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A self-professed "comprehensive anticipatory design scientist," the inventor Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983) was undoubtedly a visionary. Fuller's creations often bordered on the realm of science fiction, ranging from the freestanding geodesic dome to the three-wheel Dymaxion car.

The post The life and work of Buckminster Fuller: a timeline appeared first on OUPblog.

What could philosophy have to do with odors and perfumes? And what could odors and perfumes have to do with Art? After all, many philosophers have considered smell the lowest and most animal of the senses and have viewed perfume as a trivial luxury.

The post Perfumes, olfactory art, and philosophy appeared first on OUPblog.

Emory’s Shakespeare Illustrated collects 19th century British artists’ renderings of scenes from the Bard’s plays. A few of French artist Eugène Delacroix’s Hamlet paintings and lithographs are included.

Professor Harry Rusche notes that the lithographs were inspired by an 1827 English production of Hamlet in Paris, with Harriet Smithson in the part of Ophelia. (Hector Berlioz saw the same production and “fell instantly in love with Smithson and later married her.”)
 

I’m partial to the “The Death of Ophelia” (above), though Elaine Showalter has argued that the image, like Ophelia herself, embodies the reductionistic Elizabethan view of women’s madness.

Hysteria, says Showalter, was seen as the very product of the woman’s body — and treated, in contrast to male insanity, as emotional rather than intellectual in nature.

Martin Konrad’s Dirty Books is a conceptual series highlighting constraints on freedom of expression.

The artist covered each book with critical quotes that greeted it upon publication, and with references to “past and ongoing” abuses, including “burning, tearing apart, locking away, hiding.” (Via La Petite Claudine.)

Last week a school board member in Illinois District 128 objected to Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find” because of “violent imagery,” “racial slurs,” and — my favorite part — “anti-Christian language.”

While I wait for the caffeine to kick-start my brain, please enjoy — or, if you prefer, be outraged by — this (kinda NSFW) defaced Huck Finn picture. (Larger version here.)

An engraver modified the image plate, and the illustration made it into the novel’s first printing. Fortunately someone noticed before any Victorians suffered heart attacks.

Late in November of that year a bloodcurdling discovery was made in the New York publishing house. Some playful engraver had altered one of the plates, thereby turning an innocent illustration on Page 283 into an indecent picture, and this appeared in 30,000 copies of the book in the plant; production had to be stopped while a new plate was prepared. The offending pages were snipped from bound copies and a new one was pasted on the stubs. In unbound copies several pages, one containing the picture in its repaired state, was inserted.