Course Blog #16 - 2nd Round (Group D) - Jess

My own personal moments of stuplimity have come from some of the readings so far, which are are awash in a thick river of words that astonishes and overwhelms me. Now that I'm much more cognizant of how much work goes into crafting a lengthy paper or article on this scholarly level, each reading we have tackled this semester seems a room of pennies mired in honey. They are very obviously each a material result of a period of hard work, but the ideas contained within them have sometimes proven hard to excavate. A sticky situation, if you will.

Ngai's article itself is a vision of stuplimity, to me. I feel like it's a very subjective term, perhaps similar to the sublime. Perhaps seeing a Shakespeare play could be a stuplimitous (?) experience for some. The text is dense, heavy, and bewildering sometimes, but wading through the text can be extraordinarily fruitful. Reading Peggy Phelan's book "Mourning Sex" was a truly stuplimitous experience for me. It was the first time I had tried to understand something so complex that it bordered on stuplimitous. Perhaps I reveal too much of my own intellectual limitations, but to me, readings like Ngai and Phelan seem insurmountable at times, especially if there is no opportunity to have a conversation about the works after reading them.

A work we've dissected in class that seems akin to a stuplimitous work is Handke's "Offending the Audience." At times, the words seemed totally divorced from meaning, coming in waves, inspiring both irritation and boredom in me. From what I can understand about Ngai's theory, stuplimity is that mysterious combination of overwhelming awe and mind-numbing boredom. She exhorts us to interrogate that feeling and welcome it as we would welcome a moment of the sublime. Not an easy task.

Group Blog Post (Kelly, Jess, Jennifer)

“How true it is, that it is too late to catch the living form and face of our dear friends, and well illustrates the necessity of procuring those more than life-like resemblances of our friends, ere it is too late— ere the hand of death has snatched away those we prize so dearly on earth.”

Taking Portraits After Death. N. G. Burgess

From The Photographic and Fine-Art Journal Vol. 8, No. 3

March 1855 Page 80

The description of this item is brief. It is an ambrotype from the Woodward manuscript collection. The item is listed as an “interesting example of post-mortem portrait of baby along with a woven piece of hair.” Other images are listed as part of the collection, but these two objects, as they are listed in one sentence, are presented as a unit. Therefore, our group treated them as one item in two parts. In this way, the description scripted out treatment of the items (Bernstein’s idea of scriptivity; Phelan’s point that writing changes the performance) – we wouldn’t have considered them together otherwise.