Modern American Research Articles

Ecclesiastical Politics of Leonid Brezhnev: 1965-1982

The religious policy of the Soviet government is particularly urgent in modern Georgian, Russian and Western scientific literature. Special investigations, aimed at the study of the state of religious organizations in the Sor- viet Union and, particularly, of the Orthodox Church, are being developed. It is noteworthy that a large part of the existing research includes the study of the ecclesiastical policy of the Soviet government in the 20s and 60s of the last century. Only in recent monographs do we find attempts of the scientific study of the relationship between church and state in the Soviet Union of the 1970s and 1980s. The study of religious policy issues of the Soviet period is being successfully conducted in Georgian scientific reality, however, the chronological framework of the research herein only includes the period of 20-60s of the XX century. More specifically, the upper limit of this period is defined to be the final years of Nikita Khrushchev’s rule, namely the first half of the 1960s. Less attention is paid to (and is actually not investigated) Leonid Brezh- nev’s ecclesiastical policy and its development tendencies. The aim of our paper is to elucidate the bases of the ecclesiastical policy of the Soviet government during the rule of Leonid Brezhnev, its main aspects, domestic and foreign factors and the consequences of their influence; to analyze and evaluate the works of modern Russian, European, American and Georgian historiography, written and visual historical sources and published and unpublished archival documents. In terms of research methodology, the work is based on historical cognitive, content analysis, historical-typo- logical, comparative, biographical, retrospective, historical-genetic and systematic research methods, which needless to say envisages a comprehensive historical study of the historical sources around the issue; it is also an attempt to restore the images of historical past. The results of the research can be chronologically divided into 2 stages: A) The ecclesiastical policy of Leonid Brezhnev from the second half of the 1960s to the second half of the 1970s; B) The ecclesiastical policy of Leonid Brezhnev from the second half of the 1970s to 1982. Each stage is characterized by different tendencies, internal and external challenges, orientations and results that the Soviet Union used to face. For example, if at the beginning of his rule Leonid Brezhnev’s government considered it a priority to condemn Nikita Khrushchev’s repressive ecclesiastical policies and to take a relative- ly compromising approach to relations with religious organizations, from the second half of the 1970s, under the intensification of the dissident movement, the rapprochement of the society with the Church, and the success of Western states diplomacy, the chosen course was being changed and Brezhnev’s sophisticated policies be- came more radical and rigid. The transformation of the form (and not the content) of the ecclesiastical policy of the government was obviously preconditioned by certain reasons and was serving the respective purposes. In the paper, we discuss the above-mentioned reasons, goals, measures taken by the official authorities in the field of religion, both at the legislative and social levels, and the way of transforming its course from the second half of the 60s to the beginning of the 80s. Naturally, it is impossible to settle this complex issue within one paper, however, we think that this research will contribute to the development of further studies in Georgian scientific world.

The Renaissance Revisited

The Renaissance Revisited

Unfinished Poetry

Unfinished Poetry

Cerita on Calonarang Dance Drama

Cerita on <i>Calonarang</i> Dance Drama

Music &amp; Poetry

The following conversations with contemporary classical composers demonstrate how music and poetry speak much the same language, and even understand themselves in each other's terms regarding rhythm and sound, time and structure, address and listeners, recitals and recitation. Kate Soper, Matthew Aucoin, and Seth Parker Woods are three very different American composers working today. Soper also writes her own libretti—syncretic texts that engage classical and medieval verse and contemporary literature. An excerpt of her recent work, Romance of the Rose, is included here. Aucoin, an erstwhile poet, whose Eurydice was performed this season at the Metropolitan Opera, has set to music poems and other writings by Walt Whitman, Paul Celan, and Jorie Graham. Woods, a cellist and performance artist, often interweaves archival recordings and live poetry recitation on stage, while also engaging visual arts. The work of all three composers is set to be featured this year at the 76th Ojai Music Festival in Ojai, California. (American Modern Opera Company, or AMOC, co-founded by Aucoin, is the first collective to be chosen as the festival's music director.) These discussions consider the spoken word, voice types, and silence; lecture-performance, the academy, canons, and avant-gardes; the interplay between history, material texts, and graphic notation; in addition to the creative cycle of dreaming, composition, and decay.Geoffrey Lokke

Treatise: Toward a Theory of Silence in Modernist American Poetry

This essay has two premises: first, that written lyric poems by convention record the performance of a speaking or singing voice, and second, that these performances of speech and song cannot but engender silences of the voice before, between, and after the words that comprise them. These silences need not hold significance; that is, they may arise strictly as the incidental concomitants of the performance of the audible voice. In certain instances, though, poets imbue the silences of their works with the force of intentionality, positing the absence of speech and song as an integral element of the lyric poem. The twentieth century in American poetry witnessed the explicit problematization of silence in the works of the poet and composer John Cage (1912–1992), whose lecture “Nothing to Say” (1949) and whose musical composition 4’33” (1952) present just two of the many examples of Cage’s intellectual engagement with performed restraint from speaking, singing, and playing. Paul Zukofsky, the son of the modernist poet Louis Zukofsky and an artistic collaborator of John Cage, asserted that Cage’s work “elevated silence to a place of importance equal to non-silence.”1

Introduction to the Dialogues on Afterlives and Different Futures for Latin American Art

What theoretical and political exigencies framed the discussions of Latin American art in the 1970s, and what are the afterlives of those formations today? This Dialogues traces a constellation of curators and scholars that participated in the articulation of the field of modern and contemporary Latin American art, paying attention to experimentation and the ways coloniality haunt its development. Authors analyze episodes in the formation of the field, including a prominent international symposium, an audiovisual display as curatorial intervention, and the redefinition of popular art, as well as troubling the subordination of Black art. George Flaherty and Adele Nelson discuss the intensive questioning that constituted the Austin Symposium in 1975, drawing on the previously understudied audio recordings of the conference. Camila Maroja reconsiders the controversial audiovisual presentation by Ángel Kalenberg at the Tenth Paris Biennial (1977) with a view to the transnational cultural politics of the period. Karen Benezra offers that Ticio Escobar’s multidecade reconception of popular art grants space for art by communities historically excluded from both art and the mestizo nation, notably the Ishir Indigenous people of Paraguay. Eddie Chambers issues a challenge and reflects on the limited degree to which the contributions of African-descended artists have been recognized by historians of Latin American art, focusing on Brazil and Cuba. Together these texts propose that questioning and unresolvability can serve as both tools and reminders of the size and significance of the continued work required of the field of modern and contemporary Latin American art.

Projecting Latin America

What theoretical and political exigencies framed the discussions of Latin American art in the 1970s, and what are the afterlives of those formations today? This Dialogues traces a constellation of curators and scholars that participated in the articulation of the field of modern and contemporary Latin American art, paying attention to experimentation and the ways coloniality haunt its development. Authors analyze episodes in the formation of the field, including a prominent international symposium, an audiovisual display as curatorial intervention, and the redefinition of popular art, as well as troubling the subordination of Black art. George Flaherty and Adele Nelson discuss the intensive questioning that constituted the Austin Symposium in 1975, drawing on the previously understudied audio recordings of the conference. Camila Maroja reconsiders the controversial audiovisual presentation by Ángel Kalenberg at the Tenth Paris Biennial (1977) with a view to the transnational cultural politics of the period. Karen Benezra offers that Ticio Escobar’s multidecade reconception of popular art grants space for art by communities historically excluded from both art and the mestizo nation, notably the Ishir Indigenous people of Paraguay. Eddie Chambers issues a challenge and reflects on the limited degree to which the contributions of African-descended artists have been recognized by historians of Latin American art, focusing on Brazil and Cuba. Together these texts propose that questioning and unresolvability can serve as both tools and reminders of the size and significance of the continued work required of the field of modern and contemporary Latin American art.

Ticio Escobar

What theoretical and political exigencies framed the discussions of Latin American art in the 1970s, and what are the afterlives of those formations today? This Dialogues traces a constellation of curators and scholars that participated in the articulation of the field of modern and contemporary Latin American art, paying attention to experimentation and the ways coloniality haunt its development. Authors analyze episodes in the formation of the field, including a prominent international symposium, an audiovisual display as curatorial intervention, and the redefinition of popular art, as well as troubling the subordination of Black art. George Flaherty and Adele Nelson discuss the intensive questioning that constituted the Austin Symposium in 1975, drawing on the previously understudied audio recordings of the conference. Camila Maroja reconsiders the controversial audiovisual presentation by Ángel Kalenberg at the Tenth Paris Biennial (1977) with a view to the transnational cultural politics of the period. Karen Benezra offers that Ticio Escobar’s multidecade reconception of popular art grants space for art by communities historically excluded from both art and the mestizo nation, notably the Ishir Indigenous people of Paraguay. Eddie Chambers issues a challenge and reflects on the limited degree to which the contributions of African-descended artists have been recognized by historians of Latin American art, focusing on Brazil and Cuba. Together these texts propose that questioning and unresolvability can serve as both tools and reminders of the size and significance of the continued work required of the field of modern and contemporary Latin American art.

Accentuating Latin American Art’s African Dimensions

What theoretical and political exigencies framed the discussions of Latin American art in the 1970s, and what are the afterlives of those formations today? This Dialogues traces a constellation of curators and scholars that participated in the articulation of the field of modern and contemporary Latin American art, paying attention to experimentation and the ways coloniality haunt its development. Authors analyze episodes in the formation of the field, including a prominent international symposium, an audiovisual display as curatorial intervention, and the redefinition of popular art, as well as troubling the subordination of Black art. George Flaherty and Adele Nelson discuss the intensive questioning that constituted the Austin Symposium in 1975, drawing on the previously understudied audio recordings of the conference. Camila Maroja reconsiders the controversial audiovisual presentation by Ángel Kalenberg at the Tenth Paris Biennial (1977) with a view to the transnational cultural politics of the period. Karen Benezra offers that Ticio Escobar’s multidecade reconception of popular art grants space for art by communities historically excluded from both art and the mestizo nation, notably the Ishir Indigenous people of Paraguay. Eddie Chambers issues a challenge and reflects on the limited degree to which the contributions of African-descended artists have been recognized by historians of Latin American art, focusing on Brazil and Cuba. Together these texts propose that questioning and unresolvability can serve as both tools and reminders of the size and significance of the continued work required of the field of modern and contemporary Latin American art.

Latin American Art by and for Whom?

What theoretical and political exigencies framed the discussions of Latin American art in the 1970s, and what are the afterlives of those formations today? This Dialogues traces a constellation of curators and scholars that participated in the articulation of the field of modern and contemporary Latin American art, paying attention to experimentation and the ways coloniality haunt its development. Authors analyze episodes in the formation of the field, including a prominent international symposium, an audiovisual display as curatorial intervention, and the redefinition of popular art, as well as troubling the subordination of Black art. George Flaherty and Adele Nelson discuss the intensive questioning that constituted the Austin Symposium in 1975, drawing on the previously understudied audio recordings of the conference. Camila Maroja reconsiders the controversial audiovisual presentation by Ángel Kalenberg at the Tenth Paris Biennial (1977) with a view to the transnational cultural politics of the period. Karen Benezra offers that Ticio Escobar’s multidecade reconception of popular art grants space for art by communities historically excluded from both art and the mestizo nation, notably the Ishir Indigenous people of Paraguay. Eddie Chambers issues a challenge and reflects on the limited degree to which the contributions of African-descended artists have been recognized by historians of Latin American art, focusing on Brazil and Cuba. Together these texts propose that questioning and unresolvability can serve as both tools and reminders of the size and significance of the continued work required of the field of modern and contemporary Latin American art.

The meaningful art of one of the ‘worst movies of all time’: Phil Tucker’s Robot Monster (1953) as an existentialist critique of American modernity

This article analyses one of the ‘worst movies ever made’, Robot Monster (), demonstrating how the text, through weirdness, pulpy absurdity and cinematic ineptitude, examines and mediates on the existential anxieties of modern America during the Cold War. Through the strange language of gorilla-robots and alien invasion, the text articulates those existential anxieties that arise from our awareness of freedom vs. the need to be contingent under increasingly interconnected societal conditions. As such, Robot Monster is also posited as a contribution to contemporary intellectual currents of the 1950s. This article will investigate the sense in which the key aspects of the film: Ro-Man society as mass society; Ro-Man as conflicted between ‘must’ and ‘cannot’; Ro-Man as a gorilla-robot; the perspective of Johnny’s dream, articulate and mediate on those anxieties. An examination of Robot Monster allows us to appreciate the ways in which ‘bad’ cinema creates alternative ways of seeing the problems and existential anxieties of contemporary American modernity.

Laura Marcus (7 March 1956–22 September 2021)

Laura Marcus (7 March 1956–22 September 2021)

Память о Гражданской войне в США в историческом воображении общества потребления

Introduction. The author analyzes the features of the historical memory of the American Civil War in American pop culture as a form of historical memory that dominates in the consumer society. Methods and materials. The problems of imagination and invention of images of the civil war are analyzed in the contexts of cultural history, as well as intellectual history and the history of ideas. Analysis. The author presumes that 1) the historical memory of the U.S. Civil War in modern American identity is heterogeneous; 2) various forms of culture, including “high”, “mass” and “popular”, actualize the images of the civil war; 3) “high” culture became the first form of imagination of the civil war in American identity; 4) in the 20th century, various forms of consumer society culture (“mass” and “popular”) assimilated images of the civil war; 5) “popular” culture presents a “transitional” (from “high” to “mass”) version of the memory of the war. Results. Analyzing the transformation of the Civil War memory in the pseudo-documentary film “C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America” (directed by Kevin Willmott), the author presumes that 1) popular culture reduced the civil war to a minor event in the history of the Confederation; 2) the film offers an alternative version of American historical memory, actualizing the possible trajectories of the “invention” of images of the civil war in the reality where South won; 3) the film is integrated into the intellectual history and archeology of American mass-cult ideas; 4) some texts by American intellectuals belonging to the discourse of alternative history, became cultural stimuli for the project of Kevin Willmott; 5) the transformation of the memory of the Civil War in American pop-culture actualizes the crisis of memory in society, which wasn’t successful in its attempts to overcome the historical trauma of racism and racial discrimination.

Women's Tefillah Groups and the Boundaries of Jewish Orthodoxy

This article looks at women's tefillah (prayer) groups (WTGs) as an anthropological case study to consider how an initially radical movement on the margins quickly moved into, and thereby changed, the center of Jewish Modern Orthodoxy. I take up this example in order to reflect on processes of religious transformation, and to think about Orthodoxy as the product of negotiated boundaries between female lay leaders and male rabbinic authorities. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, the first section gives an account of a WTG service at an American Modern Orthodox synagogue. The following sections document some of the main concerns that motivated and hampered WTG founders and leaders, largely from their perspectives. I examine their establishment of groups in the face of halakhic and institutional opposition, their practical liturgical strategies, and their negotiation of feminist sensibilities and Orthodox piety. The article then offers some concluding thoughts on Orthodoxy as an analytical and theoretical category.

Tessa Roynon, The Classical Tradition in Modern American Fiction

Tessa Roynon, The Classical Tradition in Modern American Fiction

In Extremis: The Wildness of William James

Abstract William James advocates strenuousness as the key to the moral life yet his hunger for extreme experiences sometimes leads him to risk sacrificing morality in their pursuit. This paradox is best represented by James’s fascination with soldiers and warfare as exemplars of the strenuous life. This essay examines the tension between strenuousness and morality in James’s ethical thought through the lens of his celebration of wildness. Wildness, I argue, names the hungry craving for meaning, lust for intense, novel, and risky experiences, and contempt for the banality of American modernity. In response to Sarin Marchetti and Trygve Throntveit’s recent interpretations of James’s moral thought, I argue that a fuller account of a radical empiricist approach to ethics – its originality, its contributions, its shortcomings – demands a deeper engagement with James’s craving for wildness and its implications for grasping the aesthetic-affective registers of his social criticism and political thought.

Divine Parody: Ridiculing America’s Spiritual Crisis in Neil Gaiman’s American Gods

One of the reasons for modern man's mental disorders is a spiritual crisis. In American Gods, Neil Gaiman ridicules this condition by reviving religious, folklore, and mythological entities into new contexts. These entities, however, are simplified as merely intertextual references by most studies. In fact, the new contexts are pragmatically intended to parody American modernity in leading modern man to a spiritual crisis. This research, thus, aims to be a descriptive-analytical study that not only interprets such references through intertextual analysis but also uses pragmatic analysis to examine how the novel parodically portrays modern man's spiritual journey. Deploying Linda Hutcheon's Interpretation of Parody, the Intertextual analysis results that these mythological characters are resituated to represent marginal communities, like ex-convicts, fugitives, drifters, gangsters, immigrants, homeless, laborers, prostitutes, and relocators. While applying Jung's interpretation of the relationship between mythological archetypes and psychological traits, the pragmatic analysis suggests that the hero archetype has been reimagined to caricature modern man's spiritual journey in reconciling his conscious desire with unconscious competencies that resulting disorders in his mental. The factors that influence the hero's mental stability are manifested through the trickster characters in deceiving the hero's consciousness with secular realities, while the sage characters reinforce the hero's unconsciousness through some spiritual journeys.

Contributors’ Notes

Contributors’ Notes

Cather Among the Moderns by Janis P. Stout, and: Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and the Place of Culture by Julie Olin-Ammentorp

Reviewed by: Cather Among the Moderns by Janis P. Stout, and: Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and the Place of Culture by Julie Olin-Ammentorp Catherine Morley CATHER AMONG THE MODERNS, by Janis P. Stout. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2019. 280 pp. $44.95 hardback; $44.95 ebook. EDITH WHARTON, WILLA CATHER, AND THE PLACE OF CULTURE, by Julie Olin-Ammentorp. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2019. 396 pp. $60.00 hardback; $60.00 ebook. Janis Stout’s Cather Among the Moderns and Julie Olin-Ammentorp’s Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, and the Place of Culture each offers a considerable contribution to Willa Cather studies and indeed to Edith Wharton studies in the case of the latter. Both books demonstrate exemplary scholarship in their blending of close literary analysis with historical and biographical insights. Stout and Olin-Ammentorp break new ground in the critical conceptualization of Cather in particular. Interestingly, both books approach their subjects as being deeply attuned to the cultures they occupied and deeply cognizant of the sociopolitical debates that they are often perceived as overlooking in favor of narratives of either ordinary midwesterners or New York upper-class elites. As well as this sense of the writers as culturally and politically engaged, both Stout and Olin-Ammentorp offer portraits of the writers as carefully attentive to the craft and form of writing itself. Cather, in particular, is presented by Stout as a modernist in a similar vein to Virginia Woolf in terms of her attention to formal gaps and elisions (rather wonderfully described by Stout as “vacuoles”), the shape of her texts, and her compulsive revision of them, as well as her deviation from standard generic expectations and parameters as closely aligned to the modernist project of “making it new” (p. 197). [End Page 171] Stout’s study looks to position Cather amongst her contemporaries, contemplating that which makes Cather modern and ultimately that which makes her a modernist writer. Beginning with her early life, Stout looks at the writer’s geographical mobility, which propelled her from Virginia to Nebraska as a child, through to her later journey to Pittsburgh where she embarked upon making a thoroughly modern life, and through the development of her career as a journalist, her immersion in the artistic and cultural life the city afforded, her trips to the Carnegie Institute Art Galleries and Chicago’s Art Institute, and her journeys to England and Europe. Stout astutely links Cather’s mobility to two of the most important aspects of American modernity—migration and immigration—noting that Cather’s travels, while driven by individual choice, set her within a wider sociocultural phenomenon that engendered many of the features that critics and writers now consider to be modern and indeed modernist. Such features include the alienation, dislocation, nervousness, and fragmentation associated with urbanization, with the urban environment most typical of modern and modernist writing. Stout makes the case that these facts of Cather’s early life, as well as the family’s rather disharmonious political leanings, made for a writer who had already begun the process of becoming modern before she had even left Red Cloud, Nebraska for Pittsburgh. Indeed, the key word for Stout in terms of approaching the questions of Cather’s modernity is “transitional,” a writer in motion between states, between worlds, and between identities. Stout makes a compelling case for viewing Cather as transitional in her gender experimentalism and her performance of gendered identities as observed especially during her time at the University of Lincoln, Nebraska, a thread that is picked up in the book’s third chapter, “Among Women.” Rather than viewing Cather’s hairstyle and her choice of clothing as an attempt to masquerade as a man, Stout invites the reader to consider Cather as playing with different versions of femininity. Certainly, Cather is interested in a femininity without the fashionable frills and fuss of her contemporaries but, as Stout observes through careful examination of archival photographs, her dress choices were sophisticated and often observable in the more urbane New Woman styles that she would go on to adopt upon her relocation to the bigger city. This biographical observation of Cather’s transitional femininity—her rejection of categorical...