I need an 850-word abstract (introduction) for my paper.
The final essay will focus on the black dress depicted in John Singer Sargent’s painting Portrait of Madame X.
To help guide you, I am providing an assignment guideline, as well as the guidelines for the final paper (you don’t need to worry about the final paper itself, but these may offer useful direction).
Additionally, I am attaching quotes from Walter Benjamin that should be relevant to the discussion. (Convolute B: Fashion.” In The Arcades Project, translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, paperback ed., 62-81.)
Please let me know if anything confuses you!
The guideline of this assignment(850words)
– This assignment will be the foundation for your final assessed essay. It has two components. 1) choose a single garment and list its dialectical tensions – meaning, identify the contradictory tendencies that are visible in the image. By ‘single garment’, we mean not a type of garment (the Chanel suit) but one individual unit of clothing as existing in a particular space and time (the Chanel suit worn by Jane Fonda, photographed by Carl Bruin at the Savoy Hotel in London in 1965). You may consider the garment itself as well as its frame in the constructed image (formal composition, etc.), as well as the wearer. 2) Select and compile at least five key quotes from the work of Walter Benjamin concerning fashion that we have discussed in class that have captured your attention. Try to organise these quotes into a sequence of ideas that makes sense to you.
The final paper is going to be like this
– This essay will build upon the foundational work of your research plan formative assignment. Drawing from assigned material, class discussion, and independent research, analyse a garment in relation to the dialectical image according to your personal understanding of this concept.
– Though Walter Benjamin never articulated this concept as a complete theoretical discourse, there are many fragmentary references to the dialectical image throughout his writings, even if these references do not necessarily add up to a concrete and coherent whole. The dialectical image is, therefore, speculative – a work in progress; but, it is this very incompletion and openness that may permit us to think through the questions that fashion unrelentingly raises: namely, the intimacy between the deeply contradictory currents of the assertion and subversion of power.
– In this essay, you are asked to develop your understanding of the dialectical image through references to Benjamin’s work, and to apply this understanding to the idea of fashion through a single garment of your choosing. Like Baudelaire’s argument in “The Painter of Modern Life,” the idea is that through the ephemeral, one may touch the eternal. In the particular, one may access the general. For our purposes, under close scrutiny the individual piece of clothing may reveal greater tendencies of fashion and culture.
– Though your essay will be grounded in one particular item you are encouraged to construct a greater picture of the idea of fashion in general. For example, from the specific instance of a garment –that is, this single garment as it appears at a specific moment in time – one may consider the type of garment (such as the miniskirt), the period(s) in which the garment was current, the individual or group with which it is associated, how it was received by popular culture, other specific examples of that garment type, the materials from which it is constructed, and how the image of that specific garment is mediated. Questions such as these, though not limited to these, should inform your argument.
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