of dreams in medicine are a contributing factor, and divinatory theories are following the pull of the medical texts. Third, and most important, dreams belong to a small class of divination methods with a unique character. Only dreams, along with inspired oracles, counted as “non-technical” forms. They were thought to arise from direct inspiration. In the “technical” varieties, by contrast, the divine communicated through a non-human a medium (a sacrificial liver, for example), which then provoked the practitioner to engage in an interpretive art. |
Penn Faculty Fellows
Stefano Cracolici 2003–2004 (Belief) 2002-2003 (The Book) 2001-2002 (Time) 2000–2001 (Style)
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