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Medusa's Gaze and the Aesthetics of Fascination
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Sibylle Baumbach
Published/Copyright:
February 24, 2011
Abstract
This article explores the connection between the figure of Medusa and concepts of fascination. Evoking both attraction and repulsion and embracing concepts of beauty as well as of terror, Medusa not only continues to be a fascinating image, but also emerges as a product, an agent, and an image of fascination. The way in which the Gorgon has been represented over time can shed some light on the ways in which ‘fascination’ in images and texts works as well as help conceptualize changes in what is perceived as ‘fascinating’ or even petrifying. Chosen images of the Medusa or Medusamorphoses from literature, art and popular culture ranging from Ovid, William Drummond, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Sylvia Plath, and Annie Lennox are discussed to further explore the fascinating quality of this figure, which becomes especially apparent in the interplay between visual and verbal representations, as well as to examine its continuous presentness in contemporary culture and to analyze the changing qualities of what has been termed the ‘Medusa effect’.
Published Online: 2011-02-24
Published in Print: 2010-December
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Articles in the same Issue
- Distance Learning: How Literature Teaches Ethics
- Ästhetik der Faszination? Überlegungen und Beispiele
- Medusa's Gaze and the Aesthetics of Fascination
- Zur Frage der Präsenz ‘starker Frauen’ und der Dekonstruktion des Patriarchats in der Englischen Renaissancetragödie unter besonderer Berücksichtigung von John Websters The Duchess of Malfi
- Beyond Beginning: Walter Scott's (Para)textualisation of Scottishness
- ‘Not all of them are Paddies’: Irish-Americans and the (Un-/Re-)Embracing of Irish Identity
- Christina Sanchez, Consociation and Dissociation: An Empirical Study of Word-family Integration in English and German
- Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary, with additional material from A Thesaurus of Old English, ed. Christian Kay, Jane Roberts, Michael Samuels & Irené Wotherspoon
- Philip Durkin, The Oxford Guide to Etymology
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- Christoph Schubert, Raumkonstitution durch Sprache: Blickführung, Bildschemata und Kohäsion in Deskriptionssequenzen englischer Texte
- Udo J. Hebel, Einführung in die Amerikanistik/American Studies
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- John Wrighton, Ethics and Politics in Modern American Poetry
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