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Das Historische Museum in Moskau als Bildungsstätte nationaler Identität im ausgehenden Zarenreich
Das Historische Museum am Roten Platz (1883) war als Sprachrohr des Zarenhauses konzipiert. Über seine innere und äußere Gestalt sowie seine wissenschaftliche und öffentliche Arbeit, rief es zur Herrschaftstreue auf und bediente sich dabei eines geschönten Geschichtsentwurfs. Der Blick in die russische Vergangenheit, von der Frühzeit bis ins damalige Zeitgeschehen, sollte über die eigenen Wurzeln aufklären und Nationalstolz ausbilden. Vor allem aber sollte das Museum die staatliche Haltung im Diskurs der Slawophilen und Westler vertreten, die über eine kulturelle Anlehnung Russlands an Europa stritten. Dabei kommunizierte es, im Einklang mit dem politischen Programm der Zaren, Russlands Einzigartigkeit, Unabhängigkeit und Stärke. Die Russische Revolution 1918 setzte dem Wirken des Museums in seiner damaligen Gestalt ein Ende.
Finding Meaning in Objects, Habits, and Museums
In a bid to claim ‘scientific objects’ as requiring a significant amount of conceptual labor, this book looks sequentially at instruments, habits, and museums. The goal is to uncover how, together, these material and immaterial activities, rules, and commitments form one meaningful and credible blueprint revealing the building blocks of knowledge production. They serve to conceptualize and examine the entire life of an instrument: from its ideation and craft to its use, reuse, circulation, recycling, and (if not obliterated) its final entry into a museum. It is such an epistemological triptych that guides this investigation.
Burial Assemblages at the National Museum of Denmark Gate of the Priests Series Volume 2
Previously unpublished, the Danish Lot of antiquities from the Tomb of the Priests of Amun (Bab el-Gasus) is thoroughly examined in this book. The in-depth analysis of the objects is followed by an assessment of how these objects were crafted, designed, used and recycled in the Theban necropolis, a procedure that not only reveals to be instrumental in the dating of the objects, as it sheds light into the extraordinary dynamics of funerary workshops during the 21st Dynasty.
The volume also examines the arrival of the Lot and its reception in Denmark.
A Multidisciplinary Perspective on Expressions of Grief
Death and grief have often elicited the response of creativity, from elegies and requiems to memorial architecture. Such artistic expressions of grief form the focus of Grief, Identity, and the Arts, which brings together scholars from the disciplines of musicology, literature, sociology, film studies, social work, and museum studies. While presenting one or more case studies from a range of artistic disciplines, historical periods, or geographical areas, each chapter addresses the interdependence of grief and identity in the arts. The volume as a whole shows how artistic expressions of grief are both influenced by and contribute to constructions of religious, national, familial, social, and artistic identities.

Contributors to this volume: Tammy Clewell, Lizet Duyvendak, David Gist, Maryam Haiawi, Owen Hansen, Maggie Jackson, Christoph Jedan, Bram Lambrecht, Carlo Leo, Wolfgang Marx, Tijl Nuyts, Despoina Papastathi, Julia Płaczkiewicz, Bavjola Shatro, Caroline Supply, Nicolette van den Bogerd, Eric Venbrux, Janneke Weijermars, Miriam Wendling, and Mariske Westendorp.

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The chapter analyzes the world-making and group-defining function of the vernacular funerary arts, at the example of Tongerseweg Cemetery, in Maastricht, the Netherlands, since its inception in 1812. Despite the differentiation of groups from various backgrounds by means of spatial separators, the funerary arts have also helped to transcend differences and to indicate similarities, thus helping to maintain a sense of belonging to a single civic community. The chapter signals the retreat of such abstract, overly political referends since the 1980s and attributes this to a shift in economic, political and cultural understandings that occurred in the 1970s.

In: Grief, Identity, and the Arts

Abstract

In 1949, three years after returning to France from exile in the United States, where he escaped Nazi persecution, the Polish-born French-Jewish composer Alexandre Tansman began composing the oratorio Isaïe le prophète. Tansman, who had cultivated a strong attachment to France since leaving his native Poland, returned to a country he barely recognized. He developed a spiritual self-identification with ancient Israel, and he turned to a biblical subject to commemorate Jewish Holocaust victims and celebrate the new state of Israel in his oratorio. Drawing on materials from Tansman’s archive and published writings, this chapter reveals an intimate picture of identity construction in the wake of the Holocaust. Religious studies scholars have begun to analyze the work of French Jewish intellectuals to understand how they interpreted biblical narratives to construct a Jewish identity in relation to Israel and the Holocaust. My goal is to place Isaïe le prophète within the broader context of this intellectual milieu. I probe the intersections of Tansman’s musical, political, and philosophical observations about Judaism and French universalism and suggest that Tansman explores similar discourses in Isaïe le prophète as postwar French Jewish intellectuals do in their work. By reading the oratorio as a musical contribution to these intellectual debates, I argue that Tansman’s oratorio illuminates music’s participation in postwar French Jewish intellectual discourse

In: Grief, Identity, and the Arts
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Abstract

Following a Neo-Latin poetic tradition rooted in Quattrocento Italy and established in France by Jean Salmon Macrin (1490–1557) during the 16th century, the French poet Louis Des Masures (c. 1515–1574) composed various poems dedicated to his wife, Diane Baudoire, who died in childbirth. They appeared in Des Masures’s Carmina and Œuvres poétiques (1557). Carmen 29, entitled “Dianae Baldoriae uxoris epitaphium,” is the most important poem of this poetic cycle devoted to conjugal mourning. Analysis of the epitaph—especially, the second half of the poem—reveals rich intertextuality, particularly with Virgil’s Aeneid—a work Des Masures was very familiar with, as he was a translator of the epic. This paper highlights how Des Masures borrowed textual components and themes from the Aeneid and integrated them into Carmen 29, in order to give voice to a personal experience. The study of the reception of Virgil’s epic in the second part of the poem shows that these textual borrowings form a coherent network, creating a system of correspondences between Virgil’s heroes and Des Masures’s life experience and Christian ideas.

In: Grief, Identity, and the Arts
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Abstract

Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927) participates in the creation of a new way of memorializing loss, one that refuses consolation and cutting ties with the dead. In rendering Lily Briscoe’s struggles to paint a tribute to the lost mother figure as an extended metaphor of Woolf’s own difficulties in writing the novel, To the Lighthouse grounds a practice of anti-consolatory mourning in the failure of her artist to derive recompense from the work of art. Just as Lily refuses to regard her painting as an aesthetic substitute for the lost mother, Woolf’s modernist text distances the reader from the recuperative function of literature itself. In the place of any consoling figuration, Woolf’s novel offers a detailed portrayal of the difficult process that Lily faces in the effort to memorialize Mrs. Ramsay, a process that is complicated by Mrs. Ramsay’s restrictive ideas about gender—her inability, that is, to see women beyond their role as wives and mothers. This attention to the process of memorialization generates a discourse of loss with implications for social reform in the present. This refusal of consolation has persisted in some of the most moving memorials dedicated since the early 20th century, including the Vietnam Veterans Memorial (1982), the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (2005), and the 9/11 Memorial (2011), all of which ask us to sustain relations with the dead and embrace legacies of their lives and loss. As spatial structures, however, these memorials do not provide us with a record of the process of memorialization such as Woolf’s novel affords. Memorials—even anti-consolatory ones—do not help us remember the conflicts, disputes, difficulties, and contested visions over memorialization that went into their making, as was the case, for example, with the placement of the American flag at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial and the inclusion of unidentified human remains of victims of the 9/11 attacks at the 9/11 Memorial Museum.

In: Grief, Identity, and the Arts

Abstract

The Flemish poet Prudens van Duyse (1804–1859) wrote an elegy about his deceased sister, Natalia (1842). He repeatedly rewrote, extended, and reprinted it, so the poem is transmitted in different versions. Van Duyse as well as contemporary reviewers and literary historians considered this poem an absolute highlight of his extensive oeuvre. Prudens van Duyse is considered to be a transition figure in Flemish literature: in several poems and prose texts he unfolded progressive views about literature that can be associated with the work of other romantic writers from Germany, the Netherlands, and France. Van Duyse argues that Flemish literature must be guided by imagination and the individual feelings of the author. This was a new insight in Flanders, because the literature of that time was largely dominated by rules prescribed by the chambers of rhetoric. This chapter examines to what extent the poet in Natalia adhered to the prevailing norms for mourning poetry of the time, or whether he implemented the renewal that he proposed in his own poetic texts.

In: Grief, Identity, and the Arts