Ambiguous Ending Research Articles

From Civilization to Barbarism in El ciudadano ilustre : The Return of a Latin American Paradigm?

The aim of this article is to have an in-depth look at how the nineteenth-century paradigm of civilización y barbarie , predominant in Latin America, is represented in the film El ciudadano ilustre/ The Distinguished Citizen (2016), an Argentine film directed by Mariano Cohn and Gastón Duprat. A fictional account of an Argentine writer’s life after winning the Nobel Prize, it has a highly ambiguous ending. I argue that the film establishes a dialogic link with classics of Latin American literature such as Esteban Echeverría’s ‘El Matadero’ (1871) and Jorge Luis Borges’ ‘El Sur’ (1953), and Facundo by Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, laying bare the unresolved tension between civilización and barbarie in contemporary Argentina and broader Latin American society. A close analysis of El ciudadano ilustre shows that, at least in Latin America, oppositional concepts have all but died, thus challenging the postmodern trend of dissolving them along with other supposedly outdated binarisms (such as urban v. rural, centre v. periphery.). Simultaneously, the film uses metafiction as a postmodern strategy to deal critically with the dichotomy.

Sutton E. Griggs and Thomas R. Dixon: A Reconstruction Call and Response

Sutton E. Griggs and Thomas R. Dixon: A Reconstruction Call and Response

Queer Voids

Queer Voids

The Worlds We Leave Behind by A. F. Harrold

Reviewed by: The Worlds We Leave Behind by A. F. Harrold Adam McConville Harrold, A. F. The Worlds We Leave Behind; illus. by Levi Pinfold. Bloomsbury, 2023 [256p] Trade ed. ISBN 9781547610952 $17.99 E-book ed. ISBN 9781547610969 $12.59 Reviewed from digital galleys R Gr 5-8 Hex didn’t mean to make the little girl fall off the rope swing—the stone he threw was meant for his friend, Tommo—but now she’s lying in the creek, her arm broken. While Tommo rushes to get help, Hex flees the scene, leaving behind a mysterious old woman and dog that only he could see. What follows as the week unfolds is a cautionary tale of consequences and revenge, but also new possibilities, as Hex, Tommo, and the little girl’s older sister, Maria, become tangled in the web of a reality-shifting entity. Harrold hones in on the emotional stakes of late adolescence in this British import, with characters struggling to take accountability for their [End Page 224] impulsive actions as they leave childhood behind. Shifting perspectives coupled with third-person omniscient writing keep readers attuned to familial difficulties and emotional conflicts as the five days progress, making retributory punches and magical bargains for revenge understandable, if not justifiable. The message of forgiveness isn’t subtle, but it’s packaged in a well-delivered tragedy; while all the characters grow from their mistakes, the ends they meet are not always happy. Pin-fold’s stark, black-and-white illustrations sell the tone, lending an ominous feeling to mundane scenes of English neighborhoods that give way to gnarled woods and hair-raising encounters with the villain. The reveal of sci-fi elements in the third act will surprise those primed for a trickster fantasy, but genre-flexible readers who enjoyed the darkly folkloric tone of Paradise Sands (BCCB 11/22) will find shivers, philosophical musings, and an ambiguous ending on offer here. Copyright © 2023 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

「가든파티」(“The Garden Party”)에 나타난 계급 연구

In “Garden Party,” Katherine Mansfield strongly emphasizes the social problem of class separation through the contrasting composition of a routine party in a middle-class family and the accidental death of a poor carter. At first, Laura romanticizes the workers who come to set up the tent, boasting that she despises class distinctions absurd and foolish conventions. Thus, when Laura hears of the death of the poor carter Scott, she has sympathy for the lower classes and tries to stop the party, which can be said to be an attempt to transcend the rigid class separation. But her mother tries to pass on her middle-class perceptions and legacy, putting Laura in her new hat and encouraging her to recognize herself as an aesthetic object. But after a perfect afternoon party, when Laura sees the calm and beautiful face of her dead carter Scott, she emerges from the world of innocence into the world of experience, feeling the wonder of her life and gaining intuitive knowledge. However, the ambiguous ending in the final scene of this short makes it difficult to gauge the extent of her changed perception. Laura's journey to visit the dead carter’s house gives her a chance to grow socially, psychologically, and morally, but considering that this story only deals with what happened in one day, it is difficult for her to overcome prejudice against class differences or distinctions. It can be seen that a longer time and experience are needed for Laura to achieve a sufficiently changed perception and maturity.

The Pedagogy of Bafflement: Bernard Bailyn's History 2910, Fall 1996

The Pedagogy of Bafflement: Bernard Bailyn's History 2910, Fall 1996

Justice in Sultana’s Dream: A Secular, Feminist, Anti-colonial and Sustainable Utopia Embodying the Ideas of Indian Modernism

Rokeya Shakhawat Hossain’s short story Sultana’s Dream is a brief text, but its complexities and nuances make it a critical part of the utopian canon.[1] The narrative follows the titular Sultana as she explores an advanced feminist society called Ladyland, with the ambiguous ending leaving questions to whether it was an alternate reality or a dream (as the title suggests).

Are some more equal than others? Animated and animatronic adaptations of Animal Farm

ABSTRACT This article focuses on two film adaptations of George Orwell’s 1945 novel Animal Farm, exploring what they tell us about the Cultural Cold War and the post-Cold War period, as well as about the interplay between adaptation and political purpose. The article situates the 1945 animated version in the context of the Cultural Cold War, touching on the now well-established CIA involvement of this version, and investigating how that film’s ending especially reflects specific propaganda agendas. The less-considered 1999 animatronics version is read in terms of its substantial refocusing of narrative and point-of-view to foreground the situation of refugees and dissidents in the post-Cold War world in which it first appeared. The article argues that this adaptation ignores Orwell’s powerful and ambiguous ending in ways that are different from the 1945 version but equally problematic. While accepting that no adaptation is required to observe fidelity to an originary text, the article suggests that both these cinematic takes reconfigure the novel for political ends fundamentally at odds with those in Orwell’s Animal Farm.

Self-Derived Happiness, Defamiliarized: Ambiguity and Agency in Nella Larsen’s Passing

In Nella Larsen’s Passing, Clare Kendry plays a dangerous game. Only a little over half a century removed from the end of the American Civil War, in a time when white supremacy still defined the nation’s social, economic, and political life, Clare Kendry has agency. Though free from the confines of slavery, American white supremacy maintained that Black independence and narratives of Black happiness be dictated and authored solely by whites. Passing as a white woman, Clare derives her own happiness and builds her identity, marriage and livelihood on the basis of her deception. When her trickery is uncovered, Clare suffers an ambiguous fate and an untimely death. In writing an ambiguous end for Kendry, Larsen provides Clare an even greater sense of agency by forbidding traditions of white-authored narratives of a self-derived Black happiness from determining her fate. Critical condemnations of Passing’s conclusion establish that Larsen successfully defamiliarizes the Black psychological fiction novel and rejects southern antebellum models of white supremacy and Black self-determination.

Exploring lack of closure as a brand transgression

Purpose This study aims to contribute to research into narrative brands by investigating if the lack of closure in the ambiguous season two’s ending of the Australian television series, Wanted, constituted a brand transgression. Design/methodology/approach Comments on posts about Wanted from social media accounts associated with the series were downloaded and analysed using thematic analysis informed by non-participatory netnography. Findings Audiences found the ambiguous ending of Wanted season two disappointing and it did not fulfil implied promises and their expectations, which fits the description of a brand transgression, and so they engaged in behaviours indicative of a brand transgression such as spreading negative word of mouth online. The ambiguous ending could have been a cliff-hanger to lead into a third season that was not guaranteed when the final episode aired, or the ending for the entire series. Although a third season was eventually made and positively received by audiences, viewer numbers declined by nearly a third, illustrating the importance of brand management for narrative brands. Practical implications This research has implications for the creators of television series, particularly if they do not know if it will be renewed. Not providing audiences with their expected closure can constitute a brand transgression and damage the narrative brand’s residual brand equity and potential earnings from streaming or a revival at a later date. Originality/value Prior research has focused on audiences’ responses to definitive endings, rather than ambiguous endings, which is the focus of this research. Furthermore, narrative brands are still an under-researched context.

Writing the Self, Creating Community: German Women Authors and the Literary Sphere, 1750–1850 ed. by Elisabeth Krimmer and Lauren Nossett

Reviewed by: Writing the Self, Creating Community: German Women Authors and the Literary Sphere, 1750–1850 ed. by Elisabeth Krimmer and Lauren Nossett Beth Ann Muellner Elisabeth Krimmer and Lauren Nossett, editors. Writing the Self, Creating Community: German Women Authors and the Literary Sphere, 1750–1850. Camden House, 2020. 319 pp. Cloth, $99.00; E-book, $24.99. This fascinating collection shifts focus away from the tendency of eighteenth-century women writers to understate their own literary contributions and toward an emphasis on direct and indirect influences on their creative processes. The editors’ succinct and informative introduction summarizes women’s literary production as shaped by education, class, familial and sociocultural ideology and norms, genres, themes, and the book trade. The challenge that male intellectuals presented in acknowledging women’s abilities highlights women’s need to consistently and creatively negotiate the literary marketplace. The volume’s three sections, “Writing a Community,” “Writing the Self,” and “Writing toward Emancipation,” reveal such strategies but also suggest how profoundly eighteenth-century definitions of gender complicate our understanding of women’s authorship. Three of the four essays in the first section focus on Sophie von La Roche, the first professional German woman writer. Monika Nenon sees a pedagogical program laid out for young women of all social classes in La Roche’s nonfictional writing, specifically the journal Pomona für Teutschlands Töchter (1783–84; Pomona for Germany’s daughters) and the epistolary travel book Journal einer Reise nach Frankreich (1787; Journal of a journey through France). Beyond La Roche’s engagement of her own daughters as audience, Nossett investigates the writer’s cultivation of herself as a “maternal literary authority” (46) who encourages reading [End Page 119] despite “risk and conflict” (50) as central to education. Angela Sanmann brings to the “seemingly docile medium of translation” (69) an analysis that reveals progressive, “emancipatory thrusts” (77) in Marie-Elisabeth de La Fite’s 1773 translation of La Roche’s Geschichte des Fräuleins von Sternheim (1771; The history of Lady Sophia Sternheim) into French. The translation counters male editors’ attempted intrusions into the text and serves as a key source for the 1776 English translation. The odd chapter here, though thematically fitting, is Ruth Dawson’s consideration of Catherine II’s literary collaborations with poet Polyxene Dilthey Büsching and writer Johanna Charlotte Unzer. If not for Dawson’s literary sleuthing, Büsching’s work with the two women would have remained invisible, as Büsching’s husband’s 1777 biography of his wife intended. The essays in the second section consider individual authors’ pushback against patriarchal censorship and silencing. In similar ghost stories—one by Benedikte Naubert and one by Sophie Albrecht—Sara Luly considers how the “doubling of the self ” (120) reflects women’s authorship and where censorship and ambiguous endings neutralize previous vilifications of the “gelehrte Frau,” or learned woman (120). Amy Jones reads “reverse vampirism” in Günderrode’s poem “Die Bande der Liebe” (1804; The bonds of love) as a response to an 1802 letter from Clemens Brentano that Jones refers to as the “Vampire Letter” (142). Instead of sucking blood from life, Günderrode’s gender-fluid poetic I breathes life into death, an essential rebirth that rejects eighteenth-century discourses that pathologize female writers. Karin Baumgartner recounts the struggle of Helmina von Chézy, granddaughter of Anna Louisa Karsch, to establish a women’s literary journal and to find her own voice in the chorus of surrounding talented women. Finally, Julie L. J. Koehler considers connections between creativity and domesticity, spheres deemed incompatible by male fairy-tale gatekeepers. Three collections by Märchenomas (fairy-tale-telling women) reveal links to French author Madame d’Aulnoy and present a female tradition of community over competition. The final section emphasizes unique emancipatory efforts of writing women, beginning with Margaretmary Daley’s analysis of the anonymously published Bildungsroman Agnes von Lilien (1796). The novel tells of an illegitimate daughter’s search for her biological parents on the cusp of her own marriage, which Daley sees mirroring Caroline von Wolzogen’s process to claim ownership of the novel. Renata Fuchs’s essay on Louise Aston and Fanny Lewald reminds us that their...

Steinbeck Today

Abstract Developments around COVID-19 in the first half of 2020 stimulated renewed interest in The Grapes of Wrath while suggesting a limited future for live events like the annual Steinbeck festival in Salinas, or the public presentation in Palo Alto by Gavin Jones on Steinbeck's time at Stanford and the university's influence on To a God Unknown, Cannery Row, and other books by Steinbeck. Commentators in New York responded to the imposition of social distancing controls there and elsewhere in America with appeals to The Grapes of Wrath that left room for ambivalence about the future, like the ambiguous ending of Steinbeck's greatest novel.

Wanderers of the New World: From the Jew as Other, to the Jew as (Uncanny) Double in “A Virtuoso's Collection” (1842) and “Ethan Brand” (1850)

AbstractThe legend of the Wandering Jew began as a European folk motif and migrated to America, where it gained a popularity unmatched in the countries of the Old World. This article focuses on the adaptation of this legend in the American gothic, and specifically on the literary rendition of the Wandering Jew in Hawthorne's “A Virtuoso's Collection” (1842) and “Ethan Brand” (1850). Hawthorne first staged this archetype in his short story titled “A Virtuoso's Collection,” in which the Jew serves as a chronicler and an eerie museum guide. In “Ethan Brand,” the Wandering Jew is recast as a “German Jew,” a showman carrying a diorama and showing sketches. There, he serves as both the figure of the Other and an image of the evil double. He proves to be a source of gothic horror, hinting at the pointlessness of the quest of the main protagonist, who claims to have identified and mastered the “Unpardonable Sin.” After the departure of the Jew, Brand kills himself, which could be interpreted as a victory of the doppelgänger typical of gothic tales. However, Brand's attempt to annihilate himself is incomplete, for it is mentioned in the explicit that his heart could not be burnt down. This ambiguous ending and lack of closure are true to the spirit of the legend, whereby the Jew must wander until messianic times. However, the real Jew behind the mask remains unaccounted for, as he is reduced to a mere literary representation of pure otherness.

The Poetics of Schism: Dostoevsky Translates Hamlet

F.M. Dostoevsky (1821–1881) never translated Shakespeare’s works into Russian, at least not in the common sense. His fascination, however, with Hamlet and his choices, led him to interrogate the cult of Hamlet in his own culture to better understand the political and philosophical schism of the nineteenth-century Russian intelligentsia, torn between Western and Populist ideals. Translatio, in the broader sense of “carrying over” Hamlet’s character, caught on a threshold, into the Russian context represents an important aspect of Dostoevsky’s re-interpretation of modern ethics. More immediately, this translatio is a call to the “old morality” of the 1840s generation of Russian intellectuals, who rejected notions of rational egoism and of the means justifying the ends. Dostoevsky’s schismatic hero, Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, is Dostoevsky’s reimagining of his own culture’s translation of Hamlet that produced extreme and radical forms of Hamlet. Raskolnikov mimics Hamlet’s conscience-stricken personality at war with itself but achieves a more ambiguous ending typical of Dostoevsky’s regenerative paradigm.

Wharton, Hemingway, and the Advent of Modernism ed. by Lisa Tyler (review)

Reviewed by: Wharton, Hemingway, and the Advent of Modernism ed. by Lisa Tyler Wayne Catan Lisa Tyler, editor. Wharton, Hemingway, and the Advent of Modernism. Baton Rouge: Louisiana SU Press, 2019. 269 p. In Wharton, Hemingway, and the Advent of Modernism editor Lisa Tyler presents twelve essays from top scholars who argue the case for Edith Wharton's place in the modernist canon … alongside Ernest Hemingway. Wharton and Hemingway were, according to Tyler, more similar than readers would believe: both lived as expats in Paris, both spent time in Italy and Africa "and wrote about those experiences in their fiction and nonfiction" (1). Both won the Pulitzer Prize and [End Page 252] had mutual friends, including F. Scott Fitzgerald and Sinclair Lewis. However, they never met, a decision made by Wharton. Because I cannot write about every piece in the volume, I highlight three essays, which I believe confirm the fact that Edith Wharton is a modernist writer. First, Peter Hays in "Hemingway and Wharton Both Modernists" uses his list of modernist traits to declare Wharton a modernist. He explicates passages from Ethan Frome (1911) and The Sun Also Rises (1926) to state his case. He claims Frome allows reader participation, it is fragmented, experimental, and anti-romantic, all traits of modernism. Specifically, Frome is "fragmented by its frametale format" (23), and it is experimental because Wharton, for the first time, incorporates "an unreliable first-person narrator" (23) and its "thwarted romance (if there was one) between Mattie and Ethan" (24) is anti-romantic. Hays writes that Hemingway's style at the time in 1926 was experimental. Hemingway wrote in "short, clipped sentences, with little direct clue as to the narrator's feelings, except for such passages as where Jake declares his love for Brett" (20). The Sun Also Rises is "fragmented, consisting of Jake's incomplete accounts of events in Paris, Pamplona" (21) and other cities, and "it is anti-romantic in its harsh depiction of those who endured the war" (21). Hays's discovery of modernist traits in Ethan Frome is convincing, and his explanation and comparison to The Sun Also Rises makes a strong case for Wharton. Next, Ellen Andrews Knodt posits that modernism possibly started with The House of Mirth, an unusual choice "given that the First World War is the oft-used defining moment of modernism," (29) but she believes that Mirth, released in 1905, responds to "changing economics and gender relationships," (29) setting the stage for Hemingway and his counterparts. Although the two authors possess different writing styles, Knodt identifies "three main links" in Mirth and The Sun Also Rises that deem both novels modern: insider-outsider status, taboo subjects, and ambiguity. Knodt states that Mirth's protagonist Lily Bart was forced into insider-outsider status "having been born and raised in a wealthy family which loses its money through business losses and death of the father" (33). Jake Barnes in Sun is an insider because he is part of an expat group in France and he "can view them close up" (34); however, [End Page 253] Jake, a journalist, is not independently wealthy–like some of his expat friends–making him an outsider too. Knodt also argues that Wharton writes about taboo subjects in Mirth. Her characters have affairs, and Gus Trenor expects sexual favors from Lily. The expats in Sun drink to excess and Lady Brett has multiple lovers. The ambiguous endings in both novels befit a modernist label–Lily's deathbed scene and Jake rescuing Lady Brett at Botin's. In "Dawn and Decline: Contrasting Spaces in Wharton's 'False Dawn' and Hemingway's 'A Very Short Story'," Sirpa Salenius discusses the fact that an author can use literary space in many ways, not just in exposition to establish setting. She argues that it can be "connected with psychological states of fictional characters" (110). Salenius writes that Wharton's "False Dawn" and Hemingway's "A Very Short Story" are similar in that aspect: both use Italy and the United States "two different geographical locations … that mirror and contrast each other in morals, emotions, ideals, and worldviews" (110). Both stories begin in "open, outdoor spaces" (110). Hemingway's "A Very Short Story...

Burmese Governance and the Buddhist Ironies of U Win Pe’s “Clean, Clear Water”

The Theravadan Buddhist dharma [teachings of the Buddha] and Burmese cultural identity are inseparable. Likewise, Burmese monarchs from the eleventh to the nineteenth centuries revered India’s Mauryan ruler Ashoka (c. 280-200 BCE) as the epitome of noble Buddhist kingship. In recent decades, military regimes have drawn upon inherited Theravadan tropes and topoi, while dissident pro-democracy voices have invoked the Theravadan dharma to expose the hypocrisies of authoritarian rule in subtly disguised ironical writings. This essay argues that the Buddhist ironies permeating U Win Pe’s short story “Clean, Clear Water” epitomize this latter phenomenon. A witty folktale on one level, the story reverberates ironically with the tropes and topoi of the Theravadan dharma. On the one hand, “Clean, Clear Water” prompts critical reflection upon the suffering associated with the attitudes and policies of Burma’s military rulers; on the other hand, the story’s ambiguous ending encourages some wishful thinking about the ostensibly consensual politics of Burma’s contemporary democratic reformers. The essay closes with some observations about U Win Pe’s continuing dissident work and concludes that his multifold use of irony in “Clean, Clear Water” constitutes an important marker in Burma’s ongoing struggle to restore the country’s tradition of right relations between political power and Theravadan Buddhist thought and practice.

Desegregating Birmingham’s Buses: African Americans’ Protracted Struggle and White “Civil” Resistance

Desegregating Birmingham’s Buses: African Americans’ Protracted Struggle and White “Civil” Resistance Sarah Frohardt-Lane (bio) Recounting his experiences as a part of the civil rights struggles in Birmingham, Alabama, James Roberson described the intense emotion he felt when he rode a city bus in defiance of segregation rules. As a teenager in the 1950s, Roberson participated in collective actions to desegregate Birmingham’s buses, knowing that he was risking his safety in doing so. Forced by law to sit or stand behind the white seating section, black riders potentially faced humiliation, verbal abuse, physical assault, and arrest if they refused to comply. “The first time I defied the segregation of the bus, there was fear,” Roberson recalled. “The only way I could describe it [is] if I had a brown bag and had something in it that was alive and told you it was a rattlesnake and sat it on your lap. You didn’t know if it was going to strike or what was in it. That’s the kind of fear that gripped me when I first violated the rules and sat up front.”1 Roberson was among hundreds of African Americans who took direct action in an attempt to bring about bus desegregation in Birmingham. On two occasions—once in 1956 and again in 1958—their efforts were coordinated attempts to bring attention to the issue of segregated buses and to provoke an arrest that could be used as a test case to challenge the legality of Birmingham’s bus statutes. At other times throughout the late 1950s, individuals’ decisions not to comply with municipal segregation statutes and bus company policies were personal initiatives rather than components of a systematic desegregation strategy. This article tells the story of black Birminghamians’ years-long fight to desegregate the Birmingham Transit Company’s buses and of the forms of resistance that white residents and city leaders pursued to prevent it. [End Page 283] As African Americans challenged bus segregation in Birmingham through lawsuits, pressure on officials, boycotts, and acts of civil disobedience, white Birminghamians responded with equally varied tactics to prevent the integration of the city’s buses. At first, white riders demanded, and public officials embraced, an outright defense of bus segregation as legal and moral. Then, in the face of mounting evidence that courts would interpret municipal bus segregation as disregarding federal law, the city’s leaders abandoned the explicit legal endorsement of racially segregated public conveyances and crafted a new statute intended to maintain white supremacy without explicitly invoking race. Even when civil rights activists successfully challenged the new coded statute in court, white opponents continued to undermine bus desegregation. Bus drivers harassed black riders, and city officials publicized the bus company’s right to discipline riders who were found to engage in “disorderly conduct.”2 By the time black activists successfully defeated the last legal vestiges of bus segregation, many white residents who were opposed to the idea of integrated buses in Birmingham could simply avoid the bus altogether. Far from being a decisive moment of integration, desegregating Birmingham’s buses, as this article argues, was a protracted struggle with an ambiguous end point as white rejection of black equal access to buses morphed into a rejection of the bus itself. The history of bus desegregation in Birmingham has been eclipsed by the dramatic bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, less than a hundred miles to the south. Scholarly attention to the thirteen-month Montgomery bus boycott of 1955–1956 has produced a rich understanding of the organizing and local conditions that made that boycott possible; of its gender dynamics, including the carefully crafted narrative of Rosa Parks’s involvement; of the rise to prominence of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.; of police repression and economic backlash; and, ultimately, of the successful legal challenge that prompted the protesters to end the boycott when they could ride desegregated buses. Historians’ focus on this milestone in civil rights history and “formative turning point of the twentieth century” has overshadowed examination of how bus desegregation unfolded in other locales.3 In [End Page 284] this understanding, the Montgomery bus boycott suggests a watershed moment from which bus desegregation...

Stages of European Romanticism: Cultural Synchronicity across the Arts, 1798–1848 by Theodore Ziolkowski

 Reviews weakness, it is a tendency towards facile generalization. When Goethe consulted with his two guides as he and Tischbein ate their midday lunch on Vesuvius, it was hardly an image of sociability and egalitarian ‘commensality’ (p. ); he simply wanted to discuss their next steps. But such occasional lapses cannot detract from a masterful work rich in detail, organized with compelling logic, and presented with vivid clarity. P U T Z Stages of European Romanticism: Cultural Synchronicity across the Arts, –. By T Z. Rochester, NY, and Woodbridge: Camden House. . xiv+ pp. £. ISBN ––––. For his latest book, eodore Ziolkowski, one of our foremost comparatists, has chosen a device that is as astute as it is engaging. In order to gain a new perspective on Romanticism he treats all three major arts—literature, music, and fine art—as well as politics by comparing examples created in five specific years ranging from  to . He treats thirty-three works in all, including such masterpieces as Schubert’s Winterreise () and Constable’s Hampstead Heath (). By means of these cross-sections, or tranches, as he calls them, he aims to demonstrate the synchronicity of Romantic art across Europe. e rigour with which he pursues his theme throws up numerous unexpected juxtapositions, including Rossini’s Mosè in Egitto and Hoffmann’s Die Serapionsbrüder (). is device proves wonderfully illuminating. e two main approaches Ziolkowski combines are the historical narrative and close reading. Readers familiar only with his literary-critical skills may well be surprised by the expertise with which he treats his musical and artistic examples; for he brings the same suasion to bear when interpreting Beethoven or Rossini as when explicating Mary Shelly or Poe. e result is a cornucopian chef-d’œuvre, as rich in individual insights as it is insightful in expounding the coherence of Romanticism as a whole. e opening chapter is in some ways the most remarkable as it brings together several groundworks of the new movement, including Beethoven’s Pathétique, Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, the Schlegel Brothers’ Athenaeum, and Goya’s El sueño (). Each of Ziolkowski’s analyses brings new insights, enriched by surprising cross-references, such as between Anne Brontë, Dumas fils, and Grillparzer. But perhaps the most significant comparison here and indeed in the whole book is that between Wordsworth and Coleridge on the one hand and the Schlegel Brothers on the other. It is characteristic of the nascent movement that in both Germany and Britain it began with collaborative efforts which set a new tone subsequently taken as a point of reference by a whole generation. Ziolkowski pinpoints several features that define the new sensibility: an evolution from existing forms; a sense of mystery and the demonic; Romantic irony; and a new fragmentariness. It is to be hoped that future studies of Romanticism will develop these insights and follow the path here mapped out. roughout, Ziolkowski reveals a passion for the arts that marks him out as MLR, .,   a humanist. In his view art is life-enhancing. His default mode is celebration. He includes precise philological details—the dates of composition and publication and so forth—together with affective criticism touching on the emotional value of his exhibits. When exploring the ambiguous ending of Schubert’s Winterreise, for instance, he combines the views of previous experts, notably Charles Rosen and Ian Bostridge, with his own sense that it is not death but alienation that defines this tragic song cycle. He is wonderfully apt in his quotations, too. In treating Scott’s e Fair Maid of Perth he takes issue with Georg Lukács’s phrase (borrowed from Balzac) that Scott displays a ‘conservative philistinism’, and in so doing ‘rescues’ Scott, arguing that he introduced a new historicism to Romanticism, suitable to a growing bourgeois audience. By thus subtly attending to context Ziolkowski restores allure and dignity to an unvisited monument. We read, see, hear, and feel anew in his company. Ziolkowski’s voice is simple, clear, unassuming. He wears his immense erudition lightly. Although he is discussing one of the most debated themes in all criticism, and certainly does not lack sophistication, he seems to approach it...

Dissonant endings of chord progressions elicit a larger ERAN than ambiguous endings in musicians.

In major-minor tonal music, the hierarchical relationships and patterns of tension/release are essential for its composition and experience. For most listeners, tension leads to an expectation of resolution. Thus, when musical expectations are broken, they are usually perceived as erroneous and elicit specific neural responses such as the early right anterior negativity (ERAN). In the present study, we explored if different degrees of musical violations are processed differently after long-term musical training in comparison to day-to-day exposure. We registered the ERPs elicited by listening to unexpected chords in both musicians and nonmusicians. More specifically, we compared the responses of strong violations by unexpected dissonant endings and mild violations by unexpected but consonant endings (Neapolitan chords). Our results show that, irrespective of training, irregular endings elicited the ERAN. However, the ERAN for dissonant endings was larger in musicians than in nonmusicians. More importantly, we observed a modulation of the neural responses by the degree of violation only in musicians. In this group, the amplitude of the ERAN was larger for strong than for mild violations. These results suggest an early sensitivity of musicians to dissonance, which is processed as less expected than tonal irregularities. We also found that irregular endings elicited a P3 only in musicians. Our study suggests that, even though violations of harmonic expectancies are detected by all listeners, musical training modulates how different violations of the musical context are processed.

Echoes of Emerson: Rethinking Realism in Twain, James, Wharton, and Cather

Echoes of Emerson: Rethinking Realism in Twain, James, Wharton, and Cather