Journal articles on the topic 'German drama 20th century History and criticism'
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1
Ebanoidse, Igor А. "Karl Jaspers’ “Question of German Guilt” in the Context of the German Self-Criticism." History of Philosophy Yearbook 27 (December 28, 2022): 36–57. http://dx.doi.org/10.21146/0134-8655-2022-37-36-57.
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On the example of German philosophical thought of the first half of the 20th century, the paper examines the problem of collective guilt of the nation for the actions of its state. Particular attention is paid to the formation of the revanchist ideology that led to the domination of National Socialism. The paper also addresses the history of the criticism of the German imperial statehood, which had developed by the end of the 19th century.
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Alheit, Peter, and Bettina Dausien. "A brief history of biographical research in Germany." Revista Brasileira de Pesquisa (Auto)biográfica 3, no. 9 (December 20, 2018): 749–64. http://dx.doi.org/10.31892/rbpab2525-426x.2018.v3.n9.p749-764.
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The contribution gives a brief historical insight in the beginning and the drastic change of biographical thinking particularly in the educational sphere. Biography is a theme addressed by German educational sciences ever since its historical beginnings in the late 18th century. The discovery of the autonomous, educated, middle-class subject is rooted in that interest in biography, which also shaped the process of “biographisation” of the lower social strata a century later. Even post-modern and post-structural criticism of the ‘subject’ towards the end of the 20th century has a lasting influence on educational science. Understanding the historical background and the consequences of this threefold change of ideas in the concept of “biography” in the German tradition is the aim of this article.
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Zhurcheva, Olga V. "“New drama”: Pro et contra." Izvestiya of Saratov University. Philology. Journalism 22, no. 4 (November 23, 2022): 484–87. http://dx.doi.org/10.18500/1817-7115-2022-22-4-484-487.
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At the end of the 20th – the beginning of the 21st century there were serious changes in the poetics of drama, defining the strategy of artistic forms and features of artistic consciousness. This gives the right to single out the history of the “new drama” in a separate period of the literary and theatrical process. A new book by the Belarusian researcher S.Ya. Goncharova-Grabovskaya “Modern Russian Dramaturgy (late 20th – early 21st century)” is devoted to generalization and comprehension of this period, which is considered and announced in the presented review. The book examines the main trends in the development of the Russian drama at the turn of the 20-21st centuries: the history of the emergence of the “new drama” movement, aspects of poetics (hero, conflict, chronotope, language), genre-style vector (social drama, documentary drama, monodrama, remake plays, drama of the absurd) – all that defines the specific features of the modern dramaturgical process. The focus is on the plays of famous playwrights, which have been staged in theaters in Russia and Belarus, have received positive reviews in criticism. The peculiarity of the reviewed book is that it analyzes modern Belarusian drama, traces its connection with the Russian. The book includes overview chapters reflecting the genre and style parameters of drama, a list of plays, information about playwrights, control questions and assignments. The scientific and methodological publication under review is expected to be in high demand not only in the philological environment, but also among theater critics and theater historians.
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Fetscher, Justus. "Hiob in Gath. Deutsch-jüdische Lektüren von Lessings "Nathan der Weise"." Zeitschrift für Religions- und Geistesgeschichte 57, no. 3 (2005): 209–31. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/1570073054395993.
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AbstractThe paper presents a series of German-Jewish readings of Lessing's "Nathan the Wise" (1779) stretching from the Enlightenment to the early post-1945 period. Already the first Jewish reader, Moses Mendelssohn, did not focus his interpretation of this drama on the so-called "parabel of the rings," where Nathan is commonly said to preach religious tolerance. Rather, Mendelssohn concentrates on act IV, scene 7, which expounds Lessing's concept of the relationship between Judaism and Christianity and Nathan's experience of Christian persecution. With the upsurge of German anti-Semitism in the late 19th and 20th century, this scene served first as a sign of German-Christian empathy for Jewish suffering, and thus of hope, then as a reminder of recent prosecutions. It seemed to foreshadow, and eventually became overshadowed by, the Shoah.
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Petraru, Ana-Magdalena. "Genesis and Other Biblical Events Depicted in Postmodern Drama." Theatrical Colloquia 8, no. 2 (December 1, 2018): 283–300. http://dx.doi.org/10.2478/tco-2018-0022.
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Abstract A complex person (novelist, playwright, screenwriter, translator), George Tabori, pen name of György Tábori, born in Budapest in 1914, was little acclaimed in North America where he spent twenty years of his life and left a mark on the German culture of the 20th century. Due to his cathartic black humour, he overcame the tragic experience of the Holocaust that took away from him almost all his family. Known in post-war drama especially by means of his anti-Hitler farce Mein Kampf (1987) which he authored, directed and acted in, Tabori even took the East-German public by surprise with his special, yet less familiar perspective on history.1 Mein Kampf was the first play that had a Romanian staging, at Cluj; however, Die Goldberg-Variationen (1991), a real international success2, became known to our public at the theatre Radu Stanca in Sibiu under the same title and as Goldberg Show at the National Theatre of Iasi (TNI). Our aim, in this paper, is to analyse the biblical events in the play from a postmodern perspective as homage to the author’s contribution to the philological sub-field of Bible and literature, already consecrated by N. Frye’s Great Code and more recent studies.
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Brannigan, John, Marcela Santos Brigida, Thayane Verçosa, and Gabriela Ribeiro Nunes. "Thinking in Archipelagic Terms: An Interview with John Brannigan." Palimpsesto - Revista do Programa de Pós-Graduação em Letras da UERJ 20, no. 35 (May 13, 2021): 3–28. http://dx.doi.org/10.12957/palimpsesto.2021.59645.
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John Brannigan is Professor at the School of English, Drama and Film at University College Dublin. He has research interests in the twentieth-century literatures of Ireland, England, Scotland, and Wales, with a particular focus on the relationships between literature and social and cultural identities. His first book, New Historicism and Cultural Materialism (1998), was a study of the leading historicist methodologies in late twentieth-century literary criticism. He has since published two books on the postwar history of English literature (2002, 2003), leading book-length studies of working-class authors Brendan Behan (2002) and Pat Barker (2005), and the first book to investigate twentieth-century Irish literature and culture using critical race theories, Race in Modern Irish Literature and Culture (2009). His most recent book, Archipelagic Modernism: Literature in the Irish and British Isles, 1890-1970 (2014), explores new ways of understanding the relationship between literature, place and environment in 20th-century Irish and British writing. He was editor of the international peer-reviewed journal, Irish University Review, from 2010 to 2016.
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Lamm, Mariya A. "The development of Belarusian literature in a multicultural context." Slavic Almanac, no. 1-2 (2020): 501–7. http://dx.doi.org/10.31168/2073-5731.2020.1-2.6.04.
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Sinkova L. D. Between text and discourse: Russian literature of the XX-XXI century: history, comparative studies and criticism (lit. - crit. articles, conversations). - Minsk: Parkus plus, 2013. - 296 P. The main characteristics of the Belarusian literature development in the contest of 20th-21th century are demonstrated throughout the review. The key patterns of the poetics progression in Belarusian literature are revealed, alongside with the most noticeable algorithms of the national aesthetics establishment and the specifics of mythopoetic perception. Meaningful characteristics of Belarusian literature during Soviet period are examined particularly, especially the literature about Second World War. The national aspects of literary comprehension of the experience of German-fascist occupation in Belarusian literature during Soviet period are revealed. The important characteristic of the modern Belarusian literature after the Chernobyl disaster that has started in 1986, is emphasized upon.
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Colak, Yasar, and Serdar Sinan Gulec. "Schlomo Dov Goitein’s “Political” Symbiosis in the Secrets of Simon Ben Yohai: A Qur’anic Reappraisal for a Jewish Apocalyptic Source on the Reflecting of an Early Islamic Background." Bussecon Review of Social Sciences (2687-2285) 4, no. 1 (February 27, 2022): 01–10. http://dx.doi.org/10.36096/brss.v4i1.314.
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This paper examines the concept of symbiosis in Islamic history as developed by Schlomo Dov Goitein, the 20th-century Jewish German scholar in the area of Jewish and Arabic studies, and discusses its application to the identity sourcing of Prophet Muhammad in particular. The aim of the study is to review the historical outline briefly on the background and formation of “symbiosis” preceding and in the aftermath of Goitein’s conceptualization and context, following a qualitative research approach with an intertextual criticism to his references and discussing their possible philological aspects in his mindset. The study found that, while the Islamic historical sources presented the relations between Jews and Muslims in the Madina period of Islam as negative, in Goitein’s works, the Jewish perception of early Islamic history is positively grounded on a mid-eight century Jewish messianic-apocalyptical text, namely, The Secrets of Rabbi Simon ben Yohai as traditionally understood in Judaism for describing Ishmaelites as the savior of Jews from Christian oppression. This finding seems to be in explicit contradistinction to the concept of innovative “creative symbiosis” with subversion of historical experience.
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Levit, Georgy S., and Uwe Hossfeld. "Biology and panpsychism: German evolutionists and a philosopher Theodor Ziehen (1862–1950)." Vestnik of Saint Petersburg University. Philosophy and Conflict Studies 36, no. 2 (2020): 240–53. http://dx.doi.org/10.21638/spbu17.2020.203.
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Theodor Ziehen was a prominent German psychiatrist and psychologist and a marginal philosopher of the first half of the 20th century who developed an exotic subjective-idealistic theory based on quasi-empirical psychological arguments. Although Ziehen was seen by contemporaries (most prominently by Vladimir Lenin) as a representative of the same philosophical current (empirio-criticism) as Mach and Avenarius, he never achieved their prominence in the history of philosophy. At the same time, Ziehen’s philosophy became influential in German biology, first of all, due to his direct and very strong impact on Bernhard Rensch. Rensch, in his turn, was the most significant figure on the international scene of what is known as the Modern Evolutionary Synthesis in biology. Rensch was not the only biologist influenced by Ziehen’s ideas. Ziehen had some communication with the “German Darwin” Ernst Haeckel and played a prominent role in the concept of the founder of biological systematics Willi Hennig. How to explain Ziehen’s prominent place in the history of evolutionary biology, despite his obscurity in the history of philosophy? Our hypothesis is that Ziehen became a visible figure in evolutionary theory because of the monistic bias in German biology. Ziehen’s epistemology appeared to be compatible with evolutionary monism and was developed by a practicing psychiatrist therefore obtaining a character of a quasi-experimental doctrine.
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Ulberte, Līga. "THE UNKNOWN HISTORY : BERNHARD REICH ’ S MANUSCRIPT ABOUT VALMIERA THEATRE." Culture Crossroads 19 (October 11, 2022): 68–77. http://dx.doi.org/10.55877/cc.vol19.41.
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Latvian theatre director Anna (Asja) Lācis and her life partner, German theatre director and theoretician Bernhard Reich, began their professional careers in Latvia and Germany in the 1920s during the period of European modernism. During the second half of the 20th century, the paths of both their private and professional relationships lead them to the Soviet Union – a place whose ideological system and theatre they remained intertwined with for the rest of their lives. Both artists were then directly affected by Stalinist repressions. In 1948, Anna Lācis returned to Latvia and began working at Valmiera Drama Theatre. In 1951, Bernhard Reich also moved to Latvia, which remained his place of residence until his death. Both internationally recognized artists were buried at the Rainis Cemetery in Riga. This article provides insight into Bernhard Reich’s unpublished manuscript titled Valmieras teātris (Valmiera Theatre), which reveals the left-leaning western artist’s perspective of the history of Valmiera Theatre in the 1950s and the 1960s as well as the art of Socialist Realism that was both surprising and, at the time, unheard of in the history of Latvian theatre.
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Kachorovskaya, A. E. "On the Reception of the Myth of Prometheus in Austrian Literature of 19th-20th Centuries." Nauchnyi dialog, no. 3 (March 30, 2020): 221–35. http://dx.doi.org/10.24224/2227-1295-2020-3-221-235.
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This article focuses its attention on the motive of resistance characteristic of Austrian literature of the 19th - 20th centuries, which is considered from the point of view of the historical and literary relationship with the myth of Prometheus. The history of the issue is reviewed. A selective analysis of the versions of the Promethean myth in the Austrian historical and literary context of the 19th-20th centuries, which is part of the pan-European literary and philosophical heritage, is given. The stylistic and genre originality of Austrian interpretations of the myth of Prometheus is proved on the basis of a study of a number of works. The artistic reception of the image of Prometheus in the poem by Z. Lipiner "Liberated Prometheus", little studied in Russian literary criticism is considered in the article. Attention is paid to the version of the Promethean myth in the literature of Austrian Art Nouveau (on the example of F. Kafka's little prose). The issue of conflicting trends in the development of Austrian literature of the 20th century, affecting the interaction of the motive of resistance with the Promethean myth, is investigated by the example of M. Gruber's essay. The correlation of the Austrian versions of the motive of resistance with the myth of Prometheus is proved. The results of the study confirm the significance of the Promethean myth in the Austrian reception of the 19th-20th centuries, which has more pronounced features of drama and theatricality in relation to the European context.
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Kovács, Gábor. "THE MYTH OF THE WICKED CITY IN THE CULTURAL CRITICISM OF O. SPENGLER / NUODĖMINGO MIESTO MITAS O. SPENGLERIO KULTŪROS KRITIKOJE." CREATIVITY STUDIES 4, no. 1 (June 28, 2011): 64–74. http://dx.doi.org/10.3846/20290187.2011.577175.
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O. Spengler was one of the leading protagonists of cultural criticism in the 20th century. His oeuvre had been rooted in the German intellectual climate of the pre-war period and war years. The German tradition based on an ambivalent relation to modernity, after the German defeat suffered at the end of the First World War, emerged as the movement of ‘conservative revolution’. This new kind of conservatism, on the one hand, enthusiastically greeted technological advancement, while, on the other hand, rejected social and political modernization. The opposition of the city and the country-side was a central theme of this way of thought. Spengler in his ‘morphology of world history’ gave an outstanding place to this opposition. Our paper offers a reconstruction, in this respect, of the theory of Spengler. Santrauka O. Spengleris buvo vienas iš svarbiausių XX a. kultūros kritikos atstovų. Jo kūryba buvo įšaknyta vokiečių ikikarinio laikotarpio ir karo metų intelektualinėje atmosferoje. Vokiškoji tradicija, pagrįsta ambivalentišku santykiu su modernybe, po skaudaus vokiečių pralaimėjimo Pirmajame pasauliniame kare, iškilo kaip ,,konservatyviosios revoliucijos“ judėjimas. Naujas konservatizmo tipas, viena vertus, entuziastingai sveikino technologinį progresą, kita vertus, atmetė socialinę ir politinę modernizaciją. Priešprieša tarp miesto ir kaimo buvo pagrindinė diskusijų tema. Šiose diskusijose Spengleris su savo „pasaulio istorijos morfologija” užėmė iškilią vietą. Šiame straipsnyje pristatoma Spenglerio teorijos rekonstrukcija.
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Manurung, Cici Christina. "Peran Zending dalam Pelayanan Kesehatan di Tarutung, 1900-1942." MUKADIMAH: Jurnal Pendidikan, Sejarah, dan Ilmu-ilmu Sosial 6, no. 2 (August 26, 2022): 295–304. http://dx.doi.org/10.30743/mkd.v6i2.5597.
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This article aims to explain how the history of the development of health facilities in Tarutung in the 20th century. Tarutung in the past was used as the center of the Christianization movement by zendings from various countries. One of the zending organizations that plays a big role in health services in Tarutung is a German zending organization called Rheinische Missionsgesellscaft (RMG). This article uses a historical research method with four stages in its writing, namely: heuristics (collection of sources), verification (source criticism), interpretation, and historiography (writing). The results showed that zending plays a big role in improving the health and hygiene of the Batak people in Tarutung. The zendings also introduced modern methods of medicine that replaced traditional medicine by the Batak datu. In addition, zending also played a role in establishing various health facilities in Tarutung such as: hospitals, auxiliary hospitals, polyclinics, and nursing and midwifery schools.
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Valčo, Michal, Daniel Slivka, Katarina Valčova, Nina I. Kryukova, Dinara G. Vasbieva, and Elmira R. Khairullina. "Samuel Štefan Osusky’s Theological-Prophetic Criticism of War and Totalitarianism." Bogoslovni vestnik 79, no. 3 (2019): 765–85. http://dx.doi.org/10.34291/bv2019/03/valco.
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: This article analyzes the thought legacy of Samuel Štefan Osuský (1888–1975), a famous Slovak philosopher and theologian, pertaining to his fight against totalitarianism and war. Having lived during arguably the most difficult period of (Czecho-)Slovak history, which included the two world wars, the emergence of independent Czechoslovakia in 1918, its fateful, forceful split by Nazi Germany in 1939, followed by its reestablishment after WWII in 1945, only to be afflicted again by a new kind of totalitarianism on the left, it is no surprise that Osuský aimed his philosophical and theological criticism especially at the two great human ideologies of the 20th century – Fascism (including its German, racial version, Nazism, which he preferred to call ›Hitlerism‹), and Communism (above all in its historical shape of Stalinist Bolshevism). After exploring the human predicament in ›boundary situations,‹ i.e. situations of ultimate anxiety, despair but also hope and trust, religious motives seemed to gain the upper hand, according to Osuský. As a ›rational theist,‹ he attempted to draw from theology, philosophy and science as complementary sources of wisdom combining them in his struggle to find satisfying insights for larger questions of meaning. Osusky’s ideas in his book War and Religion (1916) and article The Philosophy of Bolshevism, Fascism, and Hitlerism (1937) manifest the much-needed prophetic insight that has the potential to enlighten our own struggle against the creeping forces of totalitarianism, right and left that seek to engulf our societies today.
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Kuizinienė, Dalia. "Alfonsas Nyka-Niliūnas’s Literary Review: Polemical Dialogues." Colloquia 43 (December 20, 2019): 77–96. http://dx.doi.org/10.51554/col.2019.28640.
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Alfonsas Nyka-Niliūnas (1919–2015), the celebrated Lithuanian poet of the 20th century, was also one of the most prominent literary critics. For more than two decades, he had been an active literary critic, publishing his texts in Lithuanian émigré literary and culture magazines. In addition to his studies on the history and criticism of Lithuanian literature, articles on Western and Lithuanian classics, Nyka-Niliūnas wrote literary reviews. In the field of Lithuanian émigré literature and criticism, he validated a certain type of critical review which emphasized novelty, originality and evaluation of the book in question.Nyka-Niliūnas wrote his first reviews in a monthly pedagogical journal, Tremtinių mokykla [School of Exiles], published in a German DP camp. The reviews published in the journal, and later in the cultural magazine, Aidai [Echoes], stood out for their completeness, coherent structure, and strict and straightforward evaluation that allowed seeing a particular book in a broader context. A number of Nyka-Niliūnas’s reviews of this period sparked controversy and encouraged literary dialogue.In the US, Nyka-Niliūnas continued to publish literary reviews in Aidai and literary magazine, Literatūros lankai [The Pages of Literature]. In the reviews written during this period, he debated with a group of critics who held a different opinion, established the criteria for evaluating the literature, and highlighted the objectives and the importance of a literary review. Nyka-Niliūnas’s reviews can be characterized not only by author’s suggestive argumentation and fiery style, but also by his poetic metaphors.
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Nosonovsky, Michael, Dan Shapira, and Daria Vasyutinsky-Shapira. "Not by Firkowicz’s Fault: Daniel Chwolson’s Comic Blunders in Research of Hebrew Epigraphy of the Crimea and Caucasus, and their Impact on Jewish Studies in Russia." Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 73, no. 4 (December 17, 2020): 633–68. http://dx.doi.org/10.1556/062.2020.00033.
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AbstractDaniel Chwolson (1819–1911) made a huge impact upon the research of Hebrew epigraphy from the Crimea and Caucasus. Despite that, his role in the more-than-a-century-long controversy regarding Crimean Hebrew tomb inscriptions has not been well studied. Chwolson, at first, adopted Abraham Firkowicz’s forgeries, and then quickly realized his mistake; however, he could not back up. Th e criticism by both Abraham Harkavy and German Hebraists questioned Chwolson’s scholarly qualifications and integrity. Consequently, the interference of political pressure into the academic argument resulted in the prevailing of the scholarly flawed opinion. We revisit the interpretation of these findings by Russian, Jewish, Karaite and Georgian historians in the 19th and 20th centuries. During the Soviet period, Jewish Studies in the USSR were in neglect and nobody seriously studied the whole complex of the inscriptions from the South of Russia / the Soviet Union. The remnants of the scholarly community were hypnotized by Chwolson’s authority, who was the teacher of their teachers’ teachers. At the same time, Western scholars did not have access to these materials and/or lacked the understanding of the broader context, and thus a number of erroneous Chwolson’s conclusion have entered academic literature for decades.
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Oliveira, Pedro Rocha de. "FETICHISMO E ORNAMENTO NA TEORIA DA CULTURA DE SIEGFRIED KRACAUER." Síntese: Revista de Filosofia 39, no. 124 (September 17, 2012): 237. http://dx.doi.org/10.20911/21769389v39n124p237-258/2012.
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Buscando os aspectos da crítica da cultura de Siegfried Kracauer que apontam para uma crítica radical da sociedade, o presente texto analisa a caracterização feita por aquele autor da arte industrializada do início do século XX nas obras O ornamento da massa: ensaios, de 1963 e De Caligari a Hitler: uma história psicológica do cinema alemão, de 1947. Atenta-se para a maneira como tal caracterização mapeia a determinação das formas dessa arte pelo ideário e contexto político-econômicos da sociedade onde ela emerge, especialmente no que tange às relações entre avanço técnico e projeto de modernização social na sociedade burguesa.Abstract: The present work analyses Siegfried Kracauer’s characterization of the early 20th century industrialized art, by seeking in the author’sThe mass ornament (1963) and From Caligari to Hitler: a psychological history of the German film (1947), aspects of his cultural criticism that point towards a radical critique of society. This paper will highlight the way in which such a characterization explores how the forms of that art are determined by the ideology and the political-economic context in which it has emerged, focusing on the relationships between technical advancement and social modernization in the bourgeois society.
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Mitlyanskaya, Maria. "Rectorship of Martin Heidegger: Historical and Philosophical Analysis." Ideas and Ideals 12, no. 3-1 (September 23, 2020): 121–33. http://dx.doi.org/10.17212/2075-0862-2020-12.3.1-121-133.
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The idea of reorganizing a German university was revealed in the correspondence of the young Martin Heidegger and his friend Karl Jaspers. Prominent thinkers critically analyze the contribution of contemporaries and representatives of the previous generation of scientists and philosophers. Ambitious and confident in their abilities, they hatched a plan, as it seemed to them, for the most important mission: the revival of the spirit of genuine philosophy within the walls of German universities. Repeatedly emphasized in their correspondence in the 1920s - such a high goal will require the reduction of professors of philosophy and "cleansing" of universities from the prospering mediocrity. Despite spiritual aspirations, these philosophers were aware of the need for career growth. Without a proper position, it was impossible to, at least, make any changes in the current system of higher German education and academic philosophy. The author of this article believes that the same thoughts of Heidegger lay at the basis of the ideas expressed in correspondence with Jaspers and in the decision to accept the post of the rector of the University of Freiburg, which played a fatal role in his biography. The period of the duties of the rector Martin Heidegger is covered by the so-called «Black Notebooks». The author of the article departs from the widely used biographical approach in favor of a historical and philosophical analysis of passages of that creation time. The main objective of this work is to identify the basic categories of the being-historical concept of M. Heidegger, manifested in criticism of the academic university philosophy of German universities at the beginning of the 20th century. The philosophy of being history is first touched upon in the aforementioned Black Notebooks. In the volumes of the collected works “Beiträge zur Philosophie”, “Das Ereignis”, “Die Geschichte des Seyns”, addressed by the author of the article, the main part of the being-historical concept is revealed. The leading research method is historical philosophical, which determines the relationship between the fundamental ontological intuitions of the German master and his analysis of factuality, in particular, criticism of German university philosophy. In the framework of this article, the historical philosophical method includes the hermeneutical method, which is necessary when working with the specific language of Heidegger's works, which requires a thorough interpretation.
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Lazirko, Nataliia. "GEORGE KAISER’S WRITING IN THE RECEPTION OF YURI KLEN." Polish Studies of Kyiv, no. 35 (2019): 201–6. http://dx.doi.org/10.17721/psk.2019.35.201-206.
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The given article deals with Klen’s research of the German dramatist George Kaiser. The main parameters of artistic universe of this author are presented in the article. There are also outlined the methodological strategies of research the German dramatist’s creativity by Yuri Klen – a well-known Ukrainian literary critic. Georg Kaiser is one of the brightest representatives of theatrical and literary expressionism. His plays are the unique phenomenon in the 20th century drama. His expressionism appeared to be the special one and the global and scope of plots allowed scientists to call G. Kaiser a «new myth creator». Among world scientists, who comprehended the features of author manner of this sign artist for history of world drama, a main place belongs to the Ukrainian literary critic – Yuri Klen. In his scientific work there is the article «George Kaiser», which an author compositionally divides into seven parts. Its pre-condition is an original metaphorical lineation (vivid registration of which is adopted from astronomy), structural-semiotics assertion that every writer creation has a basic idea or favourite main image, that can be found in many writings of the author. However, in the Ukrainian literary critic’s opinion, it is not impossible to say it on the first sight about George of Kaiser because every work of this author has a new incarnate idea, new and unexpected development of a plot, new and original interpretation of that problem which has been solved in his previous works. In the article “George Kaiser” by Yuri Klen the biographic approach can be highlighted while analyzing creative works of the German dramatist. The Ukrainian literary critic also outlines the secrets of psychology of the German artist creation in expressionism manner. Expressionism drama is always drama of ideas; therefore acting persons of this drama are not individuals, but types which helps writer to lead the general action of the characters. Yuri Klen asserts transformation of images in dramas by George of Kaiser, their original reduction up to separate characters and allegories: his characters lost the outlines of people and become symbols of idea, super individual creatures, typical samples, and logic of acting can be sacrificed for the sake of the higher logic – logic of composition and dramatic construction. Few times a researcher accents on closeness an artistic world view of the German dramatist to cubism: characters mainly don’t have the names, but appear on the stage under the names: a «father», «multimillionaire», «black», «yellow» – they are structural formulas. Summarizing these the structural-semiotics searches, Yuri Klen marks once again that in George Kayiser’s works can be found: 1) central idea of man renewing which is peculiar for all his creative work; 2) leading motive of escape-chasing and 3) element of contingency which manages events, that is a case-shove which suddenly gives dynamic of action and sets fire before a man as a distant lighthouse – dream about renewal. It is also possible to assert that researches of expressionism by some authors whose creation correlates with expressionism views demonstrates complete maturity of Yuri Klen to be a serious literary critic armed by the newest methodological approaches to study literature as theoretician and practician of literature studies.
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Roasto, Margo. "Marksismi retseptsioon ja dogmaatilise marksismi kriitika Eesti alal aastatel 1905–16." Ajalooline Ajakiri. The Estonian Historical Journal 177, no. 3/4 (June 20, 2022): 169–94. http://dx.doi.org/10.12697/aa.2021.3-4.02.
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In Estonian historiography, the revolutionary year of 1905 has been described as a starting point for subsequent political changes in 1917 and 1918. Hence many authors have highlighted the importance of political development that led to the foundation of the first Estonian political parties in 1905. However, the ideological differentiation of Estonian political thought between the revolutionary years of 1905 and 1917 has been studied less. The aim of this article is to analyse the political debates on Marxist theory that took place in the Estonian area of the Baltic provinces from 1905 to 1916.
The leaders of the Estonian socialist movement first became acquainted with Marxist theory through German and Russian socialist literature. Since 1905, various texts by socialist authors were also available to a wider audience in Estonian. First and foremost, the works of German social democrats were published in Estonian. During 1910–14, the first volume of Karl Marx’s Capital was translated into Estonian. While it had often previously been argued that socialism benefits all oppressed people, Marxist ideology was now presented as a scientific theory that explained economic development and protected the interests of industrial workers in a class society.
The article claims that during the period from 1905 to 1916, recognised experts on Marxist ideology emerged among Estonian socialists. In addition to Marxist tactics, Estonian socialist authors discussed theoretical issues such as the material conception of history. In these discussions, the personal conflicts between Estonian socialists as well as their ideological disagreements became evident. More broadly, these discussions were shaped by earlier ideological debates among European socialists at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century.
The article also argues that during the period considered, several Estonian left-wing thinkers questioned the validity of Marxism. Influenced by Bernstein’s revisionist ideas, these thinkers criticised Marxism as a one-sided and dogmatic ideology. They claimed that Marxism was just another theory with both strengths and weaknesses. However, Estonian social democrats who embraced Marxism as a scientific theory responded to such criticism and defended the materialist view of society.
The debates on Marxist theory considered here provide evidence of the ideological differentiation of Estonian left-wing political thought. From 1905 to 1916, numerous socialist texts in Estonian presented various approaches for understanding Marxist ideology. Thus, one can witness an intensified reception of Marxism in the Estonian area during that period. More specifically, these ideological debates reveal new facets of the political views of Estonian socialists who later affected the course of Estonian history as communist revolutionaries or as members of the Estonian Constituent Assembly.
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Loos, Helmut. "Beethoven — the Zeus of Modernity." Culturology Ideas, no. 18 (2'2020) (2020): 66–84. http://dx.doi.org/10.37627/2311-9489-18-2020-2.66-84.
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A large part of German musicology sees itself as a science of art in the emphatic sense and is committed to quite different principles than historical-critical approaches in the discipline. The latter seek to gain a realistic picture of the history of music, including contemporary ways of thinking, and allow for historical actors to make meaningful, free will decisions within anthropologically determined circumstances. The emphatic science of art, on the other hand, claims to be able to prove and scientifically determine the objects of great art music and their nature. It originated during the Enlightenment, when philosophy took the place of religion and created ever new theoretical constructs of thought presented as scientifically proven and binding. In music, Beethoven rose to the ideal of the ingenious creator, who embodied the progress and achievements of mankind on the path toward perfection. Thus, in the course of the 19th century, a Beethoven cult developed using philosophy as its guide in selecting and evaluating historical sources, gladly accepting literary testimonies as historical fact. Historical criticism, which revealed this construction of a romantic image of Beethoven, was suppressed for a long time. Society’s broad acceptance of the notion of the evolutionary progress of mankind, one to which modernity adhered, proved too powerful, and belief in it took the form of an art religion. Beethoven as Zeus of the Third Reich, as the god of modernity, was the program and message of the 14th Secession Exhibition in Vienna in 1902. This image was destructed in the late 20th century.
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Vasic, Aleksandar. "The beginnings of Serbian music historiography: Serbian music periodicals between the world wars." Muzikologija, no. 12 (2012): 143–64. http://dx.doi.org/10.2298/muz120227007v.
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The transition of the 19th into the 20th century in Serbian music history was a period of music criticism, journalism and essay writing. At that time, Serbian musicology had not yet been developed as an academic discipline. After WWI there were many more academic writings on this subject; therefore, the interwar period represents the beginning of Serbian music historiography. This paper analyses Serbian interwar music magazines as source material for the history of Serbian musicology. The following music magazines were published in Belgrade at the time: Muzicki glasnik (Music Herald, 1922), Muzika (Music, 1928-1929), Glasnik Muzickog drustva ?Stankovic? (Stankovic Music Society Herald, 1928-1934, 1938-1941; from January 1931. known as Muzicki glasnik /Music Herald/), Zvuk ( Sound, 1932-1936), Vesnik Juznoslovesnkog pevackog saveza (The South Slav Singing Union Courier, 1935-1936, 1938), Slavenska muzika ( Slavonic Music, 1939-1941), and Revija muzike (The Music Review, 1940). A great number of historical studies and writings on Serbian music were published in the interwar periodicals. A significant contribution was made above all to the study of Serbian musicians? biographies and bibliographies of the 19th century. Vladimir R. Djordjevic published several short biographies in Muzicki glasnik (1922) in an article called Ogled biografskog recnika srpskih muzicara (An Introduction to Serbian Musicians? Biographies). Writers on music obviously understood that the starting point in the study of Serbian music history had to be the composers? biographical data. Other magazines (such as Muzicki glasnik in 1928 and 1931, Zvuk, Vesnik Juznoslovenskog pevackog saveza, and Slavenska muzika) published a number of essays on distinguished Serbian and Yugoslav musicians of the 19th and 20th centuries, most of which deal with both composers? biographical data and analysis of their compositions. Their narrative style reflects the habits of 19th-century romanticism and positivism: in some of these writings the language also has an aesthetic function. Serbian interwar music magazines also published some archival documents contributing to the future research of Serbian music history. Interwar period in the then Yugoslavia was a time of rapid development and modernization in various fields of culture. There was a great demand for music writings of general interest. Therefore, Revija muzike (January - June 1940) was totally oriented towards the popularization of music and the arts (such as drama and film). This magazine also published some popular articles on music history. Serbian interwar music periodicals were least active in the field of musicological analysis. However, in 1934, Branko M. Dragutinovic published a detailed analytic study of Josip Slavenski?s composition Religiofonija (Religiophonics) in Zvuk. There were also some interdisciplinary history articles in Serbian interwar music magazines. Being well aware of the fact that music history comprises not only music itself, but also music writing, schools, institutions and music life, our music writers used ?indirect? sources, such as literature and art, as well as music. Serbian interwar music periodicals opened many fields of research, thus blazing a trail in postwar Serbian musicology.
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Pavlov, Alexander. "The 70-Year-Old The New Science of Politics." Sotsiologicheskoe Obozrenie / Russian Sociological Review 20, no. 1 (2021): 244–61. http://dx.doi.org/10.17323/1728-192x-2021-1-244-261.
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The paper is a reflection on the book The New Science of Politics: An Introduction by the German-American political philosopher Eric Voegelin. The book is considered as a classic work in the field of the political theory of the 20th century. The first edition of the book was published in 1952, but its Russian translation was only completed in 2021. The author notes that although Voegelin’s thought is clear, the reading of the work may be difficult because Voegelin re-invents the terms that were already established in the scientific field, such as positivism, Gnosticism, the philosophy of history, the philosophy of consciousness, etc. To clarify the thinker’s contribution to political philosophy, the author addresses several studies that describe this contribution. After a brief enumeration of the components of this ‘contribution’, the author discusses how fully these points are reflected in The New Science of Politics. It turns out that although this work is based on six lectures, it contains all the topics of Voegelin’s political theory. The author further clarifies several key terms of the philosopher, and proceeds to the presentation of Voegelin’s concept. This technique makes Voegelin’s political theory crystal clear. Finally, the author turns to the context of “before-Rawls” political theory and briefly describes how the jurist and (later) political scientist Hans Kelsen reacted to Voegelin’s work. The author also analyses the polemics between Hannah Arendt and Voegelin, explaining why Arendt’s reaction to Voegelin’s criticism might seem strange, although it should not be considered as such. He concludes by referring to some excellent assessments of Voegelin’s philosophy, and states that the great hope that Voegelin would become the most important philosopher of the twentieth century did not come true.
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Юрченкова, Оксана Николаевна. "ON DRAMA POETICS AND MORE… THE HISTORIOGRAPHIC REVIEW OF SCIENTIFIC ACTIVITY OF PROFESSOR VALENTINA YE. GOLOVCHINER." Tomsk state pedagogical university bulletin, no. 5(211) (September 7, 2020): 206–27. http://dx.doi.org/10.23951/1609-624x-2020-5-206-227.
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Введение. Статья приурочена к 75-летнему юбилею профессора В. Е. Головчинер и посвящена анализу ее научной деятельности. Цель статьи – определить этапы и направления научно-педагогической деятельности ученого. Материалы и методы. Материалом исследования послужили научные труды (статьи, доклады, монографии) В. Е. Головчинер и ее учеников. Систематизация и описание результатов научной работы ученого осуществлялись в сопоставлении с ведущими концепциями отечественной филологии. Результаты и обсуждение. Впервые научное наследие В. Е. Головчинер рассмотрено как целостное явление; выявлены принципы, которыми руководствовался ученый в разные периоды научной деятельности; выделены ключевые идеи ее работ: 1) формирование эпической драмы как специфического направления в отечественном литературном процессе ХХ в., обусловленного культурно-историческими обстоятельствами и имеющего две типологические разновидности – метафорическую и метонимическую – с характерными чертами поэтики; 2) специфика художественного произведения во многом обусловлена родовыми чертами, поскольку каждый род литературы имеет свои выразительные возможности; 3) закономерная смена жанровой парадигмы в эпоху неклассической поэтики приводит к тому, что канонические жанры уступают место авторским моделям творчества, выступающим в качестве нового способа завершения художественного целого. Теоретическая значимость исследования: научное наследие В. Е. Головчинер введено в историко-научный контекст; освещены основные направления ее исследований; проанализирован эвристический потенциал теоретических положений и кратко охарактеризованы тезисы основных работ. Практическая значимость исследования: выводы и результаты исследования могут быть использованы при составлении рабочих программ филологических дисциплин, разработке учебных материалов, пособий по истории отечественного литературоведения. Заключение. Научные разработки профессора В. Е. Головчинер не только являются концептуальными в отдельных вопросах теории литературы, открывают интересные историко-литературные факты, но и отражают общие тенденции филологической науки, развивают достижения томской школы литературоведения, изучающей отечественную драму. Introduction. The article is devoted to the 75th anniversary of professor V. Ye. Golovchiner. Aim and objectives. The aim of the article is to determine the stages and directions of scientific and pedagogical activity of Professor V. Golovchiner. Material and methods. The research material (articles, reports, monographs) by V. E. Golovchiner and her students served as the material for the study. The systematization and description of the results of scientific activity was carried out in comparison with the leading concepts of Russian philology. Results and discussion. For the first time, her scientific heritage is examined as a whole; the principles are revealed by which the scientist was guided during the different periods of her scientific activity; the key ideas of her papers are selected: 1. the formation of an epic drama as a specific direction in Russian literary process of the 20th century caused by cultural-historical conditions and having two typological versions – metaphorical and metonymical – with characteristic features of poetics; 2. the specifics of an artwork is in many respects caused by ancestral features as each literary genre has its own expressive possibilities; 3. the natural change of a genre paradigm during the era of nonclassical poetics leads to that the initial genres give way to the author’s models of creativity which represent a new way to end of an artistic whole. The theoretical relevance of the research: V. Ye. Golovchiner’s scientific heritage is introduced into the historical scientific context; the directions of her scientific activity are studied; the heuristic potential of theoretical positions is analyzed and theses of the main papers are shortly characterized. The practical relevance of the research: the conclusions and results of the research can be used to develop work programs of subjects in different areas of philology, to develop the teaching materials, guide books on the history of Russian literary criticism. Conclusion. The author of the paper comes to conclusions that the scientific developments of the professor are not only conceptual in certain questions of the theory of literature, open interesting historical literary facts but also reflect general trends of a philology science, develop the achievements of Tomsk school of literary criticism studying Russian drama.
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Nagornaya, Yana V. "А. М. REMIZOV AND FOLKLORE: ON THE ISSUE OF RESEARCH METHODOLOGY." Philological Class 26, no. 2 (2021): 155–66. http://dx.doi.org/10.51762/1fk-2021-26-02-13.
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The article presents a critical review of research works on the topic “Folklore-literary interaction in the creative activity of A.M. Remizov” published in Russian. The study of the topic has been conducted mainly within the framework of literary criticism. Meanwhile, for a writer known for his commitment to preservation and innovative approach to traditional literary genres, folklore is one of the dominant sources of creativity. Currently, Remizov studies cannot boast of generalizing works on folklorism in the writer’s creative activity and on the influence of oral folk art genres on his artistic system, so one of the aims of the article is to attract scholarly interest to the issue and stimulate further research in this area. The publication gives a brief description of the current state of research on the problem, identifies the main vectors of its consideration and reveals the academic lacunae. The author analyzes the works, which deal with the creative heritage from the point of view of folklore studies and address the problems of the typology of folklorism and mythologism of the writer, clarify the range of folklore sources and the specificity of working with them, as well as the role and function of the author’s comments on the miniatures of Posoloni. These notes to the texts were created under the influence of a literary scandal related to the accusation of the writer of plagiarism. The assessment of the events around this incident by specialists in Remisov studies and folklorists does not coincide, the article outlines prospects for further research. The author undertakes a detailed description of the influence of the texts of calendar rite, spiritual verses, fairy tale, conspiracy-spell tradition, folk drama, children’s folklore and Russian folk pictures on the writer’s creative activity. For the first time, the author poses a hypothesis about the possible influence of the aesthetics of rayok (“World Cosmorama”) on the work of A. M. Remizov by the example of the fairy-tale novella “What is Tobacco”, which which depicts the reformatting of the apocryphal model by artistic means of lubok and rayok. The analysis of numerous studies made it possible for the author of the article to conclude that the writer’s creative activity does not only reflect the real diversity of folklore genres but also such specific features of them as oral format and variability. The results of the study can be used in the design of the course of the history of Russian literature and folklore studies of the beginning of the early 20th century, in the studies dealing with folklore-literary interaction, and in popularization and publication of folklore texts.
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Svitlenko, Serhiy. "Ukrainian intellectual Trokhym Zinkivskyi and preservation of historical memory of Taras Shevchenko." Chornomors’ka Mynuvshyna, no. 17 (December 31, 2022): 71–78. http://dx.doi.org/10.18524/2519-2523.2022.17.268828.
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The personality of Trochym Zinkivskyi (1861–1891) remains little known and insufficiently developed in modern Ukrainian historiography. The purpose of the article is to study the figure of Trokhym Zinkivskyi in the context of the problem of preserving the historical memory of Taras Shevchenko. Research methods are personalistic, historical-genetic and historical-systemic. Sources: published epistolaries of T. Zinkivskyi and his addressees, memories of contemporaries, biographical articles in the Ukrainian press of the beginning of the 20th century etc. The main results consist in elucidating the peculiarities of the formation of T. Zinkivskyi's worldview under the conditions of the oppression of the Southern Ukrainian lands by the Russian imperial regime, in particular in Berdyansk, Feodosia and Odesa, the establishment of his Ukrainian national-democratic views during his studies and military service in Smila, Shpola and Uman, in Kyiv and St. Petersburg. It is noted that an important factor in the development of his Ukrainian consciousness and identity was his family upbringing, which instilled love for his native language and formed Christian, religious values. A prominent role was played by the reading circle, which included Shevchenkov's «Kobzar» along with other literary works of Ukrainian and foreign writers; as well as Ukrainian folk art. V. Kravchenko, L. Smolenskyi, B. Grinchenko, M. Komarov, and a number of representatives of the Ukrainian colony in St. Petersburg were included in the closest circle of persons who significantly influenced the formation of the worldview of the Ukrainian figure. The article traces the main stages of the intellectual and public activity of the Ukrainian figure in the matter of preserving the historical memory of Kobzar. It is noted that already in the middle and second half of the 80s of the 19th century. T. Zinkivskyi began work in the field of Ukrainian literature, took care of translation activities. In St. Petersburg, he was able to begin wider work for the benefit of Ukrainianism and became an ideological leader of young Ukrainians. The powerful vital energy of the activist was organically combined with consistent and convinced actions in the name of the Ukrainian cause. In the youth group at Shevchenko's anniversary, T. Zinkivskyi read a number of essays, such as «The National Question in Russia», «Shevchenko in the Light of European Criticism», «Young Ukraine» and others. His essay «Taras Shevchenko in the Light of European Criticism», which was read in Ukrainian on the evening of February 25, 1889 in the capital of the empire, was of exceptional importance. This speech, prepared mostly on the basis of French, Austrian, German, and Polish historiographical sources, presented Kobzar as a figure of global poetic scale and destroyed the perception of the Russian metropolitan public about Ukrainians and the Ukrainian language as something provincial and inferior. Conclusions.T. Zinkivskyi became one of the brightest representatives of the «Young Ukraine» generation. The short-lived but important intellectual activity of the ideological leader of young Ukrainians, in particular, speeches at the Shevchenko anniversary, publication of abstracts, epistolaries, drew the attention of contemporaries to the figure of Taras Shevchenko, to his poetic heritage; actualized the issue of preserving the historical memory of Kobzar as a leader of the national values of Ukrainians. It has been proven that during the 1880s and early 1890s, T. Zinkivskyi's intellectual activity contributed to the progress of Ukrainian public affairs and national science, the establishment of Ukrainian national consciousness among the generation of young Ukrainians. The practical significance of the article is that the given material will be of interest to specialists in the context of studying the ethno-national history of Ukraine in the second half of the 19th century. The originality of the article lies in the understanding of insufficiently studied aspects of the activity of the Ukrainian intellectual, who stood at the origins of the idea of «Young Ukraine». Scientific novelty in updating the intellectual activity of T. Zinkivskyi in the matter of preserving Ukrainian national memory and forming national consciousness and identity.
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Bardone, Ester, Maarja Kaaristo, Kristi Jõesalu, and Ene Kõresaar. "Mõtestades materiaalset kultuuri / Making sense of the material culture." Studia Vernacula 10 (November 5, 2019): 12–45. http://dx.doi.org/10.12697/sv.2019.10.12-45.
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People live amidst objects, things, articles, items, artefacts, materials, substances, and stuff – described in social sciences and humanities as material culture, which denotes both natural and human-made entities, which form our physical environment. We, humans, relate to this environment by using, depicting, interacting with or thinking about various material objects or their representations. In other words, material culture is never just about things in themselves, it is also about various ideas, representations, experiences, practices and relations. In contemporary theorising about material culture, the watershed between the tangible and intangible has started to disappear as all the objects have multiple meanings. This paper theorises objects mostly in terms of contemporary socio-cultural anthropology and ethnology by first giving an overview of the development of the material culture studies and then focusing upon consumption studies, material agency, practice theory and the methods for studying material culture.
Both anthropology and ethnology in the beginning of the 20th century were dealing mostly with ‘saving’; that is, collecting the ethnographical objects from various cultures for future preservation as societies modernised. The collecting of the everyday items of rural Estonians, which had begun in the 19th century during the period of national awakening, gained its full momentum after the establishment of the Estonian National Museum in 1909. During the museum’s first ten years, 20,000 objects were collected (Õunapuu 2007). First, the focus was on the identification of the historical-geographical typologies of the collected artefacts. In 1919, the first Estonian with a degree in ethnology, Helmi Reiman-Neggo (2013) stressed the need for ethnographical descriptions of the collected items and the theoretical planning of the museum collections. The resulting vast ethnographical collection of the Estonian National Museum (currently about 140,000 items) has also largely influenced ethnology and anthropology as academic disciplines in Estonia (Pärdi 1993).
Even though in the first half of the 20th century the focus lay in the systematic collection and comparative analysis of everyday items and folk art, there were studies that centred on meaning already at the end of 19th century. Austrianethnologist Rudolf Meringer suggested in 1891 that a house should be studied as a cultural individual and analysed within the context of its functions and in relation to its inhabitants. Similarly, the 1920s and 1930s saw studies on the roles of artefacts that were not influenced by Anglo-American functionalism: Mathilde Hain (1936) studied how folk costumes contribute to the harmonious functioning of a ‘small community’, and Petr Bogatyrev (1971) published his study on Moravian costumes in 1937. This study, determining the three main functions – instrumental, aesthetic and symbolic – of the folk costume, and translated into English 30 years after first publication, had a substantial influence on the development of material culture studies.
The 1970s saw the focus of material culture studies in Western and Northern Europe shifting mainly from the examination of (historical) rural artefacts to the topics surrounding contemporary culture, such as consumption. In Soviet Estonian ethnology, however, the focus on the 19th century ethnographic items was prevalent until the 1980s as the topic was also partially perceived as a protest against the direction of Soviet academia (see Annist and Kaaristo 2013 for a thorough overview). There were, of course, exceptions, as for instance Arved Luts’s (1962) studies on everyday life on collective farms. Meanwhile, however, the communicative and semiotic turn of the 1970s turned European ethnology’s focus to the idea of representation and objects as markers of identity as well as means of materialising the otherwise intangible and immaterial relationships and relations. The theory of cultural communication was established in Scandinavian ethnology and numerous studies on clothing, housing and everyday items as material expressions of social structures, hierarchies, values and ideologies emerged (Lönnqvist 1979, Gustavsson 1991). The Scandinavian influences on Estonia are also reflected in Ants Viires’s (1990) suggestion that ethnologists should study clothing (including contemporary clothing) in general and not just folk costumes, by using a semiotic approach.
Löfgren’s (1997) clarion call to bring more ‘flesh and blood’ to the study of material culture was a certain reaction to the above focus. Researchers had for too long focused exclusively upon the meaning and, as Löfgren brought forth, they still did not have enough understanding of what exactly it was that people were actually and practically doing with their things. Ingold’s (2013) criticism on the studies focusing on symbolism, and the lack of studies on the tangible materiality of the materials and their properties, takes a similar position. In the 1990s, there was a turn toward the examination of material-cultural and those studies that were written within the framework of ‘new materialism’ (Hicks 2010, Coole and Frost 2010) started to pay attention to objects as embodied and agentive (Latour 1999, Tilley et al 2006). Nevertheless, as Olsen (2017) notes, all materialities are not created equal in contemporary academic research: while items like prostheses, Boyle’s air pumps or virtual realities enjoy increased attention, objects such as wooden houses, fireplaces, rakes and simple wooden chairs are still largely unexamined. The traditional material culture therefore needs new studying in the light of these post-humanist theories.
Where does this leave Estonian ethnology? In the light of the theoretical developments discussed above, we could ask, whether and how has the material Making sense of the material culture turn affected research in Estonia? Here we must first note that for a significant part of the 20th century, Estonian ethnology (or ethnography as the discipline was called before 1990s) has mostly been centred on the material culture (see the overview of the main topics from vehicles to folk costumes in Viires and Vunder 2008). Partly because of this aspect of the discipline’s history, many researchers actually felt the need to somewhat distance themselves from these topics in the 1990s (Pärdi 1998). Compared to topics like religion, identity, memory, oral history and intangible heritage, study of material culture has largely stayed in the background. There are of course notable exceptions such as Vunder’s (1992) study on the history of style, which includes analysis of theirsymbolic aspects. It is also interesting to note that in the 1990s Estonian ethnology, the term ‘material culture’ (‘materiaalne kultuur’) – then seen as incorporating the dualism between material and immaterial – was actually replaced with the Estonian translation of German ‘Sachkultur’ (‘esemekultuur’, literally ‘artefact culture’). Nevertheless, it was soon realised that this was actually a too narrow term (with its exclusion of natural objects and phenomena as well as the intangible and social aspects of culture), slowly fell out of general usage, and was replaced with ‘material culture’ once again. Within the past three decades, studies dealing with material culture have discussed a wide variety of topics from the vernacular interior design (Kannike 2000, 2002, 2012), everyday commodities (Kõresaar 1999b) and spiritual objects (Teidearu 2019), traditional rural architecture (Pärdi 2012, Kask 2012, 2015), museum artefacts (Leete 1996), clothing, textiles and jewellery (Kõresaar 1999a; Järs 2004; Summatavet 2005; Jõeste 2012; Araste and Ventsel 2015), food culture (Piiri 2006; Bardone 2016; Kannike and Bardone 2017), to soviet consumer culture (Ruusmann 2006, Rattus 2013) and its implications in life histories (Kõresaar 1998, Jõesalu and Nugin 2017). All of these these studies deal with how people interpret, remember and use objects.
The main keywords of the studies of European material culture have been home, identity and consumption (but also museology and tangible heritage, which have not been covered in this article). Material culture studies are an important part of the studies of everyday life and here social and cultural histories are still important (even though they have been criticised for focusing too much on symbols and representation). Therefore, those studies focusing on physical materials and materialites, sensory experiences, embodiment, and material agency have recently become more and more important. This article has given an overview of the three most prevalent thematic and theoretical strands of the study of material culture: objects as symbols especially in the consumer culture, material agency and practice theory as well as discussing some methodological suggestions for the material culture studies.
To conclude, even though on the one hand we could argue that when it comes to the study of material culture there indeed exists a certain hierarchy of „old“ topics that relate to museums or traditional crafts and „new“ and modern materialities, such as smart phones or genetically modified organisms. However, dichotomies like this are often artificial and do not show the whole picture: contemporary children are often as proficient in playing cat’s cradle as they are with video games (Jackson 2016). Thus, studying various (everyday) material objects and entities is still topical and the various theories discussed in this article can help to build both theoretical and empirical bridge between different approaches. Therefore, there is still a lot to do in this regard and we invite researchers to study objects form all branches of material culture, be they 19th century beer mugs in the collections of the Estonian National Museum that can help us to better give meaning to our past, or the digital and virtual design solutions that can give our academic research an applied direction.
Keywords: material culture, artefacts, consumption, practice, agency, research methods
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Griškaitė, Reda. "Teodoro Narbuto mokslinė korespondencija kaip veikalo Dzieje narodu litewskiego „akademiškumo“ liudijimas." Archivum Lithuanicum, no. 23 (December 31, 2021): 191–268. http://dx.doi.org/10.33918/26692449-23007.
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TEODOR NARBUTT’S SCIENTIFIC CORRESPONDENCE AS TESTIMONY TO THE ‘ACADEMIC’ NATURE OF DZIEJE NARODU LITEWSKIEGO S u m m a r y The critique of Dzieje narodu litewskiego (The History of the Lithuanian Nation 1–9, Vilnius, 1835–1841, [DNL]) had always made Teodor vel Teodor Mateusz Narbutt (vel O styk-Narbutt,1784–1864) argue that he was not a layman nor a wilful forger. His own approach to defending himself against the attack was unique: he prepared a second edition of DNL and the so-called New Mythology – Mytologija Litewska ze sczegółami do wiary, obyczajów i oświaty przedchrześciańskiej Narodu litewskiego odnoszącemi się (Lithuanian Mythology with Details about the Belief, Customs, and pre-Christianity Education of the Lithuanian Enlightenment, 1848), intended to publish the collection of sources of Lithuanian history kept at his manor in Szawry (Lith. Šiauriai; Grodno Governorate, as of 1843 Vilnius Governorate, Lida Region), and finally, as proof of his honest work, pieced together his scientific correspondence – the letters from scholars, old collectors, and other citizens that cared for Lithuania’s past. Today, this collection that Narbutt made himself – Korrespondencya Uczona (Scientific Correspondence [KU]) is kept at the Manuscript Department of the Wroblewski Library of the Lithuanian Academy of Science (LMAVB : f. 18 [Manuscript collection B4], b. 185/2–185/16, 25r–791v). Narbutt’s peculiar method of defence bore an ad te ipsum character; however yet, due to historic circumstances (the sequestration of the Szawry manor, the seizure of the library and its transfer to the public library of Vilnius), originally designed as a tool of self-reflection, the collection became accessible to the public. And researchers dug into letters addressed to Narbutt with much gusto indeed. Nonetheless, the real attention grabbers were the celebrity names in this collection. Hence, just like the printed work of this historian, his handwritten legacy (in this case, correspondence), too, would often merit a fragmented read, which was largely due to its tremendous volume. For instance, DNL has 5,220 pages, KU 766 archival pages – a total of 1,532 pages recto and verso. In other words, letters to Narbutt were never approached in corpore, as an intentionally built collection with an incredibly bright idea and purpose. The idea that the appearance of this epistolary compendium had been inspired by autograph-hunting, a hot trend at thetime, should be disregarded straight away, because not every one of Narbutt’s correspondents was a celebrity. With a few exceptions, their overarching trait was intellectual work and love of Lithuanian antiques. The goal of the article was to approach the collection of letters to Narbutt as a whole, as a means of self-reflection a unique weapon of defence. Narbutt’s epistolary collection had never been dissected from any of these angles. The research has showed that today, KU consists of 386 letters. It is correspondence in Polish, German, Russian, and French (in the order of appearance) written in 1808–1858 (4 letters are not dated). Of the authors of the letters, 68 are men, 3 are women. The social picture of KU is very colourful: from gymnasium students to civil governors, from clergy to members of governorate statistical committees. Still, most of Narbutt’s correspondents were historians, archivists, and litterateurs. Some of the authors were litterateurs just as they were landlords; historians, as they were government officials; clergymen, as they were collectors. This motley crew had one thing in common: they all had read DNL. Cataclysmic political developments have prevented us from having KU in its final form. Not all the letters Narbutt himself had included in his collection have survived to this day. However, regardless of how incomplete KU today is, it features the names of nearly every scholar of Lithuania’s history or lover of Lithuanian antiques of the period nonetheless. The underlying theme of KU is Lithuania’s history, search for and dissemination of historic sources. The letters wax lyrical about DNL, while criticism is very subdued, if any. The collection reveals Narbutt as a prominent authority figure, a person that had rocked both the scientific world of the history of Lithuania and the public in general. KU had a high psychological value for Narbutt as well. DNL’s critique in the press was a source of daily stress, and the letters from Narbutt’s correspondents pointed to quite the opposite – approval of his research and DNL’s dissemination amidst the society. That was probably the reason why Narbutt fostered this collection so much. His ongoing concern was evident in his handmade folders for the letters, and even more so in his own notes. The books in his library were the only other thing that he would approach in a similar manner. 20th century historians have come to consider KU as a weighty piece of evidence of Narbutt as an honest researcher. However, what matters so much more is not the case of the so-called case of historic (non-)falsification, but the perception of KU as a whole. Most of the letters were written after the closure of the Imperial University of Vilnius. There was no official Vilnius school of history any more, but the historic thought had survived. It would present itself through search for and dissemination of sources of Lithuanian history, through historic tracts and reviews (anonymous as often as not). It would become evident on yet another level: in letters, hence private media that served as a forum for curious scientific seminars and epistolary dialogue on the subject of the history of Lithuania. It was through no accident that, instead of opting for just Correspondence, Narbutt titled his collection Scientific Correspondence. It stands to represent Szawry in its own peculiar way as well. The provincial manor became an intellectual centre – something that would have been impossible but for DNL, with all the mistakes that were (not) made in the tract.
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Tsygankov, Alexander S. "History of Philosophy. 2018, Vol. 23, No. 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS Theory and Methodology of History of Philosophy Rodion V. Savinov. Philosophy of Antiquity in Scholasticism This article examines the forms of understanding ancient philosophy in medieval and post-medieval scholasticism. Using the comparative method the author identifies the main approaches to the philosophical heritage of Antiquity, and to the problem of reviving the doctrines of the past. The Patristics (Epiphanius of Cyprus, Filastrius of Brixia, Lactantius, Augustine) saw the ancient cosmological doctrines as heresies. The early Middle Ages (e.g., Isidore of Seville) assimilated the content of these heresiographic treatises, which became the main source of information about ancient philosophy. Scholasticism of the 13th–14th cent. remained cautious to ancient philosophy and distinguished, on the one hand, the doctrinal content discussed in the framework of the exegetic problems at universities (Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas, etc.), and, on the other hand, information on ancient philosophers integrated into chronological models of medieval chronicles (Peter Comestor, Vincent de Beauvais, Walter Burleigh). Finally, the post-medieval scholasticism (Pedro Fonseca, Conimbricenses, Th. Stanley, and others) raised the questions of the «history of ideas», thereby laying the foundation of the history of philosophy in its modern sense. Keywords: history of philosophy, Patristic, Scholasticism, reflection, critic DOI: 10.21146/2074-5869-2018-23-2-5-17 World Philosophy: the Past and the Present Mariya A. Solopova. The Chronology of Democritus and the Fall of Troy The article considers the chronology of Democritus of Abdera. In the times of Classical Antiquity, three different birth dates for Democritus were known: c. 495 BC (according to Diodorus of Sicily), c. 470 BC (according to Thrasyllus), and c. 460 BC (according to Apollodorus of Athens). These dates must be coordinated with the most valuable doxographic evidence, according to which Democritus 1) "was a young man during Anaxagoras’s old age" and that 2) the Lesser World-System (Diakosmos) was compiled 730 years after the Fall of Troy. The article considers the argument in favor of the most authoritative datings belonging to Apollodorus and Thrasyllus, and draws special attention to the meaning of the dating of Democritus’ work by himself from the year of the Fall of Troy. The question arises, what prompted Democritus to talk about the date of the Fall of Troy and how he could calculate it. The article expresses the opinion that Democritus indicated the date of the Fall of Troy not with the aim of proposing its own date, different from others, but in order to date the Lesser World-System in the spirit of intellectual achievements of his time, in which, perhaps, the history of the development of mankind from the primitive state to the emergence of civilization was discussed. The article discusses how to explain the number 730 and argues that it can be the result of combinations of numbers 20 (the number of generations that lived from the Fall of Troy to Democritus), 35 – one of the constants used for calculations of generations in genealogical research, and 30. The last figure perhaps indicates the age of Democritus himself, when he wrote the Lesser Diakosmos: 30 years old. Keywords: Ancient Greek philosophy, Democritus, Anaxagoras, Greek chronography, doxographers, Apollodorus, Thrasyllus, capture of Troy, ancient genealogies, the length of a generation DOI: 10.21146/2074-5869-2018-23-2-18-31 Bembya L. Mitruyev. “Yogācārabhumi-Śāstra” as a Historical and Philosophical Source The article deals with “Yogācārabhūmi-Śāstra” – a treatise on the Buddhist Yogācāra school. Concerning the authorship of this text, the Indian and Chinese traditions diverge: in the first, the treatise is attributed to Asanga, and in the second tradition to Maitreya. Most of the modern scholars consider it to be a compilation of many texts, and not the work of one author. Being an important monument for both the Yogacara tradition and Mahayana Buddhism in general, Yogācārabhūmi-Śāstra is an object of scientific interest for the researchers all around the world. The text of the treatise consists of five parts, which are divided into chapters. The contents of the treatise sheds light on many concepts of Yogācāra, such as ālayavijñāna, trisvabhāva, kliṣṭamanas, etc. Having briefly considered the textological problems: authorship, dating, translation, commenting and genre of the text, the author suggests the reconstruction of the content of the entire monument, made on the basis of his own translation from the Tibetan and Sanskrit. This allows him to single out from the whole variety of topics those topics, the study of which will increase knowledge about the history of the formation of the basic philosophical concepts of Yogācāra and thereby allow a deeper understanding of the historical and philosophical process in Buddhism and in other philosophical movements of India. Keywords: Yogācārabhūmi-śāstra, Asaṅga, Māhāyana, Vijñānavāda, Yogācāra, Abhidharma, ālayavijñāna citta, bhūmi, mind, consciousness, meditation DOI: 10.21146/2074-5869-2018-23-2-32-43 Tatiana G. Korneeva. Knowledge in Nāșir Khusraw’s Philosophy The article deals with the concept of “knowledge” in the philosophy of Nāșir Khusraw. The author analyzes the formation of the theory of knowledge in the Arab-Muslim philosophy. At the early stages of the formation of the Arab-Muslim philosophy the discussion of the question of cognition was conducted in the framework of ethical and religious disputes. Later followers of the Falsafa introduced the legacy of ancient philosophers into scientific circulation and began to discuss the problems of cognition in a philosophical way. Nāșir Khusraw, an Ismaili philosopher of the 11th century, expanded the scope of knowledge and revised the goals and objectives of the process of cognition. He put knowledge in the foundation of the world order, made it the cause and ultimate goal of the creation of the world. In his philosophy knowledge is the link between the different levels of the universe. The article analyzes the Nāșir Khusraw’s views on the role of knowledge in various fields – metaphysics, cosmogony, ethics and eschatology. Keywords: knowledge, cognition, Ismailism, Nāșir Khusraw, Neoplatonism, Arab-Muslim philosophy, kalām, falsafa DOI: 10.21146/2074-5869-2018-23-2-44-55 Vera Pozzi. Problems of Ontology and Criticism of the Kantian Formalism in Irodion Vetrinskii’s “Institutiones Metaphysicae” (Part II) This paper is a follow-up of the paper «Irodion Vetrinskii’s “Institutiones Metaphysicae” and the St. Petersburg Theological Academy» (Part I). The issue and the role of “ontology” in Vetrinskii’s textbook is analyzed in detail, as well as the author’s critique of Kantian “formalism”: in this connection, the paper provides a description of Vetrinskii’s discussion about Kantian theory of the a priori forms of sensible intuition and understanding. To sum up, Vetrinskii was well acquainted not only with Kantian works – and he was able to fully evaluate their innovative significance – but also with late Scholastic textbooks of the German area. Moreover, he relied on the latters to build up an eclectic defense of traditional Metaphysics, avoiding at the same time to refuse Kantian perspective in the sake of mere reaffirming a “traditional” perspective. Keywords: Philosophizing at Russian Theological Academies, Russian Enlightenment, Russian early Kantianism, St. Petersburg Theological Academy, history of Russian philosophy, history of metaphysics, G.I. Wenzel, I. Ya. Vetrinskii DOI: 10.21146/2074-5869-2018-23-2-56-67 Alexey E. Savin. Criticism of Judaism in Hegel's Early “Theological” Writings The aim of the article is to reveal the nature of criticism of Judaism by the “young” Hegel and underlying intuitions. The investigation is based on the phenomenological approach. It seeks to explicate the horizon of early Hegel's thinking. The revolutionary role of early Hegel’s ideas reactivation in the history of philosophy is revealed. The article demonstrates the fundamental importance of criticism of Judaism for the development of Hegel's thought. The sources of Hegelian thematization and problematization of Judaism – his Protestant theological background within the framework of supranaturalism and the then discussion about human rights and political emancipation of Jews – are discovered. Hegel's interpretation of the history of the Jewish people and the origin of Judaism from the destruction of trust in nature, the fundamental mood of distrust and fear of the world, leading to the development of alienation, is revealed. The falsity of the widespread thesis about early Hegel’s anti-Semitism is demonstrated. The reasons for the transition of early Hegel from “theology” to philosophy are revealed. Keywords: Hegel, Judaism, history, criticism, anti-Semitism, trust, nature, alienation, tyranny, philosophy DOI: 10.21146/2074-5869-2018-23-2-68-80 Evgeniya A. Dolgova. Philosophy at the Institute of Red Professors (1921–1938): Institutional Forms, Methods of Teaching, Students, Lecturers The article explores the history of the Institute of the Red Professors in philosophy (1921–1938). Referring to the unpublished documents in the State Archives of the Russian Federation and the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the author explores its financial and infrastructure support, information sphere, characterizes students and teachers. The article illustrates the practical experience of the functioning of philosophy within the framework of one of the extraordinary “revolutionary” projects on the renewal of the scientific and pedagogical sphere, reflects a vivid and ambiguous picture of the work of the educational institution in the 1920s and 1930s and corrects some of historiographical judgments (about the politically and socially homogeneous composition of the Institute of Red Professors, the specifics of state support of its work, privileges and the social status of the “red professors”). Keywords: Institute of the Red Professors in Philosophy, Philosophical Department, soviet education, teachers, students, teaching methods DOI: 10.21146/2074-5869-2018-23-2-81-94 Vladimir V. Starovoitov. K. Horney about the Consequences of Neurotic Development and the Ways of Its Overcoming This article investigates the views of Karen Horney on psychoanalysis and neurotic development of personality in her last two books: “Our Inner Conflicts” (1945) and “Neurosis and Human Grows” (1950), and also in her two articles “On Feeling Abused” (1951) and “The Paucity of Inner Experiences” (1952), written in the last two years of her life and summarizing her views on clinical and theoretical problems in her work with neurotics. If in her first book “The Neurotic Personality of Our Time” (1937) neurosis was a result of disturbed interpersonal relations, caused by conditions of culture, then the concept of the idealized Self open the gates to the intrapsychic life. Keywords: Neo-Freudianism, psychoanalysis, neurotic development of personality, real Self, idealized image of Self DOI: 10.21146/2074-5869-2018-23-2-95-102 Publications and Translations Victoria G. Lysenko. Dignāga on the Definition of Perception in the Vādaviddhi of Vasubandhu. A Historical and Philosophical Reconstruction of Dignāga’s Pramāṇasamuccayavṛtti (1.13-16) The paper investigates a fragment from Dignāga’s magnum opus Pramāṇasamuccayavṛtti (“Body of tools for reliable knowledge with a commentary”, 1, 13-16) where Dignāga challenges Vasubandhu’s definition of perception in the Vādaviddhi (“Rules of the dispute”). The definition from the Vādaviddhi is being compared in the paper with Vasubandhu’s ideas of perception in Abhidharmakośabhāṣya (“Encyclopedia of Abhidharma with the commentary”), and with Dignāga’s own definition of valid perception in the first part of his Pramāṇasamuccayavṛtti as well as in his Ālambanaparīkśavṛtti (“Investigation of the Object with the commentary”). The author puts forward the hypothesis that Dignāga criticizes the definition of perception in Vādaviddhi for the reason that it does not correspond to the teachings of Vasubandhu in his Abhidharmakośabhāṣya, to which he, Dignāga, referred earlier in his magnum opus. This helps Dignāga to justify his statement that Vasubandhu himself considered Vādaviddhi as not containing the essence of his teaching (asāra). In addition, the article reconstructs the logical sequence in Dignāga’s exegesis: he criticizes the Vādaviddhi definition from the representational standpoint of Sautrāntika school, by showing that it does not fulfill the function prescribed by Indian logic to definition, that of distinguishing perception from the classes of heterogeneous and homogeneous phenomena. Having proved the impossibility of moving further according to the “realistic logic” based on recognizing the existence of an external object, Dignāga interprets the Vādaviddhi’s definition in terms of linguistic philosophy, according to which the language refers not to external objects and not to the unique and private sensory experience (svalakṣaṇa-qualia), but to the general characteristics (sāmānya-lakṣaṇa), which are mental constructs (kalpanā). Keywords: Buddhism, linguistic philosophy, perception, theory of definition, consciousness, Vaibhashika, Sautrantika, Yogacara, Vasubandhu, Dignaga DOI: 10.21146/2074-5869-2018-23-2-103-117 Elizaveta A. Miroshnichenko. Talks about Lev N. Tolstoy: Reception of the Writer's Views in the Public Thought of Russia at the End of the 19th Century (Dedicated to the 190th Anniversary of the Great Russian Writer and Thinker) This article includes previously unpublished letters of Russian social thinkers such as N.N. Strakhov, E.M. Feoktistov, D.N. Tsertelev. These letters provide critical assessment of Lev N. Tolstoy’s teachings. The preface to publication includes the history of reception of Tolstoy’s moral and aesthetic philosophy by his contemporaries, as well as influence of his theory on the beliefs of Russian idealist philosopher D.N. Tsertelev. The author offers a rational reconstruction of the dialogue between two generations of thinkers representative of the 19th century – Lev N. Tolstoy and N.N. Strakhov, on the one hand, and D.N. Tsertelev, on the other. The main thesis of the paper: the “old” and the “new” generations of the 19th-century thinkers retained mutual interest and continuity in setting the problems and objectives of philosophy, despite the numerous worldview contradictions. Keywords: Russian philosophy of the nineteenth century, L.N. Tolstoy, N.N. Strakhov, D.N. Tsertelev, epistolary heritage, ethics, aesthetics DOI: 10.21146/2074-5869-2018-23-2-118-130 Reviews Nataliya A. Tatarenko. History of Philosophy in a Format of Lecture Notes (on Hegel G.W.F. Vorlesungen zur Ästhetik. Vorlesungsmitschrift Adolf Heimann (1828/1829). Hrsg. von A.P. Olivier und A. Gethmann-Siefert. München: Wilhelm Fink, 2017. XXXI + 254 S.) Released last year, the book “G.W.F. Hegel. Vorlesungen zur Ästhetik. Vorlesungsmitschrift Adolf Heimann (1828/1829)” in German is a publication of one of the student's manuskript of Hegel's lectures on aesthetics. Adolf Heimann was a student of Hegel in 1828/29. These notes open for us imaginary doors into the audience of the Berlin University, where Hegel read his fourth and final course on the philosophy of art. A distinctive feature of this course is a new structure of lectures in comparison with three previous courses. This three-part division was took by H.G. Hotho as the basis for the edited by him text “Lectures on Aesthetics”, included in the first collection of Hegel’s works. The content of that publication was mainly based on the lectures of 1823 and 1826. There are a number of differences between the analyzed published manuskript and the students' records of 1820/21, 1823 and 1826, as well as between the manuskript and the editorial version of H.G. Hotho. These features show that Hegel throughout all four series of Berlin lectures on the philosophy of art actively developed and revised the structure and content of aesthetics. But unfortunately this evidence of the permanent development was not taken into account by the first editor of Hegel's lectures on aesthetics. Keywords: G.W.F. Hegel, H.G. Hotho, philosophy of art, aesthetics, forms of art, idea of beauty, ideal DOI: 10.21146/2074-5869-2018-23-2-131-138 Alexander S. Tsygankov. On the Way to the Revival of Metaphysics: S.L. Frank and E. Coreth Readers are invited to review the monograph of the modern German researcher Oksana Nazarova “The problem of the renaissance and new foundation of metaphysics through the example of Christian philosophical tradition. Russian religious philosophy (Simon L. Frank) and German neosholastics (Emerich Coreth)”, which was published in 2017 in Munich. In the paper, the author offers a comparative analysis of the projects of a new, “post-dogmatic” metaphysics, which were developed in the philosophy of Frank and Coreth. This study addresses the problems of the cognitive-theoretical and ontological foundation of the renaissance of metaphysics, the methodological tools of the new metaphysics, as well as its anthropological component. O. Nazarova's book is based on the comparative analysis of Frank's religious philosophy and Coreth's neo-cholastic philosophy from the beginning to the end. This makes the study unique in its own way. Since earlier in the German reception of the heritage of Russian thinker, the comparison of Frank's philosophy with the Catholic theology of the 20th century was realized only fragmentarily and did not act as a fundamental one. Along with a deep and meaningful analysis of the metaphysical projects of both thinkers, this makes O. Nazarova's book relevant to anyone who is interested in the philosophical dialogue of Russia and Western Europe and is engaged in the work of Frank and Coreth. Keywords: the renaissance of metaphysics, post-Kantian philosophy, Christian philosophy, S.L. Frank, E. Coreth DOI: 10.21146/2074-5869-2018-23-2-139-147." History of Philosophy 23, no. 2 (October 2018): 139–47. http://dx.doi.org/10.21146/2074-5869-2018-23-2-139-147.
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Balée, William. "THE FOUR-FIELD MODEL OF ANTHROPOLOGY IN THE UNITED STATES." Amazônica - Revista de Antropologia 1, no. 1 (April 6, 2016). http://dx.doi.org/10.18542/amazonica.v1i1.136.
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This paper assesses the historical and institutional origins of anthropology in the United States in order to understand the development of the four-field model, the persistence of which is considered distinctive of anthropology in the United States. An Atlantic Enlightenment saw the origins of anthropology in the United States. The four fields of anthropology can be traced to the Enlightenment. The four fields were brought together in the context of museums and learned societies in the 19th century United States. The focus of anthropology changed in the early 20th century with the placement of anthropology in the context of the university and the German concept of the defended dissertation as the principal gateway to professionalization (introduced by Boas). Four-field anthropology programs also existed in diverse countries, but did not persist except in the US beyond the early years of the 20th century. Anthropology in the US as a four-field discipline grew throughout the 1930s. After World War II, the discipline expanded greatly in the United States, partly due to the G.I. Bill as well as to increased demand for anthropology courses. Anthropology continued to grow in terms of numbers of institutions offering the PhD and numbers of new doctorates in the field into the 1970s, stabilizing around 400 per year. The usual rank order in number of doctorates per field per year continues to be the same in the early 2000s as it was thirty years ago: cultural anthropology, archaeology, physical anthropology, linguistic anthropology. The four field unity of the discipline came under critical scrutiny in the late 20th century, with the principal criticism being that the holism of the four fields appears to be a function of 19th century museum mentality, but the four fields regardless of cleavages have nevertheless remained together in the same departments in most universities. That trend appears to be continuing in general at the present time in the United States. Keywords: four fields of anthropology, history of anthropology, US university system.
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Rusnak, Iryna. "THE POETICS OF THE DRAMATIC MINIATURE “THE WAY FROM KRUTY” BY MYKOLA CHYRSKYI (VISNYKIVETS’ EXPERIENCE)." LITERARY PROCESS: methodology, names, trends, no. 20 (2022). http://dx.doi.org/10.28925/2412-2475.2022.20.8.
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The dramatic legacy of Mykola Chyrskyi is scarce and consists of several texts, among which the most famous are the plays “Otaman Pisnya” (1936), “Andriy Karabut” (1936) and “Drunken Raid” (1938). The author neglected publication of his other dramatic texts, thus after his death those texts were lost, which created lacuna in academic perception of the Ukrainian playwright. The paper tackles theatre studies articles and accidentally found dramatic miniature “The Way from Kruty” both authored by Chyrskyi. The purpose of the study is to consider the playwright's views on the theatre in the context of “Visnyk” literary movement (1920–1930), to analyse the poetics of Chyrskyi’s work, to identify the peculiarities of his dramatic style and individual poetics, in particular, expressionist elements and details in the text of the found dramatic miniature. Chirsky’s ideological and aesthetic priorities were formed in the cultural environment of the participants of “Visnyk” movement that had a tremendous impact on his dramas and his understanding of the tasks of modern theatre. The playwright insisted on the organic connection of modern theatre art with the creative achievements of the 19th century, encouraging theatres to actively implement the national ideal. To achieve this goal, Chyrskyi proposed a form of modern theatre that has been tested in practice. “Teatr Nastupu” (The Onslaught Theater) was designed to have an appropriate repertoire — a kind of genre mosaic of dramatic scenes with heroic themes, declamations, grotesque dramatisations, “film etudes”, dances, songs. The Onslaught Theater was supposed to meet the demands of the times with a “stage language”, to synthesise the achievements of various arts, to raise vital issues that worried the Ukrainian public. The writer advocated the polishing of stage skills, its constant improvement through a network of theater schools, courses, studying literature on the theory and practice of the theatrical piece. Not the last place was given to the study of achievements of foreign theatres, training of highly qualified personnel of the theatrical stage. Drama “The Way from Kruty” was published in 1944 in the newspaper “Ukrainskyi Visnyk” (Berlin). By genre, it is a dramatic miniature, the topic and content of which fully corresponded to the author's understanding of the purpose of theatrical art. Thematically, “The Way from Kruty” referred to one of the most tragic battles of the defense of the Ukrainian State against the Bolshevik horde — the battle near Kruty in January 1918. The idea of the play is the spiritual awakening of ordinary Ukrainians, replenishment of the ranks of fighters for a liberated Ukraine with people of various social strata. The search for techniques that would effectively appeal to the viewer's consciousness prompted Chyrskyi to use dramatic means indicative of early German expressionist plays. It is less about the philosophical basis of German expressionism but rather about the expressionistic elements of the poetics of German drama of the beginning of the 20th century. In the analysed paper, the main expressionist elements are an idealistic depiction of reality; replacing the proper names of the characters with generalised names; creation of an atmosphere close to a dream-delusion; the presence of a symbol, a mystical element and visual effects that gave the stage setting a sense of mystery; minimalist props with elements of whimsy, unfolding of the main action in the form of passionate dialogue, etc. The main task of the dramatic dialogue, which was based on a heroic episode of Ukrainian history of the 20th century and was successful on the Prague stage, was to elevate the spirit of the audience, to inspire them with specific heroics and to encourage them to further fight for the Ukrainian State.
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AKBABA, Yusuf. "THE FORGOTTEN PIONEER OF SIBERIAN STUDIES: GERHARD FRIEDRICH MÜLLER ABSTRACT." Genel Türk Tarihi Araştırmaları Dergisi, July 13, 2022. http://dx.doi.org/10.53718/gttad.1120541.
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Müller, a scientist of German origin, was born into a bourgeois, educator family. The joint studies of German-Russian scientists during the reign of Peter the Great, especially the fact that German scientists went to Russia, also influenced Müller. After Müller went to Russia as a graduate historian, he carried out almost all of his scientific studies there. He took important positions at the Petersburg Academy of Sciences, which he entered shortly after and served for many years. Also, the expeditions that started during the reign of Peter the Great enabled Müller to discover his main field of work. The Siberian studies of Daniel Gottlieb Messerschmidt (1685-1735) influenced Müller. Again in 1725, the First Kamchatka Expedition organized by Vitus Bering, who was commissioned by Peter I, to find the land and sea connections between Asia and America, also increased Müller's interest in Siberia. Thus, Müller applied for the Second Kamchatka Expedition in 1733 and was accepted. In this trip, he collected many materials and described the people of Siberia. After this trip, which lasted about ten years, he created the most important works in the field of Siberian history. The most important of these is Istorii Sibiri, which consists of four volumes. In this work, the war with Yermak, the construction of Siberian cities, including the construction of Siberia from ancient times to XVIII. Century has been told. He applied the research methods of the West in Russia and became one of the founders of modern Russian historiography.
After Müller's work, the first ethnographic museum and ethnography chair in Russia were established. Norman theory again caused great controversy in Russia after his conference. He also served in other duties besides historiography, He rose to the position of rector during the Yekaterina II reign. The life and scientific personality of Müller, the pioneer of Siberian studies, has been studied especially by German and Russian historians. Few monographs exist in the rest of Europe. In Turkey, however, a monograph has not been conducted yet. Müller influenced the methods of studies on Siberian Turks in Russia. Because Müller collected information about the material and spiritual lives of the Turkish and Finno-Ugric peoples and tried to explain their historical, geographical, cultural and religious characteristics. In addition, he investigated the factors affecting the socio-cultural, political and economic articulation of the Turkic peoples in Siberia with the Russian Empire. In this respect, it is important to know Müller's scientific personality and works in Turkey.
In this study, Müller's autobiography was used as the most crucial source of his scientific career. Apart from this, biographies written in the 20th century during the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics hold an essential place. However, in these biographies, Müller's bourgeois origins are emphasized and there is prejudice. Severe criticism of the Norman theory also influenced the formation of harsh expressions in the biographies. In this regard, it has to be carefully studied. Evaluations to the contrary are seen in the biographies written by German scientists. In these biographies, it is stated that Müller was the founder of the science of ethnography. It is also seen that Russian sources are not used enough. In this respect, biographies were carefully evaluated in the study. Unverifiable information is not included. Thus, it is aimed to reveal Müller's life, scientific activities and contributions.
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Olivier, Bert. "Kritiese ekologiese kuns en Hegel se raaiselagtige uitspraak dat kuns moet sterf Critical ecological art and Hegel's cryptic statement that art must die." Tydskrif vir Geesteswetenskappe 61, no. 3 (2021). http://dx.doi.org/10.17159/2224-7912/2021/v61n3a15.
Full textAbstract:
OPSOMMING Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), een van die belangrikste figure in die ontwikkeling van Duitse idealisme, se filosofie staan as "absolute idealisme" bekend, aangesien hy die idee, of gees (verstand) as die eintlike werklikheid beskou - in teenstelling met 'n materialistiese denker soos Karl Marx, wat materie (stof) as primêre werklikheid aanwys. Hegel was die eerste Westerse denker wat die geskiedenis ernstig opgeneem het; volgens hom is alles, spesifiek menslike kulturele aktiwiteite, onderworpe aan historiese ontwikkeling, en beskryf hy hierdie ontwikkeling op verskeie vlakke, insluitende dié wat hy "absolute gees" noem. Op hierdie vlak word wêreldgeskiedenis aan die hand van 'n "dialektiese" ontwikkeling vanaf "subjektiewe" gees (individuele menslike passies en bedoelinge) via "objektiewe" gees (staatstrukture en wette) tot "absolute gees" voorgestel. In hierdie artikel word daar aandag gegee aan wat volgens Hegel op laasgenoemde vlak gebeur, spesifiek met betrekking tot sy raaiselagtige stelling, dat die kuns as "hoogste uitdrukking" van die gees "moet sterf", om plek te maak vir religie en filosofie as manifestasies daarvan op meer gevorderde vlakke. 'n Mens kan tereg wonder wat Hegel daarmee bedoel het in die lig van die voortdurende beoefening van kuns tot vandag toe. Die antwoord is geleë in die frase, "hoogste uitdrukking", wat daarop dui dat hy aan kuns in historiese ontwikkelingsterme dink - met ander woorde, kuns is die draer van die absolute gees tot op 'n bepaalde tydstip, waarna dit plek moet maak vir ander sodanige uitdrukkingsvorme, te wete godsdiens en filosofie. Bowendien is kuns self ook onderworpe aan interne ontwikkeling; vir Hegel is die vroegste kuns simbolies van aard, (met Egiptiese kuns as voorbeeld), gevolg deur klassieke kuns (onder die antieke Grieke) en laastens romantiese kuns (in sy eie tyd). Die verskille tussen hierdie drie kunsvorms word bepaal deur die verhouding tussen idee en materie; in simboliese kuns domineer materie oor die idee in kunswerke, sodat die betekenis daarvan slegs vaagweg gepeil kan word (dink maar aan die Sfinks, as die "simbool van die simboliese"), terwyl daar 'n volmaakte balans tussen idee en materie bestaan in klassieke Griekse kuns, sodat geeneen van die twee dominant is nie (soos in die geval van beeldhouwerke wat die god Apollo voorstel). In romantiese kuns (byvoorbeeld die romantiese skilderkuns van Gericault) vind 'n mens die teenoorgestelde van simboliese kuns, met die idee wat dermate oor die materie heers dat dit byna daarin slaag om in denkbeeldige vorm daarvan los te breek. Hierdie is volgens Hegel die "hoogste" ontwikkelingspunt wat kuns as draer van die gees kan bereik, voordat dit plek maak vir religie as "beelddenke" en uiteindelik filosofie, waar die gees as idee suiwer, sonder enige stoflike oorblyfsel, tot uitdrukking kom. Hier voltooi die absolute gees die ontwikkelingstrajek daarvan, wat by die objektiewe vergestalting daarvan begin en via subjektiewe beliggaming uiteindelik in absolute "selfkennis" kulmineer. Vir die doeleindes van hierdie artikel is dit egter tematies betekenisvol dat Hegel ook melding maak van die voortbestaan van kuns ná die punt waar dit afstand doen van die titel van "hoogste" manifestasie van die gees of idee, naamlik in die gewaad van "kritiese", polemiese kuns, wat vry geword het van spesifieke wêreldbeskouings. 'n Mens kan in die moderne kunsbewegings van die vroeë 20ste eeu - insluitende kubisme, abstrakte ekspressionisme, konseptualisme en futurisme - die beliggaming van hierdie verwagting by Hegel bespeur, waar hierdie soort kuns telkens die ontologiese aanspraak maak dat dit die ware werklikheid blootlê. As besonder treffende tydgenootlike uitdrukking van sodanige (radikale) kritiese kuns word Andy Goldsworthy se ekologiese kuns ten slotte onder die loep geplaas. Trefwoorde: dood van kuns, kritiese kuns, ekologiese kuns, dialekties, Hegel, geskiedenis, kapitalisme, Goldsworthy ABSTRACT Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), one of the major figures in the history of philosophy, played a significant role in the development of German idealism from Immanuel Kant in the 18th century via figures such as Schelling and Fichte, with the movement culminating in Hegel's "absolute idealism". In ontological terms idealism means that "the idea" is regarded as the true reality, instead of material things. Karl Marx, who learned a lot from Hegel as far as his dialectical method goes, famously remarked that Hegel had turned the world on its head, and he, Marx (a materialist thinker), would put it back on its feet again. Hegel made a substantial contribution to the philosophy of art - his multi-volume work, Lectures on Aesthetics, is justly famous - but instead of discussing it here in general terms, I shall focus on Hegel's puzzling statement that art had reached the highest point of its development as bearer of "the idea" in his own time (the first half of the 19th century), and would have to make way for religion and philosophy as expressions of the idea, or spirit/mind. This is known as Hegel's thesis of "the death of art". One might wonder what this means, because anyone can see that, if he meant the end of art as a cultural practice, he was simply wrong, given the ubiquitous signs of ongoing artistic activities. This may be the case, but recall that Hegel saw art as having reached the highest point of its development as bearer of "the idea" at that time, suggesting that there would still be a role for art after this point. This is precisely what is the case. For Hegel, the idea, or spirit (mind) as ultimate reality, unfolds itself in the history of the world at various levels. At the niveau of social and political development, which Hegel writes about in his Philosophy of History, he understands history from the ancient Chinese, Indians and Persians, through the Greeks and Romans until his own time as the history of the increasing "consciousness of freedom", with every new era displaying a step forward, approximating the ideal of political freedom. In this, his most accessible work, as well as in his magnum opus, The Phenomenology of spirit/mind, Hegel displays what is probably his most lasting philosophical legacy - a keen awareness, more than any philosopher before him, of history, and the fact that everything human is subject to historical development, which he believed to have meaning and direction. Moreover, instead of a simple-minded, linear conception of history, he thinks of historical change dialectically - that is, developing from one state of affairs through its negation by its dialectical opposite, or antithesis, to another, higher state, which comprises a synthesis of the two preceding stages. This new stage is again negated by its opposite, and so on. Importantly, however, Hegel claims that, with every dialectical movement from one historical condition to another, the previous, negated stage is preserved, uplifted, and cancelled simultaneously (a tripartite process called sublation in English, and Aufhebung in German). This means that every earlier stage of development is still present in every later stage, but in a transformed fashion. Hegel also calls this "the negation of the negation" - incorporating something of the other into oneself. To reach the level of what he calls absolute spirit, it develops through subjective spirit (sense perception, consciousness, self-consciousness) and objective spirit (the family, the state, law) to the point where it manifests itself in art, followed by religion, and eventually the highest level, namely, philosophy, where absolute spirit or mind "knows itself" in clear conceptual terms. In the development of art he distinguishes three stages, namely symbolic art, classical art and the art of his own time, namely romantic art. Certain kinds of art correspond to these stages, with architecture being the exemplary symbolic art, sculpture the epitome of classical art, and painting, music and dramatic poetry the clearest expressions of romantic art. Moreover, in every stage, and kind of art there is a typical relationship between the idea and the material within which it is enveloped (for that is what art is, for Hegel: the sensuous, or material, embodiment of the idea). In the case of symbolic art the idea does not appear clearly, but is only dimly suggested because the sensuous envelope predominates over it. The art of the ancient Egyptians serves as an example of symbolic art, with the Sphinx as "the symbol of the symbolic". Classical art is exemplified by ancient Greek sculpture, which is in a sense the "highest" that art is capable of as far as the relationship between idea and matter goes: in the sculptures depicting the Greek gods, such as Apollo, we see the perfect equilibrium, Hegel claims, between idea and matter, with neither dominating the other. However, when romantic art replaces classical art we find a preponderance that is the opposite of that found in symbolic art, insofar as the idea becomes too strong for the material to contain, so that it threatens to break its material bonds. Hegel sees this happening in the painting, music and poetry or drama of his time. Think of romantic paintings such as those of Eugene Delacroix or Theodore Gericault, for example, the latter's painting of The Raft of the Medusa, which commemorates the sinking of a ship by that name and shows survivors on a raft, in various stages of exhaustion and desperation. It is as if the painting is striving to surpass itself as artistic medium in an attempt to express the suffering of these people. The same is true of some of the music of Hegel's time. He would probably have been familiar with Beethoven's opera, Fidelio - with its valorisation of love, courage, sacrifice and freedom - although he does not refer to it. But it is particularly poetry and drama, where the poetic expressions of joy and suffering come close to philosophy (except that here they are instances of imaginative, instead of conceptual articulations), that testify to romantic art signalling the finale of art's capacity to embody the idea. Art passes the baton to religion, which Hegel thinks of as "pictorial thinking", and which expresses the subjectivity of humans and of God better than art could. Eventually religion has to make way for philosophy, though, because it is there that spirit or mind knows itself self-reflectively and clearly. As far as art is concerned there is an important corollary, however. Hegel writes about a "free art" that continues to exist after art has relinquished its "highest vocation", and attributes to this art a critical, polemical function, given that the artist has become free from the constraints of a specific worldview. In this respect Hegel seems to have been prescient; even in his own time he noticed that people had become less interested in merely looking at art, for instance, and more interested in what art meant - hence Hegel's anticipation of a "science of art". Beyond Hegel's lifetime art developed in a manner that bears out his expectations. Particularly in the early 20th century one notices a plethora of new art movements - abstract expressionism, cubism, fauvism, conceptualism, suprematism, futurism, metaphysical art - all of which bear overtly theoretical names, claiming to reflect the true nature of reality. In contemporary ecological art, such as that of Andy Goldsworthy, one may perceive a particularly powerful instance of the "critical" role of art that Hegel anticipated. It is here discussed to demonstrate what is meant by claiming that it embodies a "radically critical" art in the face of the ecological crisis facing humanity. Keywords: death of art, critical art, ecological art, dialectical, Hegel, history, capitalism, Goldsworthy
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Carroll, Richard. "The Trouble with History and Fiction." M/C Journal 14, no. 3 (May 20, 2011). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.372.
Full textAbstract:
Historical fiction, a widely-read genre, continues to engender contradiction and controversy within the fields of literature and historiography. This paper begins with a discussion of the differences and similarities between historical writing and the historical novel, focusing on the way these forms interpret and represent the past. It then examines the dilemma facing historians as they try to come to terms with the modern era and the growing competition from other modes of presenting history. Finally, it considers claims by Australian historians that so-called “fictive history” has been bestowed with historical authority to the detriment of traditional historiography. The Fact/Fiction Dichotomy Hayden White, a leading critic in the field of historiography, claims that the surge in popularity of historical fiction and the novel form in the nineteenth century caused historians to seek recognition of their field as a serious “science” (149). Historians believed that, to be scientific, historical studies had to cut ties with any form of artistic writing or imaginative literature, especially the romantic novel. German historian Leopold von Ranke “anathematized” the historical novel virtually from its first appearance in Scott’s Waverley in 1814. Hayden White argues that Ranke and others after him wrote history as narrative while eschewing the use of imagination and invention that were “exiled into the domain of ‘fiction’ ” (149-150). Early critics in the nineteenth century questioned the value of historical fiction. Famous Cuban poet Jose Maria Heredia believed that history was opposite and superior to fiction; he accused the historical novel of degrading history to the level of fiction which, he argued, is lies (cited in de Piérola 152). Alessandro Manzoni, though partially agreeing with Heredia, argued that fiction had value in its “poetic truth” as opposed to the “positive truth” of history (153). He eventually decided that the historical novel fails through the mixing of the incompatible elements of history and fiction, which can lead to deception (ibid). More than a hundred years after Heredia, Georg Lukács, in his much-cited The Historical Novel, first published in 1937, was more concerned with the social aspect of the historical novel and its capacity to portray the lives of its protagonists. This form of writing, through its attention to the detail of minor events, was better at highlighting the social aspects than the greater moments of history. Lukács argues that the historical novel should focus on the “poetic awakening” of those who participated in great historical events rather than the events themselves (42). The reader should be able to experience first-hand “the social and human motives which led men to think, feel and act just as they did in historical reality” (ibid). Through historical fiction, the reader is thus able to gain a greater understanding of a specific period and why people acted as they did. In contrast to these early critics, historian and author of three books on history and three novels, Richard Slotkin, argues that the historical novel can recount the past as accurately as history, because it should involve similar research methods and critical interpretation of the data (225). Kent den Heyer and Alexandra Fidyk go even further, suggesting that “historical fiction may offer a more plausible representation of the past than those sources typically accepted as more factual” (144). In its search for “poetic truth,” the novel tries to create a sense of what the past was, without necessarily adhering to all the factual details and by eliminating facts not essential to the story (Slotkin 225). For Hayden White, the difference between factual and fictional discourse, is that one is occupied by what is “true” and the other by what is “real” (147). Historical documents may provide a basis for a “true account of the world” in a certain time and place, but they are limited in their capacity to act as a foundation for the exploration of all aspects of “reality.” In White’s words: The rest of the real, after we have said what we can assert to be true about it, would not be everything and anything we could imagine about it. The real would consist of everything that can be truthfully said about its actuality plus everything that can be truthfully said about what it could possibly be. (ibid) White’s main point is that both history and fiction are interpretative by nature. Historians, for their part, interpret given evidence from a subjective viewpoint; this means that it cannot be unbiased. In the words of Beverley Southgate, “factual history is revealed as subjectively chosen, subjectively interpreted, subjectively constructed and incorporated within a narrative” (45). Both fiction and history are narratives, and “anyone who writes a narrative is fictionalising,” according to Keith Jenkins (cited in Southgate 32). The novelist and historian find meaning through their own interpretation of the known record (Brown) to produce stories that are entertaining and structured. Moreover, historians often reach conflicting conclusions in their translations of the same archival documents, which, in the extreme, can spark a wider dispute such as the so-called history wars, the debate about the representation of the Indigenous peoples in Australian history that has polarised both historians and politicians. The historian’s purpose differs from that of the novelist. Historians examine the historical record in fine detail in an attempt to understand its complexities, and then use digressions and footnotes to explain and lend authority to their findings. The novelist on the other hand, uses their imagination to create personalities and plot and can leave out important details; the novelist achieves authenticity through detailed description of setting, customs, culture, buildings and so on (Brown). Nevertheless, the main task of both history and historical fiction is to represent the past to a reader in the present; this “shared concern with the construction of meaning through narrative” is a major component in the long-lasting, close relationship between fiction and history (Southgate 19). However, unlike history, the historical novel mixes fiction and fact, and is therefore “a hybrid of two genres” (de Piérola 152); this mixture of supposed opposites of fact and fiction creates a dilemma for the theorist, because historical fiction cannot necessarily be read as belonging to either category. Attitudes towards the line drawn between fiction and history are changing as more and more critics and theorists explore the area where the two genres intersect. Historian John Demos argues that with the passing of time, this distinction “seems less a boundary than a borderland of surprising width and variegated topography” (329). While some historians are now willing to investigate the wide area where the two genres overlap, this approach remains a concern for traditionalists. History’s Dilemma Historians face a crisis as they try to come to terms with the postmodern era which has seen unprecedented questioning of the validity of history’s claim to accuracy in recounting the past. In the words of Jenkins et al., “ ‘history’ per se wobbles” as it experiences a period of uncertainty and challenge; the field is “much changed and deeply contested,” as historians seek to understand the meaning of history itself (6). But is postmodernism the cause of the problem? Writing in 1986 Linda Hutcheon, well known for her work on postmodernism, attempted to clarify the term as it is applied in modern times in reference to fiction, where, she states, it is usually taken to mean “metafiction, or texts which are in some dominant and constitutive way self-referential and auto-representational” (301). To eliminate any confusion with regard to concept or terminology, Hutcheon coined the phrase “historiographic metafiction," which includes “the presence of the past” in “historical, social, and ideological” form (302). As examples, she cites contemporary novels The French Lieutenant’s Woman, The White Hotel, Midnight’s Children and Famous Last Words. Hutcheon explains that all these works “self-consciously focus on the processes of producing and receiving paradoxically fictive historical writing” (ibid). In the Australian context, Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang and Richard Flanagan’s Gould’s Book of Fish could be added to the list. Like the others, they question how historical sources maintain their status as authentic historical documents in the context of a fictional work (302). However, White argues that the crisis in historical studies is not due to postmodernism but has materialised because historians have failed to live up to their nineteenth century expectations of history being recognised as a science (149). Postmodernists are not against history, White avows; what they do not accept “is a professional historiography” that serves self-seeking governing bodies with its outdated and severely limited approach to objectivity (152). This kind of historiography has denied itself access to aesthetic writing and the imaginary, while it has also cut any links it had “to what was most creative in the real sciences it sought half-heartedly to emulate” (ibid). Furthering White’s argument, historian Robert Rosenstone states that past certitude in the claims of historians to be the sole guardians of historical truth now seem outdated in the light of our accumulated knowledge. The once impregnable position of the historian is no longer tenable because: We know too much about framing images and stories, too much about narrative, too much about the problematics of causality, too much about the subjectivity of perception, too much about our own cultural imperatives and biases, too much about the disjuncture between language and the world it purports to describe to believe we can actually capture the world of the past on the page. (Rosenstone 12) While the archive confers credibility on history, it does not confer the right to historians to claim it as the truth (Southgate 6); there are many possible versions of the past, which can be presented to us in any number of ways as history (Jenkins et al. 1). And this is a major challenge for historians as other modes of representing the past cater to public demand in place of traditional approaches. Public interest in history has grown over the last 20 years (Harlan 109). Historical novels fill the shelves of bookstores and libraries, while films, television series and documentaries about the past attract large audiences. In the words of Rosenstone, “people are hungry for the past, as various studies tell us and the responses to certain films, TV series and museums indicate” (17). Rosenstone laments the fact that historians, despite this attraction to the past, have failed to stir public interest in their own writings. While works of history have their strengths, they target a specific, extremely limited audience in an outdated format (17). They have forgotten the fact that, in the words of White, “the conjuring up of the past requires art as well as information” (149). This may be true of some historians, but there are many writers of non-fiction, including historians, who use the narrative voice and other fictional techniques in their writings (Ricketson). Matthew Ricketson accuses White of confusing “fiction with literariness,” while other scholars take fiction and narrative to be the same thing. He argues that “the use of a wide range of modes of writing usually associated with fiction are not the sole province of fiction” and that narrative theorists have concentrated their attention on fictional narrative, thereby excluding factual forms of writing (ibid). One of the defining elements of creative non-fiction is its use of literary techniques in writing about factual events and people. At the same time, this does not make it fiction, which by definition, relies on invention (ibid). However, those historians who do write outside the limits of traditional history can attract criticism. Historian Richard Current argues that if writers of history and biography try to be more effective through literary considerations, they sometimes lose their objectivity and authenticity. While it is acceptable to seek to write with clarity and force, it is out of the question to present “occasional scenes in lifelike detail” in the manner of a novelist. Current contends that if only one source is used, this violates “the historiographical requirement of two or more independent and competent witnesses.” This requirement is important because it explains why much of the writing by academic historians is perceived as “dry-as-dust” (Current 87). Modern-day historians are contesting this viewpoint as they analyse the nature and role of their writings, with some turning to historical fiction as an alternative mode of expression. Perhaps one of the more well-known cases in recent times was that of historian Simon Schama, who, in writing Dead Certainties (Unwarranted Speculations), was criticised for creating dramatic scenes based on dubious historical sources without informing the reader of his fabrications (Nelson). In this work, Schama questions notions of factual history and the limitations of historians. The title is suggestive in itself, while the afterword to the book is explicit, as “historians are left forever chasing shadows, painfully aware of their inability ever to reconstruct a dead world in its completeness however thorough or revealing their documentation . . . We are doomed to be forever hailing someone who has just gone around the corner and out of earshot” (320). Another example is Rosenstone’s Mirror in the Shrine, which was considered to be “postmodern” and not acceptable to publishers and agents as the correct way to present history, despite the author’s reassurance that nothing was invented, “it just tells the story a different way” ("Space for the Birds to Fly" 16). Schama is not the only author to draw fire from critics for neglecting to inform the reader of the veracity or not of their writing. Richard Current accused Gore Vidal of getting his facts wrong and of inaccurately portraying Lincoln in his work, Lincoln: A Novel (81). Despite the title, which is a form of disclaimer itself, Current argued that Vidal could have avoided criticism if he had not asserted that his work was authentic history, or had used a disclaimer in a preface to deny any connection between the novel’s characters and known persons (82). Current is concerned about this form of writing, known as “fictional history," which, unlike historical fiction, “pretends to deal with real persons and events but actually reshapes them—and thus rewrites the past” (77). This concern is shared by historians in Australia. Fictive History Historian Mark McKenna, in his essay, Writing the Past, argues that “fictive history” has become a new trend in Australia; he is unhappy with the historical authority bestowed on this form of writing and would like to see history restored to its rightful place. He argues that with the decline of academic history, novelists have taken over the historian’s role and fiction has become history (3). In sympathy with McKenna, author, historian and anthropologist Inga Clendinnen claims that “novelists have been doing their best to bump historians off the track” (16). McKenna accuses writers W.G. Sebald and David Malouf of supporting “the core myth of historical fiction: the belief that being there is what makes historical understanding possible.” Malouf argues, in a conversation with Helen Daniel in 1996, that: Our only way of grasping our history—and by history I really mean what has happened to us, and what determines what we are now and where we are now—the only way of really coming to terms with that is by people's entering into it in their imagination, not by the world of facts, but by being there. And the only thing really which puts you there in that kind of way is fiction. Poetry may do so, drama may do so, but it's mostly going to be fiction. It's when you have actually been there and become a character again in that world. (3) From this point of view, the historical novel plays an important role in our culture because it allows people to interact with the past in a meaningful way, something factual writing struggles to do. McKenna recognises that history is present in fiction and that history can contain fiction, but they should not be confused. Writers and critics have a responsibility towards their readers and must be clear that fiction is not history and should not be presented as such (10). He takes writer Kate Grenville to task for not respecting this difference. McKenna argues that Grenville has asserted in public that her historical novel The Secret River is history: “If ever there was a case of a novelist wanting her work to be taken seriously as history, it is Grenville” (5). The Secret River tells the story of early settlement along the Hawkesbury River in New South Wales. Grenville’s inspiration for the story emanated from her ancestor Solomon Wiseman’s life. The main protagonist, William Thornhill (loosely based on Wiseman), is convicted of theft in 1806 and transported to Australia. The novel depicts the poverty and despair in England at the time, and describes life in the new colony where Grenville explores the collision between the colonists and the Aborigines. McKenna knows that Grenville insists elsewhere that her book is not history, but he argues that this conflicts with what she said in interviews and he worries that “with such comments, it is little wonder that many people might begin to read fiction as history” (5). In an article on her website, Grenville refutes McKenna’s arguments, and those of Clendinnen: “Here it is in plain words: I don’t think The Secret River is history…Nor did I ever say that I thought my novel was history.” Furthermore, the acknowledgements in the back of the book state clearly that it is a work of fiction. She accuses the two above-mentioned historians of using quotes that “have been narrowly selected, taken out of context, and truncated” ("History and Fiction"). McKenna then goes on to say how shocked he was on hearing Grenville, in an interview with Ramona Koval on Radio National, make her now infamous comments about standing on a stepladder looking down at the history wars, and that he “felt like ringing the ABC and leaping to the defence of historians.” He accuses Grenville of elevating fiction above history as an “interpretive power” (6). Koval asked Grenville where her book stood in regard to the history wars; she answered: Mine would be up on a ladder, looking down at the history wars. . . I think the historians, and rightly so, have battled away about the details of exactly when and where and how many and how much, and they’ve got themselves into these polarised positions, and that’s fine, I think that’s what historians ought to be doing; constantly questioning the evidence and perhaps even each other. But a novelist can stand up on a stepladder and look down at this, outside the fray, [emphasis in original audio] and say there is another way to understand it. ("Interview") Grenville claims that she did not use the stepladder image to imply that her work was superior to history, but rather to convey a sense of being outside the battle raging between historians as an uninvolved observer, “an interested onlooker who made the mistake of climbing a stepladder rather than a couple of fruit-boxes to get a good view.” She goes on to argue that McKenna’s only sources in his essay, Writing the Past, are interviews and newspaper articles, which in themselves are fine, but she disagrees with how they have been used “uncritically, at face value, as authoritative evidence” ("History and Fiction"), much in contrast to the historian’s desire for authenticity in all sources. It appears that the troubles between history and fiction will continue for some time yet as traditional historians are bent on keeping faith with the tenets of their nineteenth century predecessors by defending history from the insurgence of fiction at all costs. While history and historical fiction share a common purpose in presenting the past, the novel deals with what is “real” and can tell the past as accurately or even in a more plausible way than history, which deals with what is “true”. However, the “dry-as-dust” historical approach to writing, and postmodernism’s questioning of historiography’s role in presenting the past, has contributed to a reassessment of the nature of history. Many historians recognise the need for change in the way they present their work, but as they have often doubted the worth of historical fiction, they are wary of the genre and the narrative techniques it employs. Those historians who do make an attempt to write differently have often been criticised by traditionalists. In Australia, historians such as McKenna and Clendinnen are worried by the incursion of historical fiction into their territory and are highly critical of novelists who claim their works are history. The overall picture that emerges is of two fields that are still struggling to clarify a number of core issues concerning the nature of both the historical novel and historiographical writing, and the role they play in portraying the past. References Brown, Joanne. "Historical Fiction or Fictionalized History? Problems for Writers of Historical Novels for Young Adults." ALAN Review 26.1 (1998). 1 March 2010 ‹http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/ALAN/fall98/brown.html›. Carey, Peter. True History of the Kelly Gang. St Lucia, Qld: U of Queensland P, 2000. Clendinnen, Inga. "The History Question: Who Owns the Past?" Quarterly Essay 23 (2006): 1-72. Current, Richard. "Fiction as History: A Review Essay." Journal of Southern History 52.1 (1986): 77-90. De Piérola, José. "At the Edge of History: Notes for a Theory for the Historical Novel in Latin America." Romance Studies 26.2 (2008): 151-62. Demos, John. "Afterword: Notes from, and About, the History/Fiction Borderland." Rethinking History 9.2/3 (2005): 329-35. Den Heyer, Kent, and Alexandra Fidyk. "Configuring Historical Facts through Historical Fiction: Agency, Art-in-Fact, and Imagination as Stepping Stones between Then and Now." Educational Theory 57.2 (2007): 141-57. Flanagan, Richard. Gould’s Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish. Sydney: Picador, 2002. Grenville, Kate. “History and Fiction.” 2007. 19 July 2010 ‹http://kategrenville.com/The_Secret_River_History%20and%20Fiction›. ———. “Interview with Ramona Koval.” 17 July 2005. 26 July 2010 ‹http://www.abc.net.au/rn/arts/bwriting/stories/s1414510.htm›. ———. The Secret River. Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2006. Harlan, David. “Historical Fiction and the Future of Academic History.” Manifestos for History. Ed. Keith Jenkins, Sue Morgan and Alun Munslow. Abingdon, Oxon; N.Y.: Routledge, 2007. Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory Fiction. New York: Routledge, 1988. Jenkins, Keith, Sue Morgan, and Alun Munslow. Manifestos for History. Abingdon, Oxon; N.Y.: Routledge, 2007. Lukács, György. The Historical Novel. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983. Malouf, David. "Interview with Helen Daniel." Australian Humanities Review (Sep. 1996). McKenna, Mark. “Writing the Past: History, Literature & the Public Sphere in Australia.” Australian Financial Review (2005). 13 May 2010 ‹http://www.afraccess.com.ezp01.library.qut.edu.au/search›. Nelson, Camilla. “Faking It: History and Creative Writing.” TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses 11.2 (2007). 5 June 2010 ‹http://www.textjournal.com.au›. Ricketson, Matthew. “Not Muddying, Clarifying: Towards Understanding the Boundaries between Fiction and Nonfiction.” TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses 14.2 (2010). 6 June 2011 ‹http://www.textjournal.com.au/oct10/ricketson.htm›. Rosenstone, Robert A. “Space for the Bird to Fly.” Manifestos for History. Eds. Keith Jenkins, Sue Morgan and Alun Munslow. Abingdon, Oxon; N.Y.: Routledge, 2007. 11-18. ———. Mirror in the Shrine: American Encounters with Meiji Japan. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1988. Schama, Simon. Dead Certainties: (Unwarranted Speculations). 1st Vintage Books ed. New York: Vintage Books, 1992. Slotkin, Richard. “Fiction for the Purposes of History.” Rethinking History 9.2/3 (2005): 221-36. Southgate, Beverley C. History Meets Fiction. New York: Longman, Harlow, England, 2009. White, Hayden. “Introduction: Historical Fiction, Fictional History, and Historical Reality.” Rethinking History 9.2/3 (2005): 147-57.
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Goggin, Joyce. "Transmedia Storyworlds, Literary Theory, Games." M/C Journal 21, no. 1 (March 14, 2018). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1373.
Full textAbstract:
IntroductionThis essay will focus on some of the connections between digitally transmitted stories, games, narrative processes, and the discipline whose ostensible job is the study of storytelling, namely literature. My observations will be limited to the specific case of computer games, storytelling, and what is often unproblematically referred to as “literature,” in order to focus attention on historical and contemporary features of the development of the relationship between the two that remain largely unexamined. Therefore, one goal of this essay is to re-think this relationship from a fresh perspective, whose “freshness” derives from reopening the past and re-examining what is overlooked when games scholars talk about “narrative” and “literature” as though they were interchangeable.Further, I will discuss the dissemination of narrative on/through various platforms before mass-media, such as textually transmitted stories that anticipate digitally disseminated narrative. This will include specific examples as well as a more general a re-examination of claims made on the topic of literature, narrative and computer games, via a brief review of disciplinary insights from the study of digital games and narrative. The following is therefore intended as a view of games and (literary) narrative in pre-digital forms as an attempt to build bridges between media studies and other disciplines by calling for a longer, developmental history of games, narrative and/or literature that considers them together rather than as separate territories.The Stakes of the Game My reasons for re-examining games and narrative scholarship include my desire to discuss a number of somewhat less-than-accurate or misleading notions about narrative and literature that have been folded into computer game studies, where these notions go unchallenged. I also want to point out a body of work on literature, mimesis and play that has been overlooked in game studies, and that would be helpful in thinking about stories and some of the (digital) platforms through which they are disseminated.To begin by responding to the tacit question of why it is worth asking what literary studies have to do with videogames, my answer resides in the link between play, games and storytelling forged by Aristotle in the Poetics. As a function of imitative play or “mimesis,” he claims, art forms mimic phenomena found in nature such as the singing of birds. So, by virtue of the playful mimetic function ascribed to the arts or “poesis,” games and storytelling are kindred forms of play. Moreover, the pretend function common to art forms such as realist fictional narratives that are read “as if” the story were true, and games played “as if” their premises were real, unfold in playfully imitative ways that produce possible worlds presented through different media.In the intervening centuries, numerous scholars discussed mimesis and play from Kant and Schiller in the 18th century, to Huizinga, and to many scholars who wrote on literature, mimesis and play later in the 20th century, such as Gadamer, Bell, Spariousu, Hutchinson, and Morrow. More recently, games scholar Janet Murray wrote that computer games are “a kind of abstract storytelling that resembles the world of common experience but compresses it in order to heighten interest,” hence even Tetris acts as a dramatic “enactment of the overtasked lives of Americans in the 1990’s” allowing them to “symbolically experience agency,” and “enact control over things outside our power” (142, 143). Similarly, Ryan has argued that videogames offer micro stories that are mostly about the pleasure of discovering nooks and crannies of on-line, digital possible worlds (10).At the same time, a tendency developed in games studies in the 1990s to eschew any connection with narrative, literature and earlier scholarship on mimesis. One example is Markku Eskelinen’s article in Game Studies wherein he argued that “[o]utside academic theory people are usually excellent at making distinctions between narrative, drama and games. If I throw a ball at you I don’t expect you to drop it and wait until it starts telling stories.” Eskelinen then explains that “when games and especially computer games are studied and theorized they are almost without exception colonized from the fields of literary, theatre, drama and film studies.” As Eskelinen’s argument attests, his concern is disciplinary territorialisation rather than stories and their transmedial dissemination, whereas I prefer to take an historical approach to games and storytelling, to which I now direct my attention.Stepping Back Both mimesis and interactivity are central to how stories are told and travel across media. In light thereof, I recall the story of Zeuxis who, in the 5th century BC, introduced a realistic method of painting. As the story goes, Zeuxis painted a boy holding a bunch of grapes so realistically that it attracted birds who tried to enter the world of the painting, whereupon the artist remarked that, were the boy rendered as realistically as the grapes, he would have scared the birds away. Centuries later in the 1550s, the camera obscura and mirrors were used to project scenery as actors moved in and out of it as an early form of multimedia storytelling entertainment (Smith 22). In the late 17th century, van Mieris painted The Raree Show, representing an interactive travelling storyboard and story master who invited audience participation, hence the girl pictured here, leaning forward to interact with the story.Figure 1: The Raree Show (van Mieris)Numerous interactive narrative toys were produced in the 18th and 19th, such as these storytelling playing cards sold as a leaf in The Great Mirror of Folly (1720). Along with the plays, poems and cartoons also contained in this volume dedicated to the South Sea Bubble crisis of 1720, the cards serve as a storyboard with plot lines that follow suits, so that hearts picks up one narrative thread, and clubs, spades and diamonds another. Hence while the cards could be removed for gaming they could also be read as a story in a medium that, to borrow games scholar Espen Aarseth’s terminology, requires non-trivial physical or “ergodic effort” on the part of readers and players.Figure 2: playing cards from The Great Mirror of Folly (1720) In the 20th century examples of interactive and ergodic codex fiction abound, including Hesse’s Das Glasperlenspiel [Glass Bead Game] (1943, 1949), Nabokov’s Pale Fire (1962), Saporta’s Composition No. 1 (1962), and Winterson’s PowerBook (2001) that conceptually and/or physically mimic and anticipate hypertext. More recently, Chloé Delaume’s Corpus Simsi (2003) explicitly attempts to remediate a MMORPG as the title suggests, just as there are videogames that attempt, in various ways, to remediate novels. I have presented these examples to argue for a long-continuum view of storytelling and games, as a series of attempts to produce stories—from Zeuxis grapes to PowerBook and beyond—that can be entered and interacted with, at least metaphorically or cognitively. Over time, various game-like or playful interfaces from text to computer have invited us into storyworlds while partially impeding or opening the door to interaction and texturing our experience of the story in medium-specific ways.The desire to make stories interactive has developed across media, from image to text and various combinations thereof, as a means of externalizing an author’s imagination to be activated by opening and reading a novel, or by playing a game wherein the story is mediated through a screen while players interact to change the course of the story. While I am arguing that storytelling has for centuries striven to interpolate spectators or readers by various means and though numerous media that would eventually make storytelling thoroughly and not only metaphorically interactive, I want now to return briefly to the question of literature.Narrative vs LiteratureThe term “literature” is frequently assumed to be unambiguous when it enters discussions of transmedia storytelling and videogames. What literature “is” was, however, hotly debated in the 1980s-90s with many scholars concluding that literature is a construct invented by “old dead white men,” resulting in much criticism on the topic of canon formation. Yet, without rehearsing the arguments produced in previous decades on the topic of literariness, I want to provide a few examples of what happens when games scholars and practitioners assume they know what literature is and then absorb or eschew it in their own transmedia storytelling endeavours.The 1990s saw the emergence of game studies as a young discipline, eager to burst out of the crucible of English Departments that were, as Eskelinen pointed out, the earliest testing grounds for the legitimized study of games. Thus ensued the “ludology vs narratology” debate wherein “ludologists,” keen to move away from literary studies, insisted that games be studied as games only, and participated in what Gonzalo Frasca famously called the “debate that never happened.” Yet as short-lived as the debate may have been, a negative and limited view of literature still inheres in games studies along with an abiding lack of awareness of the shared origins of stories, games, and thinking about both that I have attempted to sketch out thus far.Exemplary of arguments on the side of “ludology,” was storytelling game designer Chris Crawford’s keynote at Mediaterra 2007, in which he explained that literariness is measured by degrees of fun. Hence, whereas literature is highly formulaic and structured, storytelling is unconstrained and fun because storytellers have no rigid blueprint and can change direction at any moment. Yet, Crawford went on to explain how his storytelling machine works by drawing together individual syntactic elements, oddly echoing the Russian formalists’ description of literature, and particularly models that locate literary production at the intersection of the axis of selection, containing linguistic elements such as verbs, nouns, adjectives and so on, and the axis of combination governed by rules of genre.I foreground Crawford’s ludological argument because it highlights some of the issues that arise when one doesn’t care to know much about the study of literature. Crawford understands literature as rule-based, rigid and non-fun, and then trots out his own storytelling-model based or rigid syntactical building blocks and rule-based laws of combination, without the understanding the irony. This returns me to ludologist Eskelinen who also argued that “stories are just uninteresting ornaments or gift-wrappings to games”. In either case, the matter of “story” is stretched over the rigid syntax of language, and the literary structuralist enterprise has consisted precisely in peeling back that narrative skin or “gift wrap” to reveal the bones of human cognitive thought processes, as for example, when we read rhetorical figures such as metaphor and metonymy. In the words of William Carlos Williams, poetry is a machine made out of words, from whose nuts and bolts meaning emerges when activated, similar to programing language in a videogame whose story is eminent and comes into being as we play.Finally, the question of genre hangs in the background given that “literature” itself is potentially transmedia because its content can take many forms and be transmitted across diverse platforms. Importantly in this regard the novel, which is the form most games scholars have in mind when drawing or rejecting connections between games and literature, is itself a shape-shifting, difficult-to-define genre whose form, as the term novel implies, is subject to the constant imperative to innovate across media as it has done over time.Different Approaches While I just highlighted inadequacies in some of the scholarship on games and narrative (or “literature” when narrative is defined as such) there is work on interactive storytelling and the transmedia dissemination of stories explicitly as games that deals with some of these issues. In their article on virtual bodies in Dante’s Inferno (2010), Welsh and Sebastian explain that the game is a “reboot of a Trecento poem,” and discuss what must have been Dante’s own struggle in the 14th century to “materialize sin through metaphors of suffering,” while contending “with the abstractness of the subject matter [as well as] the representational shortcomings of language itself,” concluding that Dante’s “corporeal allegories must become interactive objects constructed of light and math that feel to the user like they have heft and volume” (166). This notion of “corporeal allegories” accords with my own model of a “body hermeneutic” that could help to understand the reception of stories transmitted in non-codex media: a poetics of reading that includes how game narratives “engage the body hapitically” (Goggin 219).Likewise, Kathi Berens’s work on “Novel Games: Playable Books on iPad” is exemplary of what literary theory and game texts can do for each other, that is, through the ways in which games can remediate, imitate or simply embody the kind of meditative depth that we encounter in the expansive literary narratives of the 19th century. In her reading of Living Will, Berens argues that the best way to gauge meaning is not in the potentialities of its text, but rather “in the human performance of reading and gaming in new thresholds of egodicity,” and offers a close reading that uncovers the story hidden in the JavaScript code, and which potentially changes the meaning of the game. Here again, the argument runs parallel to my own call for readings that take into account the visceral experience of games, and which demands a configurative/interpretative approach to the unfolding of narrative and its impact on our being as a whole. Such an approach would destabilize the old mind/body split and account for various modes of sensation as part of the story itself. This is where literary theory, storytelling, and games may be seen as coming together in novels like Delaume’s Corpus Simsi and a host of others that in some way remediate video games. Such analyses would include features of the platform/text—shape, topography, ergodicity—and how the story is disseminated through the printed text, the authors’ websites, blogs and so on.It is likewise important to examine what literary criticism that has dealt with games and storytelling in the past can do for games. For example, if one agrees with Wittgenstein that language is inherently game-like or ludic and that, by virtue of literature’s long association with mimesis, its “as if” function, and its “autotelic” or supposedly non-expository nature, then most fiction is itself a form of game. Andrew Ferguson’s work on Finnegan’s Wake (1939) takes these considerations into account while moving games and literary studies into the digital age. Ferguson argues that Finnegan’s Wake prefigures much of what computers make possible such as glitching, which “foregrounds the gaps in the code that produces the video-game environment.” This he argues, is an operation that Joyce performed textually, thereby “radically destabilizing” his own work, “leading to effects [similar to] short-circuiting plot events, and entering spaces where a game’s normal ontological conditions are suspended.” As Ferguson points out, moreover, literary criticism resembles glitch hunting as scholars look for keys to unlock the puzzles that constitute the text through which readers must level up.Conclusion My intention has been to highlight arguments presented by ludologists like Eskelinnen who want to keep game studies separate from narrative and literary studies, as well as those game scholars who favour a narrative approach like Murray and Ryan, in order to suggest ways in which a longer, historical view of how stories travel across platforms might offer a more holistic view of where we are at today. Moreover, as my final examples of games scholarship suggest, games, and games that specifically remediate works of literature such as Dante’s Inferno, constitute a rapidly moving target that demands that we keep up by finding new ways to take narrative and ergodic complexity into account.The point of this essay was not, therefore, to adapt a position in any one camp but rather to nod to the major contributors in a debate which was largely about institutional turf, and perhaps never really happened, yet still continues to inform scholarship. At the same time, I wanted to argue for the value of discussing the long tradition of understanding literature as a form of mimesis and therefore as a particular kind of game, and to show how such an understanding contributes to historically situating and analysing videogames. Stories can be experienced across multiple platforms or formats, and my ultimate goal is to see what literary studies can do for game studies by trying to show that the two share more of the same goals, elements, and characteristics than is commonly supposed.ReferencesAristotle. Poetics, Trans. J. Hutton. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1982.Aarseth, Espen. Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2007.Behrens, Kathi. “‘Messy’ Ludology: New Dimensions of Narrator Unreliability in Living Will.” No Trivial Effort: Essays on Games and Literary Theory. Eds. Joyce Goggin and Timothy Welsh. Bloomsbury: Forthcoming.Bell, D. Circumstances: Chance in the Literary Text. Lincoln: Nebraska UP, 1993. Delaume, Chloé. Corpus Simsi. Paris: Éditions Léo Scheer, 2003.Eskelinen, Markku. “The Gaming Situation”. Game Studies 1.1 (2011). <http://www.gamestudies.org/0101/eskelinen/>. Ferguson, Andrew. “Let’s Play Finnegan’s Wake.” Hypermedia Joyce Studies 13 (2014). <http://hjs.ff.cuni.cz/archives/v13_1/main/essays.php?essay=ferguson>. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method, Trans. Barden and Cumming. New York: Crossroad, 1985.Goggin, Joyce. “A Body Hermeneutic?: Corpus Simsi or Reading like a Sim.” The Hand of the Interpreter: Essays on Meaning after Theory. Eds. G.F. Mitrano and Eric Jarosinski. Bern: Peter Lang, 2008. 205-223.Hesse, Hermann. The Glass Bead Game [Das Glasperlenspiel]. Trans. Clara Winston. London: Picador, 2002.Huizinga, Johann. Homo Ludens. Groningen: Wolters-Noordhoff cop, 1938.Hutchinson, Peter. Games Authors Play. New York: Metheun, 1985.James, Joyce. Finnegan’s Wake. London: Faber and Faber, 1939.Morrow, Nancy. Dreadful Games: The Play of Desire and the 19th-Century Novel. Ohio: Kent State UP, 1988.Murray, Janet H. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. Cambridge: MIT UP, 1997.Nabokov, Vladimir. Pale Fire. New York: Putnam, 1962.Ryan, Marie-Laure. Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2001.Saporta, Marc. Composition No. 1. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1962.Smith, Grahame. Dickens and the Dream of Cinema. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2003.Spariosu, Mihai. Literature, Mimesis and Play. Tübigen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1982.Winterson, Janette. The PowerBook. London: Vintage, 2001.Wittgenstein, Ludwig. The Philosophical Investigations. Trans. G.E.M. Anscombe. New York: Macmillan: 1972.
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Fordham, Helen. "Curating a Nation’s Past: The Role of the Public Intellectual in Australia’s History Wars." M/C Journal 18, no. 4 (August 7, 2015). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1007.
Full textAbstract:
IntroductionThe role, function, and future of the Western public intellectual have been highly contested over the last three decades. The dominant discourse, which predicts the decline of the public intellectual, asserts the institutionalisation of their labour has eroded their authority to speak publicly to power on behalf of others; and that the commodification of intellectual performance has transformed them from sages, philosophers, and men of letters into trivial media entertainers, pundits, and ideologues. Overwhelmingly the crisis debates link the demise of the public intellectual to shifts in public culture, which was initially conceptualised as a literary and artistic space designed to liberate the awareness of citizens through critique and to reflect upon “the chronic and persistent issues of life, meaning and representation” (McGuigan 430). This early imagining of public culture as an exclusively civilising space, however, did not last and Jurgen Habermas documented its decline in response to the commodification and politicisation of culture in the 20th century. Yet, as social activism continued to flourish in the public sphere, Habermas re-theorised public culture as a more pluralistic site which simultaneously accommodates “uncritical populism, radical subversion and critical intervention” (436) and operates as both a marketplace and a “site of communicative rationality, mutual respect and understanding (McGuigan 434). The rise of creative industries expanded popular engagement with public culture but destabilised the authority of the public intellectual. The accompanying shifts also affected the function of the curator, who, like the intellectual, had a role in legislating and arbitrating knowledge, and negotiating and authorising meaning through curated exhibitions of objects deemed sacred and significant. Jennifer Barrett noted the similarities in the two functions when she argued in Museums and the Public Sphere that, because museums have an intellectual role in society, curators have a public intellectual function as they define publics, determine modes of engagement, and shape knowledge formation (150). The resemblance between the idealised role of the intellectual and the curator in enabling the critique that emancipates the citizen means that both functions have been affected by the atomisation of contemporary society, which has exposed the power effects of the imposed coherency of authoritative and universal narratives. Indeed, just as Russell Jacoby, Allan Bloom, and Richard Posner predicted the death of the intellectual, who could no longer claim to speak in universal terms on behalf of others, so museums faced their own crisis of relevancy. Declining visitor numbers and reduced funding saw museums reinvent themselves, and in moving away from their traditional exclusive, authoritative, and nation building roles—which Pierre Bourdieu argued reproduced the “existing class-based culture, education and social systems” (Barrett 3)—museums transformed themselves into inclusive and diverse sites of co-creation with audiences and communities. In the context of this change the curator ceased to be the “primary producer of knowledge” (Barrett 13) and emerged to reproduce “contemporary culture preoccupations” and constitute the “social imagery” of communities (119). The modern museum remains concerned with explaining and interrogating the world, but the shift in curatorial work is away from the objects themselves to a focus upon audiences and how they value the artefacts, knowledge, and experiences of collective shared memory. The change in curatorial practices was driven by what Peter Vergo called a new “museology” (Barrett 2), and according to Macdonald this term assumes that “object meanings are contextual rather than inherent” or absolute and universal (2). Public intellectuals and curators, as the custodians of ideas and narratives in the contemporary cultural industries, privilege audience reception and recognise that consumers and/or citizens engage with public culture for a variety of reasons, including critique, understanding, and entertainment. Curators, like public intellectuals, also recognise that they can no longer assume the knowledge and experience of their audience, nor prescribe the nature of engagement with ideas and objects. Instead, curators and intellectuals emerge as negotiators and translators of cultural meaning as they traverse the divides in public culture, sequestering ideas and cultural artefacts and constructing narratives that engage audiences and communities in the process of re-imagining the past as a way of providing new insights into contemporary challenges.Methodology In exploring the idea that the public intellectual acts as a curator of ideas as he or she defines and privileges the discursive spaces of public culture, this paper begins by providing an overview of the cultural context of the contemporary public intellectual which enables comparisons between intellectual and curatorial functions. Second, this paper analyses a random sample of the content of books, newspaper and magazine articles, speeches, and transcripts of interviews drawn from The Australian, The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Sydney Institute, the ABC, The Monthly, and Quadrant published or broadcast between 1996 and 2007, in order to identify the key themes of the History Wars. It should be noted that the History War debates were extensive, persistent, and complex—and as they unfolded over a 13-year period they emerged as the “most powerful” and “most disputed form of public intellectual work” (Carter, Ideas 9). Many issues were aggregated under the trope of the History Wars, and these topics were subject to both popular commentary and academic investigation. Furthermore, the History Wars discourse was produced in a range of mediums including popular media sources, newspaper and magazine columns, broadcasts, blogs, lectures, and writers’ forums and publications. Given the extent of this discourse, the sample of articles which provides the basis for this analysis does not seek to comprehensively survey the literature on the History Wars. Rather this paper draws upon Foucault’s genealogical qualitative method, which exposes the subordinated discontinuities in texts, to 1) consider the political context of the History War trope; and 2) identify how intellectuals discursively exhibited versions of the nation’s identity and in the process made visible the power effects of the past. Public Intellectuals The underlying fear of the debates about the public intellectual crisis was that the public intellectual would no longer be able to act as the conscience of a nation, speak truth to power, or foster the independent and dissenting public debate that guides and informs individual human agency—a goal that has lain at the heart of the Western intellectual’s endeavours since Kant’s Sapere aude. The late 20th century crisis discourse, however, primarily mourned the decline of a particular form of public authority attached to the heroic universal intellectual formation made popular by Emile Zola at the end of the 19th century, and which claimed the power to hold the political elites of France accountable. Yet talk of an intellectual crisis also became progressively associated with a variety of general concerns about globalising society. Some of these concerns included fears that structural shifts in the public domain would lead to the impoverishment of the cultural domain, the end of Western civilisation, the decline of the progressive political left, and the end of universal values. It was also expected that the decline in intellectuals would also enable the rise of populism, political conservatism, and anti-intellectualism (Jacoby Bloom; Bauman; Rorty; Posner; Furedi; Marquand). As a result of these fears, the function of the intellectual who engages publicly was re-theorised. Zygmunt Bauman suggested the intellectual was no longer the legislator or arbiter of taste but the negotiator and translator of ideas; Michel Foucault argued that the intellectual could be institutionally situated and still speak truth to power; and Edward Said insisted the public intellectual had a role in opening up possibilities to resolve conflict by re-imagining the past. In contrast, the Australian public intellectual has never been declared in crisis or dead, and this is probably because the nation does not have the same legacy of the heroic public intellectual. Indeed, as a former British colony labelled the “working man’s paradise” (White 4), Australia’s intellectual work was produced in “institutionalised networks” (Head 5) like universities and knowledge disciplines, political parties, magazines, and unions. Within these networks there was a double division of labour, between the abstraction of knowledge and its compartmentalisation, and between the practical application of knowledge and its popularisation. As a result of this legacy, a more organic, specific, and institutionalised form of intellectualism emerged, which, according to Head, limited intellectual influence and visibility across other networks and domains of knowledge and historically impeded general intellectual engagement with the public. Fears about the health and authority of the public intellectual in Australia have therefore tended to be produced as a part of Antonio Gramsci’s ideological “wars of position” (Mouffe 5), which are an endless struggle between cultural and political elites for control of the institutions of social reproduction. These struggles began in Australia in the 1970s and 1980s over language and political correctness, and they reappeared in the 1990s as the History Wars. History Wars“The History Wars” was a term applied to an ideological battle between two visions of the Australian nation. The first vision was circulated by Australian Labor Party Prime Minister Paul Keating, who saw race relations as central to 21st century global Australia and began the process of dealing with the complex and divisive Indigenous issues at home. He established the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation in 1991; acknowledged in the 1992 Redfern speech that white settlers were responsible for the problems in Indigenous communities; and commissioned the Bringing Them Home report, which was completed in 1997 and concluded that the mandated removal of Indigenous children from their families and communities throughout the 20th century had violated their human rights and caused long-term and systemic damage to Indigenous communities.The second vision of Australia was circulated by Liberal Prime Minister John Howard, who, after he came to power in 1996, began his own culture war to reconstruct a more conservative vision of the nation. Howard believed that the stories of Indigenous dispossession undermined confidence in the nation, and he sought to produce a historical view of the past grounded in “Judeo-Christian ethics, the progressive spirit of the enlightenment and the institutions and values of British culture” (“Sense of Balance”). Howard called for a return to a narrative form that valorised Australia’s achievements, and he sought to instil a more homogenised view of the past and a coherent national identity by reviewing high school history programs, national museum appointments, and citizenship tests. These two political positions framed the subsequent intellectual struggles over the past. While a number of issues were implicated in the battle, generally, left commentators used the History Wars as a way to circulate certain ideas about morality and identity, including 1) Australians needed to make amends for past injustices to Indigenous Australians and 2) the nation’s global identity was linked to how they dealt with Australia’s first people. In contrast, the political right argued 1) the left had misrepresented and overstated the damage done to Indigenous communities and rewritten history; 2) stories about Indigenous abuse were fragmenting the nation’s identity at a time when the nation needed to build a coherent global presence; and 3) no apology was necessary, because contemporary Australians did not feel responsible for past injustices. AnalysisThe war between these two visions of Australia was fought in “extra-curricular sites,” according to Stuart Macintyre, and this included newspaper columns, writers’ festivals, broadcast interviews, intellectual magazines like The Monthly and Quadrant, books, and think tank lectures. Academics and intellectuals were the primary protagonists, and they disputed the extent of colonial genocide; the legitimacy of Indigenous land rights; the impact of the Stolen Generation on the lives of modern Indigenous citizens; and the necessity of a formal apology as a part of the reconciliation process. The conflicts also ignited debates about the nature of history, the quality of public debates in Australia, and exposed the tensions between academics, public intellectuals, newspaper commentators and political elites. Much of the controversy played out in the national forums can be linked to the Bringing Them Home: National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families report Stolen Generation inquiry and report, which was commissioned by Keating but released after Howard came to office. Australian public intellectual and professor of politics Robert Manne critiqued the right’s response to the report in his 2001 Quarterly Essay titled “In Denial: The Stolen Generation and The Right”. He argued that there was a right-wing campaign in Australia that sought to diminish and undermine justice for Aboriginal people by discounting the results of the inquiry, underestimating the numbers of those affected, and underfunding the report’s recommendations. He spoke of the nation’s shame and in doing so he challenged Australia’s image of itself. Manne’s position was applauded by many for providing what Kay Schaffer in her Australian Humanities Review paper called an “effective antidote to counter the bitter stream of vitriol that followed the release of the Bringing Them Home report”. Yet Manne also drew criticism. Historian Bain Attwood argued that Manne’s attack on conservatives was polemical, and he suggested that it would be more useful to consider in detail what drives the right-wing analysis of Indigenous issues. Attwood also suggested that Manne’s essay had misrepresented the origins of the narrative of the Stolen Generation, which had been widely known prior to the release of the Stolen Generation report.Conservative commentators focused upon challenging the accuracy of those stories submitted to the inquiry, which provided the basis for the report. This struggle over factual details was to characterise the approach of historian Keith Windschuttle, who rejected both the numbers of those stolen from their families and the degree of violence used in the settlement of Australia. In his 2002 book The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume One, Van Diemen’s Land 1803–1847 he accused left-wing academics of exaggerating the events of Aboriginal history in order to further their own political agenda. In particular, he argued that the extent of the “conflagration of oppression and conflict” which sought to “dispossess, degrade, and devastate the Aboriginal people” had been overstated and misrepresented and designed to “create an edifice of black victimhood and white guilt” (Windschuttle, Fabrication 1). Manne responded to Windschuttle’s allegations in Whitewash: On Keith Windschuttle’s Fabrication of Aboriginal History, arguing that Windschuttle arguments were “unpersuasive and unsupported either by independent research or even familiarity with the relevant secondary historical literature” (7) and that the book added nothing to the debates. Other academics like Stephen Muecke, Marcia Langton and Heather Goodall expressed concerns about Windschuttle’s work, and in 2003 historians Stuart Macintyre and Anna Clark published The History Wars, which described the implications of the politicisation of history on the study of the past. At the same time, historian Bain Attwood in Telling the Truth About Aboriginal History argued that the contestation over history was eroding the “integrity of intellectual life in Australia” (2). Fractures also broke out between writers and historians about who was best placed to write history. The Australian book reviewer Stella Clarke wrote that the History Wars were no longer constructive discussions, and she suggested that historical novelists could colonise the territory traditionally dominated by professional historians. Inga Clendinnen wasn’t so sure. She wrote in a 2006 Quarterly Essay entitled “The History Question: Who Owns the Past?” that, while novelists could get inside events through a process of “applied empathy,” imagination could in fact obstruct the truth of reality (20). Discussion The History Wars saw academics engage publicly to exhibit a set of competing ideas about Australia’s identity in the nation’s media and associated cultural sites, and while the debates initially prompted interest they eventually came to be described as violent and unproductive public conversations about historical details and ideological positions. Indeed, just as the museum curator could no longer authoritatively prescribe the cultural meaning of artefacts, so the History Wars showed that public intellectuals could not adjudicate the identity of the nation nor prescribe the nature of its conduct. For left-wing public intellectuals and commentators, the History Wars came to signify the further marginalisation of progressive politics in the face of the dominant, conservative, and increasingly populist constituency. Fundamentally, the battles over the past reinforced fears that Australia’s public culture was becoming less diverse, less open, and less able to protect traditional civil rights, democratic freedoms, and social values. Importantly for intellectuals like Robert Manne, there was a sense that Australian society was less able or willing to reflect upon the moral legitimacy of its past actions as a part of the process of considering its contemporary identity. In contrast right-wing intellectuals and commentators argued that the History Wars showed how public debate under a conservative government had been liberated from political correctness and had become more vibrant. This was the position of Australian columnist Janet Albrechtsen who argued that rather than a decline in public debate there had been, in fact, “vigorous debate of issues that were once banished from the national conversation” (91). She went on to insist that left-wing commentators’ concerns about public debate were simply a mask for their discomfort at having their views and ideas challenged. There is no doubt that the History Wars, while media-orchestrated debates that circulated a set of ideological positions designed to primarily attract audiences and construct particular views of Australia, also raised public awareness of the complex issues associated with Australia’s Indigenous past. Indeed, the Wars ended what W.E.H Stanner had called the “great silence” on Indigenous issues and paved the way for Kevin Rudd’s apology to Indigenous people for their “profound grief, suffering and loss”. The Wars prompted conversations across the nation about what it means to be Australian and exposed the way history is deeply implicated in power surely a goal of both intellectual debate and curated exhibitions. ConclusionThis paper has argued that the public intellectual can operate like a curator in his or her efforts to preserve particular ideas, interpretations, and narratives of public culture. The analysis of the History Wars debates, however, showed that intellectuals—just like curators —are no longer authorities and adjudicators of the nation’s character, identity, and future but cultural intermediaries whose function is not just the performance or exhibition of selected ideas, objects, and narratives but also the engagement and translation of other voices across different contexts in the ongoing negotiation of what constitutes cultural significance. ReferencesAlbrechtsen, Janet. “The History Wars.” The Sydney Papers (Winter/Spring 2003): 84–92. Attwood, Bain. Telling the Truth about Aboriginal History. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2005.Bauman, Zygmunt. Legislators and Interpreters: On Modernity, Post Modernity and Intellectuals. Cambridge, CAMBS: Polity, 1987. Barrett, Jennifer. Museums and the Public Sphere. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2010. Bloom, Allan. Closing of the American Mind. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987.Bourdieu. P. Distinctions: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans. R. Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1984. Bringing Them Home: National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families. Commonwealth of Australia. 1997.Carter, David. Introduction. The Ideas Market: An Alternative Take on Australia’s Intellectual Life. Ed. David Carter. Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 2004. 1–11.Clendinnen, Inga. True Stories. Sydney: ABC Books, 1999.Clendinnen, Inga. “The History Question: Who Owns the Past?” Quarterly Essay 23 (2006): 1–82. Foucault, Michel, and Giles Deleuze. Intellectuals and Power Language, Counter Memory and Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Ed. and trans. David Bouchard. New York: Cornell UP, 1977. Gratton, Michelle. “Howard Claims Victory in National Culture Wars.” The Age 26 Jan. 2006. 6 Aug. 2015 ‹http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/pm-claims-victory-in-culture-wars/2006/01/25/1138066861163.html›.Head, Brian. “Introduction: Intellectuals in Australian Society.” Intellectual Movements and Australian Society. Eds. Brian Head and James Waller. Melbourne: Oxford UP, 1988. 1–44.Hohendahl, Peter Uwe, and Marc Silberman. “Critical Theory, Public Sphere and Culture: Jürgen Habermas and His Critics.” New German Critique 16 (Winter 1979): 89–118.Howard, John. “A Sense of Balance: The Australian Achievement in 2006.” National Press Club. Great Parliament House, Canberra, ACT. 25 Jan. 2006. ‹http://pmtranscripts.dpmc.gov.au/browse.php?did=22110›.Howard, John. “Standard Bearer in Liberal Culture.” Address on the 50th Anniversary of Quadrant, Sydney, 3 Oct. 2006. The Australian 4 Oct. 2006. 6 Aug. 2015 ‹http://www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion/john-howard-standard-bearer-in-liberal-culture/story-e6frg6zo-1111112306534›.Jacoby, Russell. The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe. New York: The Noonday Press, 1987.Keating, Paul. “Keating’s History Wars.” Sydney Morning Herald 5 Sep. 2003. 6 Aug. 2015 ‹http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/09/05/1062549021882.html›.Macdonald, S. “Expanding Museum Studies: An Introduction.” Ed. S. Macdonald. A Companion to Museum Studies. Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006. 1–12. Macintyre, Stuart, and Anna Clarke. The History Wars. Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 2003. ———. “The History Wars.” The Sydney Papers (Winter/Spring 2003): 77–83.———. “Who Plays Stalin in Our History Wars? Sydney Morning Herald 17 Sep. 2003. 6 Aug. 2015 ‹http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/09/16/1063625030438.html›.Manne, Robert. “In Denial: The Stolen Generation and the Right.” Quarterly Essay 1 (2001).———. WhiteWash: On Keith Windshuttle’s Fabrication of Aboriginal History. Melbourne. Black Ink, 2003.Mark, David. “PM Calls for End to the History Wars.” ABC News 28 Aug. 2009.McGuigan, Jim. “The Cultural Public Sphere.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 8.4 (2005): 427–43.Mouffe, Chantal, ed. Gramsci and Marxist Theory. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979. Melleuish, Gregory. The Power of Ideas: Essays on Australian Politics and History. Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2009.Rudd, Kevin. “Full Transcript of PM’s Apology Speech.” The Australian 13 Feb. 2008. 6 Aug. 2015 ‹http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/full-transcript-of-pms-speech/story-e6frg6nf-1111115543192›.Said, Edward. “The Public Role of Writers and Intellectuals.” ABC Alfred Deakin Lectures, Melbourne Town Hall, 19 May 2001. Schaffer, Kay. “Manne’s Generation: White Nation Responses to the Stolen Generation Report.” Australian Humanities Review (June 2001). 5 June 2015 ‹http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/Issue-June-2001/schaffer.html›. Shanahan, Dennis. “Howard Rallies the Right in Cultural War Assault.” The Australian 4 Oct. 2006. 6 Aug. 2015 ‹http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/howard-rallies-right-in-culture-war-assault/story-e6frg6nf-1111112308221›.Wark, Mackenzie. “Lip Service.” The Ideas Market: An Alternative Take on Australia’s Intellectual Life. Ed. David Carter. Carlton, VIC: Melbourne UP, 2004. 259–69.White, Richard. Inventing Australia Images and Identity 1688–1980. Sydney: George Allen and Unwin, 1981. Windschuttle, Keith. The Fabrication of Australian History, Volume One: Van Diemen’s Land 1803–1847. Sydney: McCleay, 2002. ———. “Why There Was No Stolen Generation (Part One).” Quadrant Online (Jan–Feb 2010). 6 Aug. 2015 ‹https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2010/01-02/why-there-were-no-stolen-generations/›.
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Jaakkola, Maarit. "Forms of culture (Culture Coverage)." DOCA - Database of Variables for Content Analysis, March 26, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.34778/2x.
Full textAbstract:
This variable describes what kind of concept of culture underlies the cultural coverage at a certain point of time or across time. The variable dissects the concept of culture into cultural forms that are being journalistically covered. It presupposes that each article predominantly focuses on one cultural genre or discipline, such as literature, music, or film, which is the case in most articles in the cultural beat that are written according to cultural journalists’ areas of specialization. By identifying the cultural forms covered, the variable delivers an answer to the question of what kind of culture has been covered, or what kind of culture has been represented. Forms of culture are sometimes also called artistic or cultural disciplines (Jaakkola, 2015) or cultural genres (Purhonen et al., 2019), and cultural classification (Janssen et al., 2011) or cultural hierarchy (Schmutz, 2009). The level of detail varies from study to study, according to the need of knowledge, with some scholars tracing forms of subculture (Schmutz et al., 2010), while others just identify the overall development of major cultural forms (Purhonen et al., 2019; Jaakkola, 2015a).
The concepts of culture can roughly be defined as being dominated by high cultural, popular cultural, or everyday cultural forms (Kristensen, 2019). While most culture sections in newspapers are dominated by high culture, and the question is rather about which disciplines, in the operationalization it is not always easy to draw lines between high and popular forms in the postmodern cultural landscape where boundaries are being blurred. Nevertheless, the major forms of culture in the journalistic operationalization of culture are literature, classical music, theatre, and fine arts. As certain forms of culture – such as classical music and opera – are focused on classical high culture, and other forms – such as popular music and comics – represent popular forms, distribution of coverage according to cultural forms may indicate changes in the cultural concept.
Field of application/theoretical foundation
The question of the concept of culture is a standard question in content analyses on arts and cultural journalism in daily newspapers and cultural magazines, posed by a number of studies conducted in different geographical areas and often with a comparative intent (e.g., Szántó et al., 2004; Janssen, 1999; Reus & Harden, 2005; Janssen et al., 2008; Larsen, 2008; Kõnno et al., 2012; Jaakkola, 2015a, 2015b; Verboord & Janssen, 2015; Purhonen et al., 2019; Widholm et al., 2019). The essence of culture has been theorized in cultural studies, predominantly by Raymond Williams (e.g., 2011), and sociologists of art (Kroeber & Kluckhohn, 1952). In studying journalistic coverage of arts and culture, the concept of culture reveals the anatomy of coverage and whether the content is targeting a broader audience (inclusive concept of culture) or a narrow audience (exclusive or elitist concept of culture). A prevalent motivation to study the ontological dimension of cultural coverage is also to trace cultural change, which means that the concept of culture is longitudinally studied (Purhonen et al., 2019).
References/combination with other methods of data collection
Concept of culture often occurs as a variable to trace cultural change. The variable is typically coupled with other variables, mainly with representational means, i.e., the journalistic genre (Jaakkola, 2015), event type (Stegert, 1998), or author gender (Schmutz, 2009; Jaakkola, 2015b). Quantitative content analyses may also be complemented with qualitative analyses (Purhonen et al., 2019).
Sample operationalization
Cultural forms are separated according to the production structure (journalists and reviewers specializing in one cultural form typically indicate an increase of coverage for that cultural form). At a general level, the concept of culture can be divided into the following cultural forms: literature, music – which is, according to the newsroom specialization typically roughly categorized into classical and popular music – visual arts, theatre, dance, film, design, architecture and built environment, media, comics, cultural politics, cultural history, arts education, and other. Subcategories can be separated according to the interest and level of knowledge. The variable needs to be sensitive towards local features in journalism and culture.
Example study
Jaakkola (2015b)
Information about Jaakkola, 2015
Author: Maarit Jaakkola
Research question/research interest: Examination of the cultural concept across time in culture sections of daily newspapers
Object of analysis: Articles/text items on culture pages of five major daily newspapers in Finland 1978–2008 (Aamulehti, Helsingin Sanomat, Kaleva, Savon Sanomat, Turun Sanomat)
Timeframe of analysis: 1978–2008, consecutive sample of weeks 7 and 42 in five year intervals (1978, 1983, 1988, 1993, 1998, 2003, 2008)
Info about variable
Variable name/definition: Concept of culture
Unit of analysis: Article/text item
Values:
Cultural form
Description
1. Fiction literature
Fiction books: fictional genres such as poetry, literary novels, thrillers, detective novels, children’s literature, etc.
2. Non-fiction literature
Non-fiction books: non-fictional genres such as textbooks, memoirs, encyclopedias, etc.
3. Classical music
Music of more high-cultural character, such as symphonic music, chamber music, opera, etc.
4. Popular music
Music of more popular character, such as pop, rock, hip-hop, folk music, etc.
5. Visual arts
Fine arts: painting, drawing, graphical art, sculpture, media art, photography, etc.
6. Theatre
Scene art, including musicals (if not treated as music, i.e. in coverage of concerts and albums)
7. Dance
Scene art, including ballet (if not treated as music, .e. in coverage of concerts and albums)
8. Film
Cinema: fiction, documentary, experimental film, etc.
9. Design
Design of artefacts, jewelry, fashion, interiors, graphics, etc.
10. Architecture
Design, aesthetics, and planning of built environment
11. Media
Television, journalism, Internet, games, etc.
12. Comics
Illustrated periodicals
13. Cultural politics
Policies, politics, and administration concerning arts and culture in general
14. Cultural history
Historical issues and phenomena
15. Education
Educational issues concerning different cultural disciplines
16. Other
Miscellaneous minor categories, e.g., lifestyle issues (celebrity, gossip, everyday cultural issues), and larger categories developed from within the material can be separated into values of their own
Scale: nominal
Intercoder reliability: Cohen's kappa > 0.76 (two coders)
References
Jaakkola, M. (2015a). The contested autonomy of arts and journalism: Change and continuity in the dual professionalism of cultural journalism. Tampere: Tampere University Press.
Jaakkola, M. (2015b). Outsourcing views, developing news: Changes of art criticism in Finnish dailies, 1978–2008. Journalism Studies, 16(3), 383–402.
Janssen, S. (1999). Art journalism and cultural change: The coverage of the arts in Dutch newspapers 1965–1990. Poetics 26(5–6), 329–348.
Janssen, S., Kuipers, G., & Verboord, M. (2008). Cultural globalization and arts journalism: The international orientation of arts and culture coverage in Dutch, French, German, and U.S. newspapers, 1955 to 2005. American Sociological Review, 73(5), 719–740.
Janssen, S., Verboord, M., & Kuipers, G. (2011). Comparing cultural classification: High and popular arts in European and U.S. elite newspapers. Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, 63(51), 139–168.
Kõnno, A., Aljas, A., Lõhmus, M., & Kõuts, R. (2012). The centrality of culture in the 20th century Estonian press: A longitudinal study in comparison with Finland and Russia. Nordicom Review, 33(2), 103–117.
Kristensen, N. N. (2019). Arts, culture and entertainment coverage. In T. P. Vos & F. Hanusch (Eds.), The international encyclopedia of journalism studies. Wiley-Blackwell.
Kroeber, A. L., & Kluckhohn, C. (1952). Culture: A critical review of concepts and definitions. Meridian Books.
Larsen, L. O. (2008). Forskyvninger. Kulturdekningen i norske dagsaviser 1964–2005 [Displacements: Cultural coverage in Norwegian dailies 1964–2005]. In K. Knapskog & L.O. Larsen (Eds.), Kulturjournalistikk: pressen og den kulturelle offentligheten (pp. 283–329). Scandinavian Academic Press.
Purhonen, S., Heikkilä, R., Karademir Hazir, I., Lauronen, T., Rodríguez, C. F., & Gronow, J. (2019). Enter culture, exit arts? The transformation of cultural hierarchies in European newspaper culture sections, 1960–2010. Routledge.
Reus, G., & Harden, L. (2005). Politische ”Kultur”: Eine Längsschnittanalyse des Zeitungsfeuilletons von 1983 bis 2003 [Political ‘culture’: A longitudinal analysis of culture pages, 1983–2003]. Publizistik, 50(2), 153–172.
Schmutz, V. (2009). Social and symbolic boundaries in newspaper coverage of music, 1955–2005: Gender and genre in the US, France, Germany, and the Netherlands. Poetics, 37(4), 298–314.
Schmutz, V., van Venrooij, A., Janssen, S., & Verboord, M. (2010). Change and continuity in newspaper coverage of popular music since 1955: Evidence from the United States, France, Germany, and the Netherlands. Popular Music and Society, 33(4), 505–515.
Stegert, G. (1998). Feuilleton für alle: Strategien im Kulturjournalismus der Presse [Feuilleton for all: Strategies in cultural journalism of the daily press]. Max Niemeyer Verlag.
Szántó, A., Levy, D. S., & Tyndall, A. (Eds.). (2004). Reporting the arts II: News coverage of arts and culture in America. National Arts Journalism Program (NAJP).
Verboord, M., & Janssen, J. (2015). Arts journalism and its packaging in France, Germany, the Netherlands and the United States, 1955–2005. Journalism Practice, 9(6), 829–852.
Widholm, A., Riegert, K., & Roosvall, A. (2019). Abundance or crisis? Transformations in the media ecology of Swedish cultural journalism over four decades. Journalism. Advance online publication August, 6. Journalism. https://doi.org/10.1177/1464884919866077
Williams, R. (2011). Keywords: A vocabulary of culture and society. Routledge. (Original work published 1976).
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Gehrmann, Richard. "War, Snipers, and Rage from Enemy at the Gates to American Sniper." M/C Journal 22, no. 1 (March 13, 2019). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1506.
Full textAbstract:
The concept of war is inextricably linked to violence, and military action almost always resounds with the emotion and language of rage. Since the War on Terror began in September 2001, post-9/11 expressions of terror and rage have influenced academics to evaluate rage and its meanings (Gildersleeve and Gehrmann). Of course, it has directly influenced the lives of those affected by global conflicts in war-torn regions of the Middle East and North Africa. The populace there has reacted violently to military invasions with a deep sense of rage, while in the affluent West, rage has also infiltrated everyday life through clothes, haircuts, and popular culture as military chic became ‘all the rage’ (Rall 177). Likewise, post-9/11 popular films directly tap into rage and violence to explain (or justify?) conflict and war. The film version of the life of United States Iraq veteran Chris Kyle in American Sniper (2014) reveals fascinating depictions of rage through the perspective of a highly trained shooter who waits patiently above the battlefield, watching for hours before taking human life with a carefully planned long-distance shot. The significance of the complexities of rage as presented in this film are discussed later. Foundations of Rage: Colonial Legacy, Arab Spring, and ISISThe War on Terror may have purportedly began with the rage of Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda missions and the responding rage of George Bush’s America determined to seek vengeance for 9/11, but the rage simmering in the Middle East has deeper origins. This includes: the rejection of the Shah of Iran's secular dictatorship in 1979, the ongoing trauma of an Arab Palestinian state that was promised in 1947, and the blighted hopes of Gamal Abdel Nasser's Arab nationalism that offered so much in the 1950s but failed to deliver. But these events should not be considered in isolation from events of the whole 20th century, in particular the betrayal of Arab nationalism by the Allied forces, especially Britain and France after the First World War. The history of injustice that Robert Fisk has chronicled in a monumental volume reveals the complexity and nuances of an East-West conflict that continued to fracture the Middle East. In a Hollywood-based film such as American Sniper it is easy to depict the region from a Western perspective without considering the cycle of injustice and oppression that gave birth to the rage that eventually lashed out at the West. Rage can also be rage against war, or rage about the mistreatment of war victims. The large-scale protests against the war before the 2003 Iraq invasion have faded into apparent nothingness, despite nearly two decades of war. Protest rage appears to have been replaced by outrage on behalf of the victims of war; the refugees, asylum seekers, economic migrants and those displaced by the ever- spreading conflict that received a new impetus in 2011 with the Arab Spring democracy movements. One spark point for rage ignited when Tunisian street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi embarked on his act of self-immolation in protest against harassment by public officials. This moment escalated into a kaleidoscope of collective rage as regimes were challenged from Syria to Libya, but met with a tragic aftermath. Sadly, democratic governments did not emerge, but turned into regimes of extremist violence exemplified in the mediaeval misogynistic horror now known as ISIS, or IS, or the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (Hassan). This horror intensified as millions of civilised Syrians and Iraqis sought to flee their homelands. The result was the movement of peoples, which included manipulation by ruthless people smugglers and detention by governments determined to secure borders — even even as this eroded decades of consensus on the rights of refugees. One central image, that of three-year-old Aylan Kurdi’s corpse washed up on a beach (Smith) should invoke open rage. Here, the incongruity was that a one-time Turkish party beach for affluent 18 to 35-year-olds from Western Europe would signify the death place of a Syrian refugee child, now displaced by war. The historical significance of East/West conflicts in the Middle East, recent events post- Arab Spring, the resulting refugee crisis in the region, and global anti-war protests should be foremost when examining Clint Eastwood's film about an American military sniper in Iraq.Hot Rage and Cold Rage Recent mass shootings in the United States have delineated factions within the power of rage: it seems to blow either hot or cold. US Army psychiatrist Major Nidal Malik Hasan was initially calm when he embarked on a public expression of rage, wounding 30 people and murdering 13 others in a mass shooting event in 2009 (MacAskill). Was this to be categorised as the rage of a nihilist, an Islamist - or as just another American mass shooting like events in Orlando or Sandy Hook? The war journalist and film maker Sebastian Junger authored a study on belonging, where he linked mass shootings (or rampage killings) to social stress and disunity, as a “tendency rising steadily in the US since the 1980s” (115-116). In contrast, the actions of a calm and isolated shooter on a rooftop can be justified as acceptable behaviour if this occurs during war. Now in the case of Chris Kyle, he normalised his tale of calm killing, as an example identified by action “built on a radically asymmetric violence” (Pomarede 53).Enemy at the Gates The point is that sniper killings can be presented in film as morally good. For example, the 2001 film Enemy at the Gates portrays a duel of two snipers in Stalingrad, Russia. This is a fictionalised contest of a fictionalised event, because there was only tangential evidence that Russian sniper hero Vasily Zaytsev actually engaged in a three-day sniper duel with his German enemy during the Second World War. Enemy at the Gates presents the sniper as an acceptable figure in mass popular culture (or even a hero?), which provides the justification for American Sniper. However, in this instance, viewers could recognise a clear struggle between good and evil.Politically, Enemy at the Gates, whether viewed from a conservative or a progressive perspective, presents a struggle between a soldier of the allies (the Soviet Union) and the forces of Nazism, undeniably the most evil variant of fascism. We can interpret this as a defence of the communist heartland, or the defence of a Russian motherland, or the halting of Nazi aggression at its furthest expansion point. Whichever way it is viewed, the Russian sniper is a good man, and although in the movie’s plot the actor Ralph Fiennes as political commissar injects a dimension of manipulation and Stalinist authoritarian control, this does not detract from the idea of the hero defeating evil with single aimed shots. There is rage, but it is overshadowed by the moral ‘good.’American Sniper The true story of Chris Kyle is quite simple. A young man grows up in Texas with ‘traditional’ American values, tries sport and University, tries ranch life, and joins the US Navy Special Forces. He becomes a SEAL (Sea, Air and Land) team member, and is trained as a specialist sniper. Kyle excels as a sniper in Iraq, where he self-identifies as America's most successful sniper. He kills a lot of enemies in Iraq, experiences multiple deployments followed by the associated trauma of reintegration to family life and redeployment, suffers from PTSD, returns to civilian life in America and is himself shot dead by a distressed veteran, in an ironic act of rage. Admired by many, the veracity of Kyle’s story is challenged by others, a point I will return to. As noted above, Kyle kills a lot of people, many of whom are often unaware of his existence. In his book On Killing, Lieutenant-Colonel David Grossman notes this a factor that actually causes the military to have a “degree of revulsion towards snipers” (109), which is perhaps why the movie version of Kyle’s life promotes a rehabilitation of the military in its “unambiguous advocacy of the humility, dedication, mastery, and altruism of the sniper” as hero (Beck 218). Most enlisted soldiers never actually kill their enemies, but Kyle kills well over 100 while on duty.The 2012 book memoir of United States Navy sniper Chris Kyle at war in Iraq became a national cultural artefact. The film followed in 2014, allowing the public dramatisation of this to offer a more palatable form for a wider audience. It is noted that military culture at the national level is malleable and nebulous (Black 42), and these constructs are reflected in the different variants of American Sniper. These cultural products are absorbed differently when consumed by the culture that has produced them (the military), as compared to the way that they are consumed by the general public, and the book American Sniper reflects this. Depending upon readers’ perspectives, it is a book of raw honesty or nationalistic jingoism, or perhaps both. The ordinary soldier’s point of view is reiterated and directed towards a specifically American audience. Despite controversy and criticism the book was immensely successful, with weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. While it naturally appealed to many in its primary American audience, from an Australian perspective, the jingoism of this book jars. In fact, it really jars a lot, to the point of being quite challenging to read. That Australian readers would have difficulty with this text is probably appropriate, because after all, the book was not created for Australians but for Americans.On the other hand, Americans have produced balanced accounts of the soldier experience in Iraq. A very different exemplar is Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury blog that became the book The Sandbox (2007). Here American men and women soldiers wrote their own very revealing stories about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, in autobiographical accounts that ranged from nuanced explanations of the empathy for the soldier’s predicament, to simple outright patriotism. TIn their first-hand accounts of war showed a balance of ordinary pathos, humour – and the raw brutality of a soldier finding the neck stem of a human spine on the ground after a suicide bomb attack (Trudeau 161) – and even this seems more palatable to read than American Sniper. A similar book on the US military sniper experience (Cavallaro and Larsen) also shows it is possible to incorporate a variety of perspectives without patriotic jingoism, or even military propaganda being predominant.In contrast to the book, the film American Sniper narrates a more muted story. The movie is far more “saccharine”, in the words of critical Rolling Stone reviewer Matt Taibbi, but still reflects a nationalistic attitude to war and violence — appropriate to the mood of the book. American producer/director Clint Eastwood has developed his own style for skipping around the liminal space that exists between thought-provoking analysis and populism, and American Sniper is no exception. The love story of Chris Kyle and his wife Taya looks believable, and the intensity of military training and war fighting, including the dispassionate thoughts of Kyle as sniper, are far more palatable in the film version than as the raw words on the page.The Iraq War impacted on millions of Americans, and it is the compelling images shown re-living Chris Kyle’s funeral at the film’s conclusion that leaves a lasting message. The one-time footballer’s memorial service is conducted in a Texas football stadium and this in itself is poignant: but it is the thousands of people who lined the highway overpasses for over 200 miles to farewell him and show respect as his body travels towards the funeral in the stadium, that gives us an insight into the level of disenchantment and rage at America’s loss. This is a rage fuelled by losing their military ‘empire’ coupled with a traumatised search for meaning that Jerry Lembcke sees as inextricably linked to US national failure in war and the tragedy of an individual soldier’s PTSD. Such sentiments seem intimately connected to Donald Trump’s version of America, and its need to exercise global power. Kyle died before Trump’s election, but it seems evident that such rage, anger and alienation experienced by a vast segment of the American population contributed to the election result (Kluger). Calm Cold Calculation Ironically, the traditional sniper embodies the antithesis of hot-blooded rage. Firing any long- distance range weapon with accuracy requires discipline, steady breathing and intense muscle control. Olympic shooting or pentathlons demonstrate this, and Gina Cavallaro and Matt Larsen chronicle both sniper training and the sniper experience in war. So, the notion of sniper shooting and rage can only coexist if we accept that rage becomes the cold, calculating rage of a person doing a highly precise job when killing enemies. In the book, Kyle clearly has no soldierly respect for his Iraqi insurgent enemies and is content to shoot them down one by one. In the film, there is greater emphasis on Kyle having more complex emotions based around the desire to protect his fellow soldiers by shooting in a calm and detached fashion at his designated targets.Chris Kyle’s determination to kill his enemies regardless of age or gender seems at odds with the calm detached passivity of the sniper. The long-distance shooter should be dispassionate but Kyle experiences rage as he kills to protect his fellow soldiers. Can we argue he exhibits ‘cold rage’ not ‘hot rage’, but rage none the less? It would certainly seem so. War Hero and Fantasist?In life, as in death, Chris Kyle presents a figure of controversy, being praised by the political far right, yet condemned by a diverse coalition that included radicals, liberals, and even conservatives such as former soldier Michael Fumento. Fumento commented that Kyle’s literary embellishments and emphasis on his own prowess denigrated the achievements of fellow American snipers. Reviewer Lindy West described him as “a hate filled killer”, only to become a recipient of rage and hatred from Kyle supporters. Paul Rieckhoff described the film as not the most complex nor deepest nor provocative, but the best film made about the Iraq war for its accuracy in storytelling and attention to detail.Elsewhere, reviewer Mark Kermode argues that the way the film is made introduces a significant ambiguity: that we as an audience can view Kyle as either a villain, a hero, or a combination of both. Critics have also examined Kyle’s reportage on his military exploits, where it seems he received less fewer medals than he claimed, as well as his ephemeral assertion that he shot looters in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina (Lamothe). In other claims, the US courts have upheld the assertion of former wrestler turned politician Jesse Ventura that Kyle fabricated a bar-room brawl between the two. But humans are complex beings, and Drew Blackburn sees it as “entirely plausible to become both a war hero and a liar” in his candid (Texas-based) assessment of one person who was, like many of us, a multifaceted figure.Conclusion This article has addressed the complicated issues of rage originating in the historical background of military actions that have taken place in the East/West conflicts in the Middle East that began in the region after the Second World War, and continue to the present day. Rage has become a popular trope within popular culture as military chic becomes ‘all the rage’. Rage is inextricably linked to the film American Sniper. Patriotism and love of his fellow soldiers motivated Chris Kyle, and his determination to kill his country’s enemies in Iraq and protect the lives of his fellow American soldiers is clear, as is his disdain for both his Iraqi allies and enemies. With an ever- increasing number of mass shootings in the United States, the military sniper will be a hero revered by some and a villain reviled by others. Rage infuses the film American Sniper, whether the rage of battle, rage at the moral dilemmas his role demands, domestic rage between husband and wife, PTSD rage, or rage inspired following his pointless murder. But rage, even when it expresses a complex vortex of emotions, remains dangerous for those who are obsessed with guns, and look to killing others either as a ‘duty’ or to soothe an individual crisis of confidence. ReferencesAmerican Sniper. Dir. Clint Eastwood. Warner Brothers, 2014.Beck, Bernard. “If I Forget Thee: History Lessons in Selma, American Sniper, and A Most Violent Year.” Multicultural Perspectives 17.4 (2015): 215-19.Black, Jeremy. War and the Cultural Turn. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012.Blackburn, Drew. “How We Talk about Chris Kyle.” Texas Monthly 2 June 2016. 18 Feb. 2019 <https://www.texasmonthly.com/the-daily-post/chris-kyle-rorschach/>.Cavallaro, Gina, and Matt Larsen. Sniper: American Single-Shot Warriors in Iraq and Afghanistan. Guildford, Connecticut: Lyons, 2010. Enemy at the Gates. Dir. Jean-Jaques Annaud. Paramount/Pathe, 2001.Fisk, Robert. The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006.Fumento, Michael. “American Sniper’s Myths and Misrepresentations.” The American Conservative 13 Mar. 2015. 18 Feb. 2019 <https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/clint-eastwoods-fabricated-sniper/>.Gildersleeve, Jessica, and Richard Gehrmann. “Memory and the Wars on Terror”. Memory and the Wars on Terror: Australian and British Perspectives. Eds. Jessica Gildersleeve and Richard Gehrmann. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. 1-19.Grossman, Dave. On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society. Boston: Little, Brown, 1995.Hassan, Hassan. “The True Origins of ISIS.” The Atlantic 30 Nov. 2018. 17 Feb. 2019 <https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/11/isis-origins-anbari-zarqawi/577030/>.Kermode, Mark. “American Sniper Review – Bradley Cooper Stars in Real-Life Tale of Legendary Marksman.” The Guardian 18 Jan. 2015. 18 Feb. 2019 <https://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/jan/18/american-sniper-review-bradley-cooper-real-life-tale-legendary-marksman>.Kluger, Jeffrey. “America's Anger Is Out of Control.” TIME 1 June 2016. 17 Feb. 2019 <http://time.com/4353606/anger-america-enough-already>.Kyle, Chris. American Sniper. New York: Harper, 2012. Junger, Sebastian. Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging. London: Fourth Estate, 2016.Lamothe, Dan. “How ‘American Sniper’ Chris Kyle’s Truthfulness Is in Question Once Again.” 25 May 2016. 19 Feb. 2019 <https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/checkpoint/wp/2016/05/25/how-american-sniper-chris-kyles-truthfulness-is-in-question-once-again/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.d8806f2b8d3a>.Lembcke, Jerry. PTSD: Diagnosis and Identity in Post-Empire America. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2013.Pomarède, Julien. “Normalizing Violence through Front-Line Stories: The Case of American Sniper.” Critical Military Studies 4.1 (2018): 52-71. Rall, Denise N. “Afterword: The Military in Contemporary Fashion.” Fashion and War in Popular Culture. Ed. Denise N. Rall. Bristol: Intellect, 2014. 177-179. Rieckhoff, Paul. “A Veteran's View of American Sniper.” Variety 16 Jan. 2015. 19 Feb. 2019 <https://variety.com/2015/film/opinion/a-veterans-view-of-american-sniper-guest-column-1201406349/>.Smith, Heather, and Richard Gehrmann. “Branding the Muscled Male Body as Military Costume.” Fashion and War in Popular Culture. Ed. Denise N. Rall. Bristol: Intellect, 2014. 57-71.Smith, Helena. “Shocking Images of Drowned Syrian Boy Show Tragic Plight of Refugees.” The Guardian 2 Sep. 2015. 17 Feb. 2019 <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/02/shocking-image-of-drowned-syrian-boy-shows-tragic-plight-of-refugees>.Stanford, David (ed.). The Sandbox: Dispatches from Troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Kansas City: Andrews McMeel Publishing, 2007.Taibbi, Matt. “American Sniper Is Almost Too Dumb to Criticise.” Rolling Stone 21 Jan. 2015. <https://www.rollingstone.com/movies/movie-news/american-sniper-is-almost-too-dumb-to-criticize-240955/>.Trudeau, Garry B. The Sandbox: Dispatches from Troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Kansas City: Andrew McMeel Publishing, 2007.West, Lindy. “The Real American Sniper Was a Hate-Filled Killer: Why Are Simplistic Patriots Treating Him as a Hero?” The Guardian 6 Jan. 2015. 19 Feb. 2019 <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jan/06/real-american-sniper-hate-filled-killer-why-patriots-calling-hero-chris-kyle>.
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Ryder, Paul, and Daniel Binns. "The Semiotics of Strategy: A Preliminary Structuralist Assessment of the Battle-Map in Patton (1970) and Midway (1976)." M/C Journal 20, no. 4 (August 16, 2017). http://dx.doi.org/10.5204/mcj.1256.
Full textAbstract:
The general who wins a battle makes many calculations in his temple ere the battle is fought. — Sun TzuWorld War II saw a proliferation of maps. From command posts to the pages of National Geographic to the pages of daily newspapers, they were everywhere (Schulten). The era also saw substantive developments in cartography, especially with respect to the topographical maps that feature in our selected films. This essay offers a preliminary examination of the battle-map as depicted in two films about the Second World War: Franklin J. Shaffner’s biopic Patton (1970) and Jack Smight’s epic Midway (1976). In these films, maps, charts, or tableaux (the three-dimensional models upon which are plotted the movements of battalions, fleets, and so on) emerge as an expression of both martial and cinematic strategy. As a rear-view representation of the relative movements of personnel and materiel in particular battle arenas, the map and its accessories (pins, tape, markers, and so forth) trace the broad military dispositions of Patton’s 2nd Corp (Africa), Seventh Army (Italy) and Third Army (Western Europe) and the relative position of American and Japanese fleets in the Pacific. In both Patton and Midway, the map also emerges as a simple mode of narrative plotting: as the various encounters in the two texts play out, the battle-map more or less contemporaneously traces the progress of forces. It also serves as a foreshadowing device, not just narratively, but cinematically: that which is plotted in advance comes to pass (even if as preliminary movements before catastrophe), but the audience is also cued for the cinematic chaos and disjuncture that almost inevitably ensues in the battle scenes proper.On one hand, then, this essay proposes that at the fundamental level of fabula (seen through either the lens of historical hindsight or through the eyes of the novice who knows nothing of World War II), the annotated map is engaged both strategically and cinematically: as a stage upon which commanders attempt to act out (either in anticipation, or retrospectively) the intricate, but grotesque, ballet of warfare — and as a reflection of the broad, sequential, sweeps of conflict. While, in War and Cinema, Paul Virilio offers the phrase ‘the logistics of perception’ (1), in this this essay we, on the other hand, consider that, for those in command, the battle-map is a representation of the perception of logistics: the big picture of war finds rough indexical representation on a map, but (as Clausewitz tells us) chance, the creative agency of individual commanders, and the fog of battle make it far less probable (than is the case in more specific mappings, such as, say, the wedding rehearsal) that what is planned will play out with any degree of close correspondence (On War 19, 21, 77-81). Such mapping is, of course, further problematised by the processes of abstraction themselves: indexicality is necessarily a reduction; a de-realisation or déterritorialisation. ‘For the military commander,’ writes Virilio, ‘every dimension is unstable and presents itself in isolation from its original context’ (War and Cinema 32). Yet rehearsal (on maps, charts, or tableaux) is a keying activity that seeks to presage particular real world patterns (Goffman 45). As suggested above, far from being a rhizomatic activity, the heavily plotted (as opposed to thematic) business of mapping is always out of joint: either a practice of imperfect anticipation or an equally imperfect (pared back and behind-the-times) rendition of activity in the field. As is argued by Tolstoj in War and Peace, the map then presents to the responder a series of tensions and ironies often lost on the masters of conflict themselves. War, as Tostoj proposes, is a stochastic phenomenon while the map is a relatively static, and naive, attempt to impose order upon it. Tolstoj, then, pillories Phull (in the novel, Pfuhl), the aptly-named Prussian general whose lock-stepped obedience to the science of war (of which the map is part) results in the abject humiliation of 1806:Pfuhl was one of those theoreticians who are so fond of their theory that they lose sight of the object of that theory - its application in practice. (Vol. 2, Part 1, Ch. 10, 53)In both Patton and Midway, then, the map unfolds not only as an epistemological tool (read, ‘battle plan’) or reflection (read, the near contemporaneous plotting of real world affray) of the war narrative, but as a device of foreshadowing and as an allegory of command and its profound limitations. So, in Deleuzian terms, while emerging as an image of both time and perception, for commanders and filmgoers alike, the map is also something of a seduction: a ‘crystal-image’ situated in the interstices between the virtual and the actual (Deleuze 95). To put it another way, in our films the map emerges as an isomorphism: a studied plotting in which inheres a counter-text (Goffman 26). As a simple device of narrative, and in the conventional terms of latitude and longitude, in both Patton and Midway, the map, chart, or tableau facilitate the plotting of the resources of war in relation to relief (including island land masses), roads, railways, settlements, rivers, and seas. On this syntagmatic plane, in Greimasian terms, the map is likewise received as a canonical sign of command: where there are maps, there are, after all, commanders (Culler 13). On the other hand, as suggested above, the battle-map (hereafter, we use the term to signify the conventional paper map, the maritime chart, or tableau) materialises as a sanitised image of the unknown and the grotesque: as apodictic object that reduces complexity and that incidentally banishes horror and affect. Thus, the map evolves, in the viewer’s perception, as an ironic sign of all that may not be commanded. This is because, as an emblem of the rational order, in Patton and Midway the map belies the ubiquity of battle’s friction: that defined by Clausewitz as ‘the only concept which...distinguishes real war from war on paper’ (73). ‘Friction’ writes Clausewitz, ‘makes that which appears easy in War difficult in reality’ (81).Our work here cannot ignore or side-step the work of others in identifying the core cycles, characteristics of the war film genre. Jeanine Basinger, for instance, offers nothing less than an annotated checklist of sixteen key characteristics for the World War II combat film. Beyond this taxonomy, though, Basinger identifies the crucial role this sub-type of film plays in the corpus of war cinema more broadly. The World War II combat film’s ‘position in the evolutionary process is established, as well as its overall relationship to history and reality. It demonstrates how a primary set of concepts solidifies into a story – and how they can be interpreted for a changing ideology’ (78). Stuart Bender builds on Basinger’s taxonomy and discussion of narrative tropes with a substantial quantitative analysis of the very building blocks of battle sequences. This is due to Bender’s contention that ‘when a critic’s focus [is] on the narrative or ideological components of a combat film [this may] lead them to make assumptions about the style which are untenable’ (8). We seek with this research to add to a rich and detailed body of knowledge by redressing a surprising omission therein: a conscious and focussed analysis of the use of battle-maps in war cinema. In Patton and in Midway — as in War and Peace — the map emerges as an emblem of an intergeneric dialogue: as a simple storytelling device and as a paradigmatic engine of understanding. To put it another way, as viewer-responders with a synoptic perspective we perceive what might be considered a ‘double exposure’: in the map we see what is obviously before us (the collision of represented forces), but an Archimedean positioning facilitates the production of far more revelatory textual isotopies along what Roman Jakobson calls the ‘axis of combination’ (Linguistics and Poetics 358). Here, otherwise unconnected signs (in our case various manifestations and configurations of the battle-map) are brought together in relation to particular settings, situations, and figures. Through this palimpsest of perspective, a crucial binary emerges: via the battle-map we see ‘command’ and the sequence of engagement — and, through Greimasian processes of axiological combination (belonging more to syuzhet than fabula), elucidated for us are the wrenching ironies of warfare (Culler 228). Thus, through the profound and bound motif of the map (Tomashevsky 69), are we empowered to pass judgement on the map bearers who, in both films, present as the larger-than-life heroes of old. Figure 1.While we have scope only to deal with the African theatre, Patton opens with a dramatic wide-shot of the American flag: a ‘map’, if you will, of a national history forged in war (Fig. 1). Against this potent sign of American hegemony, as he slowly climbs up to the stage before it, the general appears a diminutive figure -- until, via a series of matched cuts that culminate in extreme close-ups, he manifests as a giant about to play his part in a great American story (Fig. 2).Figure 2.Some nineteen minutes into a film, having surveyed the carnage of Kasserine Pass (in which, in February 1943, the Germans inflicted a humiliating defeat on the Americans) General Omar Bradley is reunited with his old friend and newly-nominated three-star general, George S. Patton Jr.. Against a backdrop of an indistinct topographical map (that nonetheless appears to show the front line) and the American flag that together denote the men’s authority, the two discuss the Kasserine catastrophe. Bradley’s response to Patton’s question ‘What happened at Kasserine?’ clearly illustrates the tension between strategy and real-world engagement. While the battle-plan was solid, the Americans were outgunned, their tanks were outclassed, and (most importantly) their troops were out-disciplined. Patton’s concludes that Rommel can only be beaten if the American soldiers are fearless and fight as a cohesive unit. Now that he is in command of the American 2nd Corp, the tide of American martial fortune is about to turn.The next time Patton appears in relation to the map is around half an hour into the two-and-three-quarter-hour feature. Here, in the American HQ, the map once more appears as a simple, canonical sign of command. Somewhat carelessly, the map of Europe seems to show post-1945 national divisions and so is ostensibly offered as a straightforward prop. In terms of martial specifics, screenplay writer Francis Ford Coppola apparently did not envisage much close scrutiny of the film’s maps. Highlighted, instead, are the tensions between strategy as a general principle and action on the ground. As British General Sir Arthur Coningham waxes lyrical about allied air supremacy, a German bomber drops its payload on the HQ, causing the map of Europe to (emblematically) collapse forward into the room. Following a few passes by the attacking aircraft, the film then cuts to a one second medium shot as a hail of bullets from a Heinkel He 111 strike a North African battle map (Fig. 3). Still prone, Patton remarks: ‘You were discussing air supremacy, Sir Arthur.’ Dramatising a scene that did take place (although Coningham was not present), Schaffner’s intention is to allow Patton to shoot holes in the British strategy (of which he is contemptuous) but a broader objective is the director’s exposé of the more general disjuncture between strategy and action. As the film progresses, and the battle-map’s allegorical significance is increasingly foregrounded, this critique becomes definitively sharper.Figure 3.Immediately following a scene in which an introspective Patton walks through a cemetery in which are interred the remains of those killed at Kasserine, to further the critique of Allied strategy the camera cuts to Berlin’s high command and a high-tech ensemble of tableaux, projected maps, and walls featuring lights, counters, and clocks. Tasked to research the newly appointed Patton, Captain Steiger walks through the bunker HQ with Hitler’s Chief of Staff, General Jodl, to meet with Rommel — who, suffering nasal diphtheria, is away from the African theatre. In a memorable exchange, Steiger reveals that Patton permanently attacks and never retreats. Rommel, who, following his easy victory at Kasserine, is on the verge of total tactical victory, in turn declares that he will ‘attack and annihilate’ Patton — before the poet-warrior does the same to him. As Clausewitz has argued, and as Schaffner is at pains to point out, it seems that, in part, the outcome of warfare has more to do with the individual consciousness of competing warriors than it does with even the most exquisite of battle-plans.Figure 4.So, even this early in the film’s runtime, as viewer-responders we start to reassess various manifestations of the battle-map. To put it as Michelle Langford does in her assessment of Schroeter’s cinema, ‘fragments of the familiar world [in our case, battle-maps] … become radically unfamiliar’ (Allegorical Images 57). Among the revelations is that from the flag (in the context of close battle, all sense of ‘the national’ dissolves), to the wall map, to the most detailed of tableau, the battle-plan is enveloped in the fog of war: thus, the extended deeply-focussed scenes of the Battle of El Guettar take us from strategic overview (Patton’s field glass perspectives over what will soon become a Valley of Death) to what Boris Eichenbaum has called ‘Stendhalian’ scale (The Young Tolstoi 105) in which, (in Patton) through more closely situated perspectives, we almost palpably experience the Germans’ disarray under heavy fire. As the camera pivots between the general and the particular (and between the omniscient and the nescient) the cinematographer highlights the tension between the strategic and the actual. Inasmuch as it works out (and, as Schaffner shows us, it never works out completely as planned) this is the outcome of modern martial strategy: chaos and unimaginable carnage on the ground that no cartographic representation might capture. As Patton observes the destruction unfold in the valley below and before him, he declares: ‘Hell of a waste of fine infantry.’ Figure 5.An important inclusion, then, is that following the protracted El Guettar battle scenes, Schaffner has the (symbolically flag-draped) casket of Patton’s aide, Captain Richard N. “Dick” Jenson, wheeled away on a horse-drawn cart — with the lonely figure of the mourning general marching behind, his ironic interior monologue audible to the audience: ‘I can't see the reason such fine young men get killed. There are so many battles yet to fight.’ Finally, in terms of this brief and partial assessment of the battle-map in Patton, less than an hour in, we may observe that the map is emerging as something far more than a casual prop; as something more than a plotting of battlelines; as something more than an emblem of command. Along a new and unexpected axis of semantic combination, it is now manifesting as a sign of that which cannot be represented nor commanded.Midway presents the lead-up to the eponymous naval battle of 1942. Smight’s work is of interest primarily because the battle itself plays a relatively small role in the film; what is most important is the prolonged strategising that comprises most of the film’s run time. In Midway, battle-tables and fleet markers become key players in the cinematic action, second almost to the commanders themselves. Two key sequences are discussed here: the moment in which Yamamoto outlines his strategy for the attack on Midway (by way of a decoy attack on the Aleutian Islands), and the scene some moments later where Admiral Nimitz and his assembled fleet commanders (Spruance, Blake, and company) survey their own plan to defend the atoll. In Midway, as is represented by the notion of a fleet-in-being, the oceanic battlefield is presented as a speculative plane on which commanders can test ideas. Here, a fleet in a certain position projects a radius of influence that will deter an enemy fleet from attacking: i.e. ‘a fleet which is able and willing to attack an enemy proposing a descent upon territory which that force has it in charge to protect’ (Colomb viii). The fleet-in-being, it is worth noting, is one that never leaves port and, while it is certainly true that the latter half of Midway is concerned with the execution of strategy, the first half is a prolonged cinematic game of chess, with neither player wanting to move lest the other has thought three moves ahead. Virilio opines that the fleet-in-being is ‘a new idea of violence that no longer comes from direct confrontation and bloodshed, but rather from the unequal properties of bodies, evaluation of the number of movements allowed them in a chosen element, permanent verification of their dynamic efficiency’ (Speed and Politics 62). Here, as in Patton, we begin to read the map as a sign of the subjective as well as the objective. This ‘game of chess’ (or, if you prefer, ‘Battleships’) is presented cinematically through the interaction of command teams with their battle-tables and fleet markers. To be sure, this is to show strategy being developed — but it is also to prepare viewers for the defamiliarised representation of the battle itself.The first sequence opens with a close-up of Admiral Yamamoto declaring: ‘This is how I expect the battle to develop.’ The plan to decoy the Americans with an attack on the Aleutians is shown via close-ups of the conveniently-labelled ‘Northern Force’ (Fig. 6). It is then explained that, twenty-four hours later, a second force will break off and strike south, on the Midway atoll. There is a cut from closeups of the pointer on the map to the wider shot of the Japanese commanders around their battle table (Fig. 7). Interestingly, apart from the opening of the film in the Japanese garden, and the later parts of the film in the operations room, the Japanese commanders are only ever shown in this battle-table area. This canonically positions the Japanese as pure strategists, little concerned with the enmeshing of war with political or social considerations. The sequence ends with Commander Yasimasa showing a photograph of Vice Admiral Halsey, who the Japanese mistakenly believe will be leading the carrier fleet. Despite some bickering among the commanders earlier in the film, this sequence shows the absolute confidence of the Japanese strategists in their plan. The shots are suitably languorous — averaging three to four seconds between cuts — and the body language of the commanders shows a calm determination. The battle-map here is presented as an index of perfect command and inevitable victory: each part of the plan is presented with narration suggesting the Japanese expect to encounter little resistance. While Yasimasa and his clique are confident, the other commanders suggest a reconnaissance flight over Pearl Harbor to ascertain the position of the American fleet; the fear of fleet-in-being is shown here firsthand and on the map, where the reconnaissance planes are placed alongside the ship markers. The battle-map is never shown in full: only sections of the naval landscape are presented. We suggest that this is done in order to prepare the audience for the later stages of the film: as in Patton (from time to time) the battle-map here is filmed abstractly, to prime the audience for the abstract montage of the battle itself in the film’s second half.Figure 6.Figure 7.Having established in the intervening running time that Halsey is out of action, his replacement, Rear Admiral Spruance, is introduced to the rest of the command team. As with all the important American command and strategy meetings in the film, this is done in the operations room. A transparent coordinates board is shown in the foreground as Nimitz, Spruance and Rear Admiral Fletcher move through to the battle table. Behind the men, as they lean over the table, is an enormous map of the world (Fig. 8). In this sequence, Nimitz freely admits that while he knows each Japanese battle group’s origin and heading, he is unsure of their target. He asks Spruance for his advice:‘Ray, assuming what you see here isn’t just an elaborate ruse — Washington thinks it is, but assuming they’re wrong — what kind of move do you suggest?’This querying is followed by Spruance glancing to a particular point on the map (Fig. 9), then a cut to a shot of models representing the aircraft carriers Hornet, Enterprise & Yorktown (Fig. 10). This is one of the few model/map shots unaccompanied by dialogue or exposition. In effect, this shot shows Spruance’s thought process before he responds: strategic thought presented via cinematography. Spruance then suggests situating the American carrier group just northeast of Midway, in case the Japanese target is actually the West Coast of the United States. It is, in effect, a hedging of bets. Spruance’s positioning of the carrier group also projects that group’s sphere of influence around Midway atoll and north to essentially cut off Japanese access to the US. The fleet-in-being is presented graphically — on the map — in order to, once again, cue the audience to match the later (edited) images of the battle to these strategic musings.In summary, in Midway, the map is an element of production design that works alongside cinematography, editing, and performance to present the notion of strategic thought to the audience. In addition, and crucially, it functions as an abstraction of strategy that prepares the audience for the cinematic disorientation that will occur through montage as the actual battle rages later in the film. Figure 8.Figure 9.Figure 10.This essay has argued that the battle-map is a simulacrum of the weakest kind: what Baudrillard would call ‘simulacra of simulation, founded on information, the model’ (121). Just as cinema itself offers a distorted view of history (the war film, in particular, tends to hagiography), the battle-map is an over-simplification that fails to capture the physical and psychological realities of conflict. We have also argued that in both Patton and Midway, the map is not a ‘free’ motif (Tomashevsky 69). Rather, it is bound: a central thematic device. In the two films, the battle-map emerges as a crucial isomorphic element. On the one hand, it features as a prop to signify command and to relay otherwise complex strategic plottings. At this syntagmatic level, it functions alongside cinematography, editing, and performance to give audiences a glimpse into how military strategy is formed and tested: a traditional ‘reading’ of the map. But on the flip side of what emerges as a classic structuralist binary, is the map as a device of foreshadowing (especially in Midway) and as a depiction of command’s profound limitations. Here, at a paradigmatic level, along a new axis of combination, a new reading of the map in war cinema is proposed: the battle-map is as much a sign of the subjective as it is the objective.ReferencesBasinger, Jeanine. The World War II Combat Film: Anatomy of a Genre. Middletown, CT: Columbia UP, 1986.Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbour: U of Michigan Press, 1994.Bender, Stuart. Film Style and the World War II Combat Genre. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013.Clausewitz, Carl. On War. Vol. 1. London: Kegan Paul, 1908.Colomb, Philip Howard. Naval Warfare: Its Ruling Principles and Practice Historically Treated. 3rd ed. London: W.H. Allen & Co, 1899.Culler, Jonathan. Structuralist Poetics. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975.Deleuze, Gilles. 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