Class Audiences Research Articles

The Divisive Power of Humour: Comedy, Taste and Symbolic Boundaries

Using British and Dutch interview data, this article demonstrates how people from different social classes draw strong symbolic boundaries on the basis of comedy taste. Eschewing the omnivorousness described in recent studies of cultural consumption, comedy audiences make negative aesthetic and moral judgements on the basis of comedy taste, and often make harsh judgements without the disclaimers, apologies and ambivalence so typical of ‘taste talk’ in contemporary culture. The article demonstrates how, in particular, Dutch and British middle class audiences use their comedy taste to communicate distinction and cultural superiority. We discuss several reasons why such processes of social distancing exist in comedy taste and not other cultural areas: the traditionally low status of comedy; the strong relation between humour and personhood; the continuity between comedy tastes and humour styles in everyday life; as well as the specific position of comedy in the British and Dutch cultural fields.

Horses For Discourses?: The Transition from Oral to Broadside Narrative in “Skewball”

The well-known horse-racing ballad (hereafter, SB) has a well-established oral tradition in Ireland, with versions documented throughout eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The latest is a 1979 field recording of Derry folksinger and storyteller, Eddie Butcher (Shields 2011:58-9). (1) The ballad was also assimilated into African-American oral tradition, in which it was reconstructed and renamed Stewball (Lomax 1994:68-71; Scarborough 1925:61-4), and was still being documented in American folk tradition as late as 1930s (Flanders 1939:172-4). In common with countless other folk songs, SB was appropriated by broadside (2) printers and subsequently enjoyed widespread public appeal throughout England in early- to mid-nineteenth century, its popularity waning with later decline of broadside as a medium of ballad transmission and distribution. A comparative analysis of oral and broadside versions reveals clear differences between two narratives. I argue that these variations were quite deliberate in origin, being a direct result of interpolations and excisions made by broadside ballad printers to original oral narrative. By drawing comparisons between versions of SB collected from both oral and broadside sources, this paper will demonstrate that as a consequence of significant social and cultural advancements in nineteenth century, SB was deliberately revised with aim of enhancing its appeal and relevance to an increasingly literate middle class audience. Historical Context The narrative recounted in SB centres on a historically documented horse race held in Kildare, Ireland on March 30, 1752 (Heber 1753:106). (3) The race in question was a two-horse challenge between Sir Ralph Gore's Grey Mare (Pick 1803:504)--the clear favorite--and Arthur Mervin's Skewball (Pick 1803:91; Harewood 1835:309), a far lesser-known racehorse (if not completely unknown in Ireland), in which latter unexpectedly triumphs to great acclaim. Unsurprisingly, narrative of SB has changed considerably over time. Such variation is to be expected from a ballad that was based on eighteenth-century events in Ireland, enjoyed widespread popular appeal as a nineteenth-century English broadside printing, became established in African-American slave culture and later appeared as a work song among African-American prisoners, (4) and ultimately became popularised on both sides of Atlantic in folk revival of late 1960s and early 1970s. There are, however, key narrative features that are common to all documented oral and broadside versions of ballad, (5) namely: (i) A two-horse challenge for a considerable purse is arranged to be held on the plains of Kildare between Sir Ralph Gore and Arthur Mervin, both of whom were well-known figures in eighteenth-century Irish horse racing circles, and served as presidents of Irish Jockey Club in late 1750s (Carpenter 1998:312). (6) (ii) Although fleeting comparative references are periodically made to other racehorses, only two are mentioned as participating in contest related in ballad. The race favorite is a grey mare owned by Gore and is referred to variously in ballads as either Grey Mare, Maid Sportly, or Miss Portly/Portsley/ Sportl(e)y /Sportsly/Sprightly, or in later versions as Miss Grizzle. (7) The lesser-known challenger--a skewbald gelding--is owned by Marvin and known as Skewball8 throughout all documented versions (iii) Upon hearing of challenge and wager that has been put down, skewbald--the clear second favorite in contest--instructs his master to place a considerable bet as he is assured of victory. Despite established reputation of favorite, Skewball wins easily to both surprise and delight of assembled crowd. Despite both oral and broadside versions of SB sharing overall subject matter and common structure shown above, a comparative analysis of two genres reveals some striking differences. …

Big band jazz in black West Virginia, 1930-1942

Big Band Jazz in Black West Virginia, 1930-1942. By Christopher Wilkinson. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012. 197pp (hardcover). Illustrations. ISBN 978-1-61703-168-7. $55 In 1934, Irving Mills blackballed Jimmie Lunceford from the major New York theatres, radio audiences, and hotel ballrooms that his orchestra had consistently played over the years. Lunceford left after becoming fed up with Mills' exploitation, but the timing, deep in the throes of the Great Depression, was far from perfect. He knew that he had to find the steadiest work possible for his band, and fast, so he hit the road, like so many other jazz musicians did in the 1930s, towards ... the coal camps of West Virginia. Christopher Wilkinson's wonderfully researched Big Band Jazz in Black West Virginia, 1930-1942 yields a number of such revelatory anecdotes as he presents for us the vibrant dance culture of West Virginia during the long 1930s. African-American miners indeed created a remarkable and unique space in the hills of West Virginia, unlike anything witnessed during that time in the Jim Crow South, from where most of them had arrived. Railroad construction and the operation of high-quality bituminous coal mines in West Virginia required highly concentrated labor. African-American sharecroppers from the South were among the first to take advantage of this opportunity, particularly as welcomed members of the United Mine Workers Association; the work was extremely dangerous, but the financial incentive was hard to ignore, particularly after the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 virtually guaranteed the union members well-paying work for the remainder of that tumultuous decade. With disposable cash in hand, they often turned to dance band music. Wilkinson in fact documents 356 public dances held for African-Americans between 1930 and 1942 in the state. African-American southerners indeed had much reason to celebrate in West Virginia: there they wielded a politically influential right to vote, they succeeded in banning racist films such as Birth of a Nation from the state's theaters, secured an anti-lynching law, and, as Wilkinson demonstrates through the vivid remembrance of Lionel Hampton's trumpeter, Joe Wilder, enjoyed the dignify of integrated seating in train cars. One of Wilkinson's contributions lies in his ability to use a musical micro-history of West Virginia's coal camps in order to further disrupt the dichotomies that originally defined the work of many music scholars: those of rural versus urban entertainments, of hot versus sweet jazz adherents, and of the musical preferences of whites versus blacks and middle class versus working class audiences. From the days of medicine shows, West Virginians had become well versed in the cosmopolitan, commercial musics that emanated from New York and Chicago. Enhanced through the distribution of phonographs and the reach of radio deep into the hollers of the mountains, indeed the most well-known orchestras arrived behind a long line of local and territory, or regional, jazz and dance bands that had long played their hit parade renditions both to white and black audiences. Despite the equity gained by African-Americans in some of West Virginia's social and political arenas, their dances remained segregated. Wilkinson demonstrates through his examination of local newspapers how African-American jazz and dance orchestras began to create interesting fissures in the divide: when Don Redman performed at the Fairmont armory in 1934, the West Virginian reported that in addition to the biggest crowd of colored terpsichorean experts ever assembled at one time on the local floor . …

“All Intent on Seeing the White Woman Married to the Red Man”: The Parker/Sackett Affair and the Public Spectacle of Intermarriage

This article examines the events surrounding the 1867 wedding ceremony of Ely Parker, the Seneca sachem and Civil War general, to Minnie Sackett, a young, white socialite. It uses, as its main source of evidence, the newspaper coverage of and public discourse about this fascinating event. The Washington DC public obsessed over the wedding, and even though this was a very public interracial marriage at a particularly tense historical moment that could have motivated outrage and even violence in the nation’s capitol, this article argues that it was Parker’s public presentation of middle–class ideals and standards of Victorian manhood that made him an acceptable husband for a white woman. Furthermore, this article asserts that through the complex interplay of discourses of race, class, and gender, Parker represented the embodiment of primitive masculinity, and yet he was a non–threatening object of public fascination for a sentimentalized, feminized, middle–class audience.

Dangdut Soul: Who are ‘the People’ in Indonesian Popular Music?

This essay is an ideological critique of popular print media about dangdut, a genre of Indonesian popular music. The audience for dangdut has been imagined, represented, and mobilized in various ways to support the ideological interests of commercial, government, and critical institutions. In popular print publications, representations of dangdut as the music of ‘the people’ (rakyat)—the majority of society—have been produced with great frequency and in a variety of popular print media. I describe the ways in which popular print media ‘speaks for’ people, and the relations of power that define those discourses. Using an historical approach, I construct an interpretation of these representational practices, taking into account shifts in the social meaning and function of dangdut's audience. Formerly associated with the disenfranchised and depoliticized underclass, the music was marketed to appeal to middle class and elite audiences in the 1980s. While dangdut's audience has certainly grown, dangdut has not been thoroughly incorporated into the national culture of Indonesia, as claimed by government and military officials in popular print media. By taking this approach, I seek to provide a critical understanding of Indonesian media and its construction of popular music audiences within the changing social and historical conditions of modern Indonesia.

‘A Distinct Advance in Society’: Early Cinema's ‘Proletarian Public Sphere’ and Isolated Spectatorship in the UK, 1911-18

The conversational and interactive ‘picture theatre’ auditorium, a relative of the working-class music hall, the public house and the football stand, is frequently described in commentaries dating from its first years in the UK, between 1908 and c.1915. The predominantly working class audiences of these years appear to have regarded the new picture theatres as social venues, a locus for a form of public participation (see Hiley 1995: 163-4; Low 1948: 25-7). Rachael Low described the new purpose-converted and purpose-built picture theatres of the immediate pre-war period as ‘a new type of impersonal community centre’ (1948: 15). The relation of the new audiences to the screened image was conditioned both by these forms of working-class communal behaviour – the novelist and journalist Thomas Anstey Guthrie describing the working-class music hall in 1891 as ‘a cascade of whooping hobbardyhoydom’ (1891: 194) – and by habits of spectatorship derived from a range of public amusements including freak shows, circuses and magic shows. For Tom Gunning, the sensation of bewilderment at ‘a realm of impalpable phantoms’ (2000: 318) felt by the viewers of the ‘cinema of attractions’ (1895-c.1908) – a sense of magical wonder concentrated rather than diminished by cinema’s enhanced reality – relates to the treatment of optics inhering in practices of projection, animation and chemical image reproduction that had originated as early as the sixteenth century (Gunning 2000; see also Gunning 1988, 1990b, 1994, 1995). The magic lantern and the camera obscura had long been operated to provoke, and witnessed with, as much a sense of amazement as a sober appreciation of their

Music in Other Words: Victorian Conversations, and: The Idea of Music in Victorian Fiction (review)

Music in Other Words: Victorian Conversations. By Ruth A. Solie. (California Studies in 19th-century Music.) Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. [223 p. ISBN 0-520-23845-1. $39.95.] Illustrations, index. Idea of Music in Victorian Fiction. Edited by Sophie Fuller and Nicky Losseff. (Music in Nineteenth-Century Britain.) Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004. [xx, 297 p. ISBN 0-7546-0577-9. $109.95.] Index, bibliography. Both these books are volumes in nineteenth-century series but only Solie's earned ML780 classification status at C-I-P stage of production, Fuller/ Losseff being properly assessed as literary criticism (PR823). Solie's prize-winning book (a finalist for 2005 American Musicological Society Kinkeldey Award) collects and refreshes four essays published earlier and adds two that are new. Fuller and Losseff bring together essays by eleven academic specialists in literature and musicology, some of which rework conference papers. Both books are fully indexed and carry welcome footnotes as both documentation and commentary. Fuller/Losseff collects bibliographic information from those citations into a bibliography of whole, helpfully divided into categories of primary and secondary literature. Both books begin with essays that serve as overviews, Solie's eloquently stating her interest in investigating what Leo Treitler called cardinal importance of 'what goes without saying' (p. 1) in a given culture's texts-all that is taken for granted or assumed be obvious. Solie explains that she took a casual comment by Leonard Meyer regarding cultural scuttlebutt as a definition of texts pursue help her make explicit the degree which Victorian world was saturated with music (p. 1). Edward Burne-Jones's painting Golden Stairs is given in color reproduction on dust jacket and in graytone as frontispiece her book and Solie says she found it helpful to look away from professional discourse of musicians and use sources as disparate and unlikely as journalism, novels, and teenagers' diaries unearth conversations that reveal music's place in nineteenth-century European and North American culture (p. 2). Fuller and Losseff's introduction comments on all essays in their book. Their purpose is interdisciplinary (musicology and literary criticism) but limited exploring British works of fiction, sufficient sources for myriad themes: reception, practice, societal issues, aesthetic assumptions and urgent late-nineteenth-century matter of personal and national identity. Unifying care was taken in both books refer chapters ahead and behind, as appropriate. Neither book has a sewn binding. UC Press product is printed on minimally permanent paper with a gluedon headband, and inner margins wide enough for eventual rebinding, while bare-bones Ashgate book, which opens easily enough, makes no claim permanence but could also withstand one rebinding. Fuller and Losseff, only slightly longer but nearly three times as expensive as Solie's book, and more limited in scope, is also generally cast in far more formidable academic language. Nicky Losseff, both a Lecturer in Music at University of York and a pianist specializing in contemporary music, offers chapter one: The Voice, Breath and Soul: Song and Poverty in Thyrta, Mary Barton, Alton Locke and A Child of Jago. Its twice-footnoted first sentence challenges readers know what sage writers are, tolerate notion yet again, and later withstand problematized (p. 3). novels Losseff examines originally had a working class audience and their singing characters were set in economically poor environments where air was foul. They dreamt of freedom of breath such as came on a rare fresh-air day, kind that London sees but once in half a dozen winters as one author put it (p. 15). Spirituality and religion (pointedly not same thing) and sacrifice are also treated in these novels and Losseff digs deeply into authors' research, their personal experience with poverty, and social, spiritual, and individual meanings they projected on singing in their works. …

Moonshine and Magnolias: The Story of Temple Drake and The Birth of a Nation

Moonshine and Magnolias: The Story of Temple Drake and The Birth of a Nation Deborah Barker (bio) Deborah Barker University of Mississippi Deborah Barker Deborah Barker’s first book, Aesthetics and Gender in American Literature: The Portrait of the Woman Artist, delineates the aesthetic debates surrounding the fictional image of the woman artist. She is associate professor of English at the University of Mississippi, and her current book project, entitled The Rape of the South, explores the uses of sexual and racial violence in the cinematic South. Footnotes 1. In 1933, the furor over the release of The Story of Temple Drake helped to strengthen the Production Code—Hollywood’s self-imposed code of censorship—and its enforcement under Joe Breen, who, in turn, prevented the movie’s rerelease. The film was not shown again until 1958. It is still associated with the pre- Code period and was shown in 1999 as part of a pre-Code film festival. As recently as July 2005 it was shown in New York at the Film Forum. 2. Ramsey discusses the advertisements of The Story of Temple Drake that prominently link Faulkner’s name to the film and even directly connect the film to Sanctuary despite Breen’s order not to use the name of the novel (20). 3. As Bernardi explains, “Griffith’s articulations of style and of race are involved in the same cinematic and discursive processes; pragmatically, they co-constitute the filmmaker’s narrative system” (“Voice” 104). 4. As is true of his innovations in cinematic structure—Griffith did not invent the new techniques but he combined them in innovative ways—his The Birth of a Nation was not the first film to associate itself with “Art” in order to appeal to a white middle class audience, but it was able to capitalize on the cinematic move to respectability in a way that captured the attention of the American public, both black and white. Many white Americans chose to see The Birth of a Nation as an unproblematic representation of the historical truth of white superiority; the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the black press, however, condemned the film for its racism and sought to prevent it from being shown. For an extensive discussion of the black press’s response to the novel, play, and film, see Everett 59-106. 5. As Hall argues, the implied punishment for those who violate the taboos include white Southern women (333-40). “A woman who had just been raped, or who had been apprehended in a clandestine interracial affair, or whose male relatives were pretending that she had been raped, stood on display before the whole community. Here was the quintessential Woman as victim: polluted, ‘ruined for life,’ the object of fantasy and secret contempt” (335). 6. Thomas Reid, an important Scottish realist philosopher, maintained that outward beauty is a sign of the goodness of the mind (Martin 42). 7. Before The Birth of a Nation, The Leopard’s Spots and The Clansman were converted by Dixon into a successful play, which included the conflation of Flora and Marion. The scene in the cellar and the chase sequence with Gus, Flora, and Ben are Griffiths additions. This type of scene is very characteristic of Griffith’s style; he often created a sense of the home, typically a place of security, as a claustrophobic scene of entrapment with cross cuts to the danger that confronts the home, in this case the black troops. 8. At the war’s end many Southern states established Black Codes, which required African Americans to have written proof of employment and prevented anyone from offering work to an African American already under contract (Foner 198-99). The Black Codes were abolished under Radical Reconstruction, but the end of Reconstruction brought back laws, especially vagrancy laws, and “antienticement” laws which were enforced primarily to control black labor (Foner 587-98). 9. Historian Arthur S. Link asserts that the cotton crisis of 1914-1915 “left deep scars upon the South and a residue of intense anti-British sentiment,” making “the South one of the chief centers of resistance to military and naval expansion and to strong...

Dilemma at 29,000 Feet: An Exercise in Ethical Decision Making Based on the 1996 Mt. Everest Climbing Disaster

This article describes an exercise based on the 1996 Mt. Everest mountain climbing disaster designed to teach concepts related to ethical decision making. The exercise requires analyzing multiple sides of an ethical dilemma, making an ethically defensible decision and applying this decision to current business and management practices. Instructions for teaching are outlined and resources provided. Class context and audience are described, methods for evaluation suggested. Student feedback illustrates the benefits of using the Everest events to introduce concepts related to ethical decision making. Contributions to this case study for teaching introductory organizational behavior and management ethics and values are presented.

Classes of readers: Owners of books in 18th-century The Hague

Within the history of books, the second half of the 18th century is viewed as a period in which important developments took place: the production of titles grew substantially and there was increasing differentiation of titles. Common opinion has been that these alterations in the supply of titles cannot but indicate an increasing demand for reading matter. Several explanatory theories have been formulated based on this assumption, for instance Engelsing's Leserevolution and Plumb's connection with an English ‘consumer revolution’. These theories focus on a new, mainly middle class audience. Using data gathered from household inventories, this paper shows that book ownership in the city of The Hague, the political capital of Holland, increased in the first half of the 18th century. After this period, however, growth stagnated, and the number of book owners no longer increased. Thus, we may surmise that the assumed increase in demand for books in the second half of the 18th century was a rather hasty conclusion, and that the growth and differentiation in the supply of books was a result of stagnation in demand. Moreover, the increase in book possession in the first half of the 18th century was not due to a middle class which came to possess ever more books, but due to the lower classes who became owners of (ritual) books for the first time, and especially to the growing collections of the elite. Book possession did become more varied, but this is true only of the period up to about 1750. Additionally, I found no evidence for another general assumption, the secularisation of book possession. The relative proportion of Bibles, hymn and church books indeed decreased, but the possession of collections of sermons and other religious ‘miscellany’ grew. Cluster analysis shows that the possession of theological books seems more strongly related to religious persuasion than to the socio-economic background of the possessors. Application of this method also suggests that the majority of books in 18th-century bookcases in The Hague often served other purposes than reading per se. The texts which literary historians usually associate with the middle classes, like travel stories, novels and spectatorial magazines, only appeared in the libraries of the elite.

The Reader as Consumer

Edward Bok used say that he edited Ladies' Home Journal with an ideal woman in mind. He first saw her not long after he became Journal's editor in 1889, when he and Cyrus Curtis took a trip several small cities study needs of American people. He saw woman at church and later at a concert with her husband and children. He passed her house, which had an air of homeness and refinement, and he concluded that woman herself seemed, by her dress, manner, and in every way, be typical of best in American womanhood.1 The key word in Bok's assessment was best. From about 1890, he and other members of staff of Curtis Publishing Company continually tried make case that Curtis publications reached elite of American society-people with culture and, most important, people with money. The company told advertisers that Curtis publications, with their high grade artwork and printing, appealed only the intelligent, earnest and progressive.' The Ladies' Home Journal was designed for home loving, while Saturday Evening Post was designed for men and women who desire a wholesome, sane and entertaining treatment of modern life in fiction and in fact.2 The Post's editor, George Horace Lorimer, said that Post appealed to two classes of men: Men with income, and men who are going have incomes, and second is quite as important as first advertiser.3 Similarly, Curtis proclaimed its Public Ledger newspaper publication of intelligent masses, asking advertisers: What kind of people do you wish reach in Philadelphia?4 Even as publisher of two widest-circulating magazines of 1910s and 1920s, though, Curtis Publishing couldn't escape scrutiny of advertisers who wanted proof of its readership claims. Bok noted in 1913 that Journal had been criticized for being read too many girls and not enough serious-minded women, although he discounted any such criticism as speculation.5 Companies such as Peerless, Packard, and Pierce-Arrow automobiles doubted that buyers of their products actually read Curtis publications, and they were, therefore, reluctant buy Curtis advertising.6 The advertising manager of Thomas B. Jeffery Company, maker of Rambler Motor Cars, criticized magazines in general for crowing about their widespread circulations but failing provide accurate information back up their claims that their readers were buyers.' More widespread were concerns that magazines, including those published Curtis, failed reach a unique audience. That is, readers tended subscribe more than one periodical. Advertisers who sought largest audience at lowest cost often saw such duplication as wasteful and inefficient. Why, advertisers asked, should they buy space in both Post and Journal if same families subscribed both magazines?8 To blunt such criticism and prove that it reached both a mass and a class audience, Curtis began using its nascent Division of Commercial Research, which was formed in 1911, compile information about readers. Its early readership reports appear be among first ever conducted an American publisher. This paper uses those studies, along with speeches, advertisements, articles, and other sources from Curtis Publishing Company, show how consumer culture that emerged at turn of century shaped way magazines thought about readers. In doing so, it explores some of origins of readership research and shows that even before readership research began, publications portrayed their audiences in ways that would attract advertisers. The most-coveted audience from a commercial standpoint was a buying audience. Over past ten or so years, researchers have begun ask historical questions about readers of newspapers and magazines. Much of research in this area has focused on eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and has provided important insights into readers and readership. …

Resisting Translation: Slang and Subversion in the Rebétika

Resisting Translation: Slang and Subversion in the Rebétika Gail Hokt-Warhaft ΜπουζοϕκιγλÎ-ντιτοϕντουνιά ΓλÎ-νταγεςτουςμάγκες Κι οι πλοϕσιοι σου κάνανε Μεγάλεςματσαϕάγκες. Τώϕασεβαλανσεχαλιά Και σε σαλόνια πάνω Ακόμακιαπότοβιολί Δυοσκάλεςπαϕαπάνω. ΜεασανσÎ-ϕανÎ-βηκες Σε πολυκατοικίες ΚιÎ-παιξεςκαιγουστάϕανε Αφάν-γκατÎ-κυϕίες. Τώϕα θ' ανÎ-βεις πιο ψηλά Θα φτάσεις και στον Αϕη Κι ο Απόλλων ο Θεός Κιαυτός9ασεγουστάϕει. Bouzouki, the world's joy, you made AU the manghes happy But now the rich have played A dirty trick on you. They put you on their carpets In their smart salons Higher than the violin Two steps further up. In an elevator you went Up to their apartments; You played and they were really sent Those smart society dames. Now you'll rise still further, go High as divine Ares Right to the god Apollo, He'll really dig you too.1 What is it about the rebétika which has made them both popular with some middle and upper class audiences and despised by others? Apart from their intrinsic musical merit, they cater to what seems to be a universal fascination for sampling low-life at a distance. As Vamvakaris ' song makes clear, this sort of vicarious excitement is a form of voyeurism that may deceive the performer as well as the audience. The appropriation of rebetika by recording companies, bourgeois audiences, afficionados and scholars has undoutedly weakened their credibility as an expression of the sub-culture where they originated. At the same time musical and linguistic elements of rebetika have filtered into composed music and everyday speech, so subtly subJournal of Modern Greek Studies, Volume 8, 1990. 183 184 Gail Holst-Warhaft verting a culture in the course of being appropriated. In the special context of Greece where the issue of "pure" language has been so bitterly disputed, not only the subject matter, but the language of the rebetika is especially provocative. Slang was once used by the rebétes, as it is by other marginalized groups, as a deliberate barrier intended to resist comprehension by the society at large. The slang we find in the recorded rebetika songs is no longer functional, but is retained in part as a deliberate rhetorical strategy to give authentic underworld flavor to the songs and at the same time to provoke the establishment. Part of its allure is a delight in what black American English calls "signifying," the use of indirect figures of speech for their own sake. Translating the slang-filled lyrics of the rebetika into another language , especially one like English, raises serious theoretical and practical problems some of which I will illustrate in this paper. My conclusion is that any solutions we arrive at do little more than remind us that the language of the rebetika resists, among other things, translation . Slang and the Rebetika Although the rebetika employ slang expressions from the secret language of the drug-users and other underworld groups, they are never composed in the entirely cryptic argot such sub-cultures habitually employ. The Dalals of Benares, swindlers who act as middlemen for the silk-merchants of that city, speak a restricted language whose grammatical patterns and vocabulary are drawn almost exclusively from the majority language, Hindi, so that it cannot be called a dialect, but yet is sufficiently impenetrable to the average Hindi speaker to constitute a cant or secret language.2 Slang usually has in common with such secret languages the fact that it often originates "in communicative situations that are under some kind of stress or even oppression" (Sornig 1981: 1). This may account for the fact that most slang occurs in urban areas, or areas in which social groups come into unexpected contact with one another. Urban life, for most of the citizens of Athens as of other European capitals, begins in subordination . The influx of Asia Minor refugees into Piraeus and outer suburbs of Athens in the 1920s marked the beginnings of a large and disaffected urban population in Greece and of the enforced contact between different linguistic groups that is responsible for the extraordinarily innovative quality of urban slang. Foreign borrowings are common to all slang—as are loan translations (cf. Italian erba via English "grass" = marijuana). Similarly slang freely adapts lexical material already in use, substituting one word for another (mavro- Resisting Translation: Rebetika 185 black=marijuana). It is the subnorms of language, the slang of the sailor and the criminal, the hashish smoker and the motor-bike gangs that help bring about...

Stories of supervision: Tutorials in a transformative practice of supervision

Four years ago I began asking students in a graduate course on instructional supervision to present what I called incidents in supervision. I explained that they were to think of experiences that stood out in their memories, experiences of being supervised themselves or of being the supervisor, and that these experiences should still trigger in them an emotional reaction-either positive or negative-even though the events themselves were long past. The students were to provide sufficient information and detail to engage the class audience in the experience, and then were to analyze the experience for its implications for supervisory theory and/or practice. My expectations for the assignment were that the analysis of the critical would be most important. Perhaps I was seduced by the instrumentalist implications of the term incident to think that recognition and analysis of key events is a linear process by which felt experience is sanitized and transformed into the purer form of theory. I was wrong. Frankly, the analyses were usually rather thin and unmemorable. The experiences recounted by students, however, were compelling and have left their impression on me and on other members of the various class audiences. We remember details and feelings, characters and consequences. In other words, we remember stories, and by our associations of the stories with their authors, we remember the storytellers as well. I, for instance, have much better recall of the stories told by those whose names fill pages in my grade book from past semesters

The British Press's Coverage of Health: An Antagonistic Force

A content analysis revealed that Britain's 'popular' press provided generally less health information to its relatively lower social class audience in comparison to the information provided by the 'quality' press to its upper class audience. The implications of these findings for the public, health educators and journalists are discussed.

Two Plays, ‘Sodom and Gomorrah’ and ‘Comedy: A Tragedy in One Act’ by Nikos Kazantzakis

Reviews 387 director was doing at the same time. This problem of chronology some­ times defeats even Styan, who at times plays fast and loose with the dates of his supporting documents, especially regarding the productions revamped over a period of years. Readers should therefore exercise cau­ tion when sorting through Styan’s supporting quotations. For example, Granville Barker visited Germany in 1910; his views, published that year, are cited to describe the 1933 version of Faust and the 1912 British version of Oedipus. There are other occasional slips: Reinhardt’s produc­ tion of The Taming of the Shrew which, Styan alleges on p. 54, Martin Harvey brought to the Prince of Wales’ Theatre in 1909, did not exist. (Harvey produced his own Reinhardt-inspired version of the play in 1913, assisted by William Poel, which Huntly Carter describes in The Theatre of Max Reinhardt, evidently Styan’s source). Surely Styan need hardly repeat Gottfried Reinhardt’s rather inane observation that his father reached working class audiences as Piscator and Brecht never did. And while Reinhardt’s use of the repertory system clearly impressed Edwardian Englishmen, it can hardly be said to be a contribution to Continental theatre practice. The book is good for what it is, but it is important to identify what it is not, namely, a truly comprehensive study of Reinhardt’s aesthetics and working methods. Only in the last chapter does Styan begin to de­ scribe not only Reinhardt’s effects but also his method of preparing them, of selecting and analyzing his texts, and of managing the vast mechanical and human resources assembled for each production; this chapter could be a book in itself. Edward Gordon Craig used to complain that Rein­ hardt was a manager and not an artist (see The Mask, 4, No. 3 (1912], 5, No. 4 [1913], and Fourteen Notes on Eight Pages from The Story of the Theatre by Glenn Hughes [Seattle, 1931], pp. 7, 19); but it was precisely Reinhardt’s ability to harness his own eclectic tendencies and the varied talents of his collaborators that made him a great practitioner if not a great theorist, and this surely needs more extensive treatment. Styan repeatedly reminds us of Reinhardt’s belief in the centrality of the actor’s performance, but he only spends four pages in the final chapter in discussing how the director selected his casts and worked with the actors in rehearsal. One wonders who imposed the space limitations that Styan mentions (on p. 108), for surely a longer and more comprehen­ sive study is needed, a massive analysis of Reinhardt’s multiform aesthetic as it emerged over time, on the scale of Edward Braun’s studies of Meyerhold. In the meantime, we must be grateful for this short study in the Cambridge series, which serves to convince us of the importance of the artist and the range, vitality, and sheer volume of his work. CARY M. MAZER University of Pennsylvania Nikos Kazantzakis. Two Plays, ‘Sodom and Gomorrah’ and 'Comedy: A Tragedy in One Act.’ Translated from the Greek by Kimon Friar. Minneapolis: North Central Publishing Company, 1982. Pp. 124. The eighth volume in the Nostos Books series on modem Greek 388 Comparative Drama writers and thinkers, edited by historian Theofanis Stavrou, appeared one year before the celebration of the centenary of Nikos Kazantzakis’s birth (1883-1957). Kazantzakis is, of course, the famous Cretan writer and thinker who composed at least eighteen dramas in metrical or free verse, and in prose, while he was writing several major novels and his colossal epic of modem man, The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel (1938; English translation by Kimon Friar, 1958). Sodom and Gomorrah and Comedy: A Tragedy in One Act were expertly translated by Kimon Friar who also wrote the scholarly intro­ duction to the first play. Professor Kark Kerenyi did the introduction to the one-act play, and Professor Peter Bien turned it into eloquent English. All translations were first published in 1975 and 1976 issues of The Literary Review, and the longer play, under the title Burn Me to Ashes, had its world première some twenty years ago in the Jan Hus Playhouse in New York...

The Writer and his Middle Class Audience Frank Norris, a Case in Point

Journal of American CultureVolume 3, Issue 1 p. 105-112 The Writer and his Middle Class Audience Frank Norris, a Case in Point Robert A. Morace, Robert A. Morace Member of the English faculty at Daemer CollegeSearch for more papers by this author Robert A. Morace, Robert A. Morace Member of the English faculty at Daemer CollegeSearch for more papers by this author First published: Spring 1980 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1542-734X.1980.0301_105.xAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Volume3, Issue1Spring 1980Pages 105-112 RelatedInformation

Drama for the Disadvantaged

Teaching in a Negro college whose student body is largely what is called disadvantaged, I find that my most successful projects involve drama, or dramatizing life and literature. Some two thousand years ago, in the Poetics, Aristotle wrote that action on a stage provides the spectator with an opportunity to purge his own strong emotions harmlessly through identifi cation with the events and people on that stage. Drama may be the only art form which fully recognizes man's gregarious nature. Sometimes students are considered dull because they are unresponsive to the usual academic approach and need to be awakened imaginatively. I discovered that one of my most successful teaching experi ences was a classroom for Freshmen who listened to Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, re corded by the original Broadway cast. Students followed the play in their anthologies. At the end of the record, there was not a dry eye in the room. One boy broke the passionate silence with, Loman is my father Immediately students burst into talk, all simultaneously. Willy was their uncle, their brothers, their neighbors, they themselves. They knew him intimately. students derived such an emotional impact from the play that I ordered a film of Death of a Salesman, for classroom viewing. Following the film, the discussion sur prisingly developed that most of the students liked the recording better. Why? Their reasons?vari ous and thoughtful?suggested that the records allowed the listener free play of imagination, a chance to picture characters in their minds. One girl said she had conceived of the family as Ne groes. movie dispelled this preferred idea. She concluded: All families have the same problems. I quoted the opening of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina to her: Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. She expressed interest in the book, and later we had a remarkable conversation about Tolstoy. That was the first novel she had ever finished reading ! Perhaps more important than reading plays and listening to them on records is the students' actual participation in classroom presentations. There are many ways of involving students, from role playing to acting in a classroom production. Each semester I increase my library of mimeo graphed scripts of one act plays. Often we have readings of an adaptation of Chekhov's The Proposal, a farce about a neighbor coming to ask the hand of a landowner's daughter. In his shy ness and awkwardness, the neighbor gets into quarrels about acreage and dogs . . . whose dog is better, the neighbor's or the young woman's? Both the actors and the class audience relish this drama and find ready identification with the characters.

The Passive Female: Her Comparative Image by Class and Culture in Women's Magazine Fiction

Passivity, a trait prevalent in all oppressed groups, is hypothesized to be ideal in women regardless of class or culture. Using indicators of passivity drawn from a sample of 202 examples of women's magazine fiction of working class and middle class audiences in the United States and Latin America, the image of female passivity is upheld. There are significant differences by culture, with the Latin American fiction stressing passivity more. Differences by class are also found, although not so marked as the cultural differences. Middle class fiction is more likely to stress passivity than working class fiction. These differences-and the similarities-among class and culture are related to the position of women in the different settings.