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The Representation of Domestic Space in Modern Culture
Volume Editors: and
Space has emerged in recent years as a radical category in a range of related disciplines across the humanities. Of the many possible applications of this new interest, some of the most exciting and challenging have addressed the issue of domestic architecture and its function as a space for both the dramatisation and the negotiation of a cluster of highly salient issues concerning, amongst other things, belonging and exclusion, fear and desire, identity and difference.
Our House is a cross-disciplinary collection of essays taking as its focus both the prospect and the possibility of ‘the house’. This latter term is taken in its broadest possible resonance, encompassing everything from the great houses so beloved of nineteenth-century English novelists to the caravans and mobile homes of the latterday travelling community, and all points in between. The essays are written by a combination of established and emerging scholars, working in a variety of scholarly disciplines, including literary criticism, sociology, cultural studies, history, popular music, and architecture. No specific school or theory predominates, although the work of two key figures – Gaston Bachelard and Martin Heidegger – is engaged throughout.
This collection engages with a number of key issues raised by the increasingly troubled relationship between the cultural (built) and natural environments in the contemporary world.
Experience, Formalism, and the Question of Being
Born in Vyborg in 1884 by parents of German descent, Vasily (Wilhelm) Sesemann grew up and studied in St. Petersburg. A close friend of Viktor Zhirmunsky and Lev P. Karsavin, Sesemann taught from the early 1920s until his death in 1963 at the universities of Kaunas and Vilnius in Lithuania (interrupted only by his internment in a Siberian labor camp from 1950 to 1956).
Botz-Bornstein’s study takes up Sesemann’s idea of experience as a dynamic, constantly self-reflective, ungraspable phenomenon that cannot be objectified. Through various studies, the author shows how Sesemann develops an outstanding idea of experience by reflecting it against empathy, Erkenntnistheorie (theory of knowledge), Formalism, Neo-Kantianism, Freudian psychoanalysis, and Bergson’s philosophy. Sesemann’s thought establishes a link between Formalist thoughts about dynamics and a concept of Being reminiscent of Heidegger.
The book contains also translations of two essays by Sesemann as well as of an essay by Karsavin.
This book prints for the first time two remarkable interlocking sequences of letters between Paris and the Netherlands: 40 letters from Gilles Ménage in Paris to Johann-Georg Grævius in Utrecht, and 30 from the printer Henrik Wetstein, in Amsterdam, to Ménage. Their principal focus is the publication of a considerable number of Ménage’s works outside France, above all his monumental edition of Diogenes Laertius’s Lives of the Philosophers.
The letters give an engaging picture of mutual help within the community of scholars, Dutch, German, English, and French, including Huguenot exiles like Le Clerc and Bayle.
Ménage’s are full of information from Paris; while Wetstein’s, forthright and humorous, concentrate on publishing details in a sometimes stormy relationship. The great Diogenes edition encountered an extraordinary range of problems: difficulties at every stage of publication, hazardous wartime communications, and, not least, a bizarrely eccentric collaborator in Marcus Meibomius. The two correspondences provide a fascinating case-study of the practical working of international scholarly publishing in time of war, and the European network of learned correspondence in the later seventeenth century.
Each letter is printed in full, accompanied by a summary, detailed commentary, and extensive annotations.
Myth and Mythologizing in Postmodern Canadian Historical Fiction
This study brings together three major areas of interest - history, postmodern fiction, and myth. Whereas neither history and postmodern fiction nor history and myth are strangers to one another, postmodernism and myth are odd bedfellows. For many critics, postmodern thought with its resistance to metanarratives stands in direct and deliberate contrast to myth with its apparent tendency to explain the world by means of neat, complete narratives.
There is a strain of postmodern Canadian historical fiction in which myth actually forms a complement not only to postmodernism's suspicion of master-narratives but also to its privileging of those marginal and at times ignored areas of history. The fourteen works of Canadian fiction considered demonstrate a doubled impulse which at first glance seems contradictory. On the one hand, they go about demythologizing - in the Barthesian sense - various elements of historical discourse, exposing its authority as not simply a natural given but as a construct. This includes the fact that the view of history portrayed in the fiction has been either underrepresented or suppressed by official historiography. On the other hand, the history is then re-mythologized, in that it becomes part of a pre-existing myth, its mythic elements are foregrounded, myth and magic are woven into the narrative, or it is portrayed as extraordinary in some way. The result is an empowering of these histories for the future; they are made larger than life and unforgettable.
The present volume of Critical Studies is a collection of selected essays on the topic of feminism and femininity in Chinese literature. Although feminism has been a hot topic in Chinese literary circles in recent years, this remarkable collection represents one of the first of its kind to be published in English. The essays have been written by well-known scholars and feminists including Kang-I Sun Chang of Yale University, and Li Ziyun, a writer and feminist in Shanghai, China. The essays are inter- and multi-disciplinary, covering several historical periods in poetry and fiction (from the Ming-Qing periods to the twentieth century). In particular, the development of women’s writing in the New Period (post-1976) is examined in depth. The articles thus offer the reader a composite and broad perspective of feminism and the treatment of the female in Chinese literature. As this remarkable new collection attests, the voices of women in China have begun calling out loudly, in ways that challenge prevalent views about the Chinese female persona.
Author:
This study offers a new perspective on the object represented by art, specifically by art that succeeds to create in its receiver a sense of “the real”, a sense of approximating the true nature of the represented object that lies outside the artwork.
The object that cannot be accessed through a concept, a meaning or a sign, the thing-in-itself, is generally rejected by philosophy as being outside the realm of its concerns. This rejection is surveyed in a number of philosophical discussions, from Kant to Hilary Putnam. Turning to the psychoanalytic object, an object inexhaustible in terms of its external existence, or in terms of its conceptual status or meaning (the object is always suppressed, partly known, inaccessible), another notion of the object. The Real is suggested as what can neither be contained in language nor reduced to a linguistic referent. This solution does not lead away from philosophical interests but rather exposes this dilemma about the object of representation as fundamentally philosophical.
Cases of artistic realism discussed range from perspective painting to abstract art, from tragedies to the literary representation of minds.
Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Word and Music Studies at Ann Arbor, MI, 1999
Volume Editors: and
This volume assembles twelve interdisciplinary essays that were originally presented at the Second International Conference on Word and Music Studies at Ann Arbor, MI, in 1999, a conference organized by the International Association for Word and Music Studies (WMA).
The contributions to this volume focus on two centres of interest. The first deals with general issues of literature and music relations from culturalist, historical, reception-aesthetic and cognitive points of view. It covers issues such as conceptual problems in devising transdisciplinary histories of both arts, cultural functions of opera as a means of reflecting postcolonial national identity, the problem of verbalizing musical experience in nineteenth-century aesthetics and of understanding reception processes triggered by musicalized fiction.
The second centre of interest deals with a specific genre of vocal music as an obvious area of word and music interaction, namely the song cycle. As a musico-literary genre, the song cycle not only permits explorations of relations between text and music in individual songs but also raises the question if, and to what extent words and/or music contribute to creating a larger unity beyond the limits of single songs. Elucidating both of these issues with stimulating diversity the essays in this section highlight classic nineteenth- and twentieth-century song cycles by Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann, Hugo Wolf, Richard Strauss and Benjamin Britten and also include the discussion of a modern successor of the song cycle, the concept album as part of today’s popular culture.
Avantgarde – Avantgardekritik – Avantgardeforschung
Volume Editors: and
Volume Editor:
This collection of critical essays is designed to lay the foundations for a new theory of the European avant-garde. It starts from the assumption that not one all-embracing intention of all avant-garde movements - i.e. the intention of “reintegrating art into the practice of life” (Peter Bürger) - but the challenge of new cultural technologies, in particular photography and cinema, constitutes the main driving force of the formation and further development of the avant-garde. This approach permits to establish a theoretical framework that takes into account the diversity of artistic aims and directions of the various art movements and encourages a wide and open exploration of the multifaceted and often contradictory nature of the great variety of avant-gardist innovations.
Following the theoretical foundation of the new approach, individual contributions concentrate on a diverse range of avant-gardist concepts, trends and manifestations from cubist painting and the literary work of Apollinaire and Gertrude Stein to the screeching voices of futurism, dadaist photomontage and film, surrealist photographs and sculptures and neo-avant-gardist theories as developed by the French group OuLiPo. The volume closes with new insights gained from placing the avant-garde in the contexts of literary institutions and psychoanalytical and sociological concepts.
The main body of the volume is based on presentations and discussions of a three-day research seminar held at Yale University, New Haven, in February 2000. The research group formed on this occasion will continue with its efforts to elaborate a new theory of the avant-garde in the coming years.