Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Introduction: Out of the Marvellous, or, Scholarship and the Magic Arts
- 1 The Artist and the Terrorist, or, The Paintable and the Unpaintable: Gerhard Richter and the Baader-Meinhof Group
- 2 The Face, or, Senseless Kindness: War Photography and the Ethics of Responsibility
- 3 Provenance, or, Authenticity: The Guitar Player and the Arc of a Life
- 4 Broomstick Horrors, or, The Fog-Walker in the Wood: Keeping up Appearances in the Great War
- 5 The Strategy of Still Life, or, Art and Current Affairs: Georges Braque and the Occupation
- 6 All This Happened, or, The Real Waugh: Sword of Honour and the Literature of the Second World War
- 7 The Secret Life, or, The Soldier's Tale: Diaries and Diary-Keeping in War
- 8 Like a Dog, or, Animal House on the Night Shift: Kafka and Abu Ghraib
- 9 It's All Fucked Up, or, The Non-Fiction Horror Movie: The Cinema and the War on Terror
- 10 Waiting for the Barbarians, or, The Hospitality of War: Civilisation and Barbarism in the War on Terror
- Index
Introduction: Out of the Marvellous, or, Scholarship and the Magic Arts
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Dedication
- Introduction: Out of the Marvellous, or, Scholarship and the Magic Arts
- 1 The Artist and the Terrorist, or, The Paintable and the Unpaintable: Gerhard Richter and the Baader-Meinhof Group
- 2 The Face, or, Senseless Kindness: War Photography and the Ethics of Responsibility
- 3 Provenance, or, Authenticity: The Guitar Player and the Arc of a Life
- 4 Broomstick Horrors, or, The Fog-Walker in the Wood: Keeping up Appearances in the Great War
- 5 The Strategy of Still Life, or, Art and Current Affairs: Georges Braque and the Occupation
- 6 All This Happened, or, The Real Waugh: Sword of Honour and the Literature of the Second World War
- 7 The Secret Life, or, The Soldier's Tale: Diaries and Diary-Keeping in War
- 8 Like a Dog, or, Animal House on the Night Shift: Kafka and Abu Ghraib
- 9 It's All Fucked Up, or, The Non-Fiction Horror Movie: The Cinema and the War on Terror
- 10 Waiting for the Barbarians, or, The Hospitality of War: Civilisation and Barbarism in the War on Terror
- Index
Summary
The annals say: when the monks of Clonmacnoise Were all at prayers inside the oratory A ship appeared above them in the air.
The anchor dragged along behind so deep It hooked itself into the altar rails And then, as the big hull rocked to a standstill,
A crewman shinned and grappled down the rope And struggled to release it. But in vain. ‘This man can't bear our life here and will drown,’
The abbot said, ‘unless we help him.’ So They did, the freed ship sailed, and the man climbed back Out of the marvellous as he had known it.
Seamus Heaney‘The imaginative transformation of human life is the means by which we can most truly grasp and comprehend it.’ That will do, I think, as credo and manifesto for this book. The words are Seamus Heaney's. ‘Whatever is given,’ he writes in his own idiom, ‘can always be reimagined, however four-square, / Plank-thick, hull-stupid and out of its time / It happens to be.’ The words come from ruminations on what he calls the redress of poetry: the notion that poetry – art – can function as a kind of moral spirit level, an agent of equilibration, ‘an upright, resistant, and self-bracing entity within the general flux and flex’.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- On Art and War and Terror , pp. 1 - 7Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2009