Historiographical Concepts Research Articles

Usos políticos e historiográficos del concepto de Reconquista

En este trabajo se ofrece una panorámica sobre la forma en que el concepto de Reconquista fue utilizado con diversos objetivos ideológicos y políticos entre finales del siglo XV y principios del siglo XX. El recorrido inicia con el reinado de los Reyes Católicos para centrarse, posteriormente, en la doble utilización del discurso reconquistador a lo largo de los siglos XVI y XVII como arma de propaganda política en contra de los enemigos de la monarquía hispana y como vehículo privilegiado en la conformación de una identidad colectiva para todos los súbditos del rey católico, amén de su utilización para legitimar a la dinastía borbónica. Así mismo, se analizan los múltiples usos que los diferentes grupos políticos hicieron del discurso reconquistador a lo largo del siglo XIX constatándose su utilización en el impulso a la resistencia contra los invasores napoleónicos, en la construcción de un discurso nacional, en la legitimación del proyecto restauracionista de Antonio Cánovas y en la conformación del proyecto histórico-político catalán del último tercio de la centuria. Ello permite constatar que, ya en el siglo XX, los golpistas del año 1936 recuperaron los discursos y las imágenes empleados en el siglo XIX para presentar su movimiento como una auténtica «reconquista» que buscaba recuperar las esencia nacionales; con ello, la «Reconquista» dejó de ser únicamente una categoría historiográfica y se transformó en una categoría política.

“Modernity”: The Peregrinations of a Contested Historiographical Concept

THE EVIDENCE FOR MODERNITY’S OBSOLESCENCE as an analytical concept for historical study is both overwhelming and overstated. Many of the polemical barbs that have been directed against modernity by practitioners of global and postcolonial history are fair-minded and compelling. After all, empirically speaking, modernity has often been used as a transparent normative justification for the West’s predatory and imperious mission civilisatrice. As “moderns”—that is, as the presumptive representatives of a more advanced stage of civilization—Europeans customarily assumed that it was their moral duty to rescue non-European peoples, still mired in the backwardness of their traditional ways, from their condition of ignorance and dereliction. During the nineteenth century, the discourse of Western legalism—of rights and sovereignty—was employed as an ideological justification for European colonialism, in Africa in particular. The fact that native inhabitants lacked the Western concept of sovereignty was employed as a pretext both to deny them the right to self-rule and, correlatively, to justify colonial legal and political trusteeship, with its attendant horrors and excesses. 1 To peruse any creditable survey of the history of European colonialism makes Hegel’s bon mot concerning history as a “slaughterbench on which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of states, and the virtue of individuals have been sacrificed” look like an egregious understatement. 2 In the Belgian Congo alone, the overall toll from King Leopold II’s draconian policies is estimated at ten million needless and senseless deaths. Even when, following World War II, the era of decolonization erupted, in many instances local elites, having been exposed to the pro-Western biases of the European educational system, felt that their only recourse lay in formulating their own path to modernity—so thoroughly had they internalized the ideological idiom of their oppressors. Thus, rather than looking inward and cultivating their own indigenous cultural and political traditions, they perceived their primary goal as catching up with the West. Even today, non-Western historians take their bearings almost exclusively from their European progenitors. As Dipesh Chakrabarty has observed, “Insofar as the 1 See Martti Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law, 1870–1960 (New York, 2002), 98–110. 2 G. W. F. Hegel,Reason in History: A General Introduction to the Philosophy of History (Indianapolis, 1953), 27.

Pleasure and transcendence of the self: Notes on ‘a dialogue too soon interrupted’ between Michel Foucault and Pierre Hadot

The fact that the notion of ‘practice’ has achieved an ever-increasing relevance in the most various fields of knowledge must not overshadow that it can be interpreted in so many different ways as to orient fairly different historiographical paradigms and philosophical conceptions. Starting with the two main issues of Hadot’s criticism of Foucault (the lack of a distinction between joy and pleasure and the fact that his account does not underscore that the individual Self is ultimately transcended by universal Reason), I have tried to show how the two scholars’ philosophical and historiographical approaches entail a different notion of ‘practice’. According to Hadot, the performativity of a practice (or spiritual exercise) is intimately tied to a universal which transcends the individual self, whereas Foucault maintains that it does not require the appeal to any universal, being exclusively grounded on the modes of exertion of the practices which constitute the individual Self. According to this address, pleasure is a fundamental notion in order to historicize the different ways in which the ethical subject structures itself.

Weitwinkel – Nahaufnahme: Zeitperspektiven in der Wissenschaftsgeschichte

AbstractClose‐Ups and Long Shots: Perspectives on Time in the History of Science. In the last decade, historians of science have shown a growing interest in the question of time. Especially when looking at the huge amount of valuable work performed within the methodological frames of microhistory, experimental and social history of science, the question has come up how to re‐integrate ‘longue‐durée‐perspectives’ into historiography of science. The Society for History of Science has dedicated its 45th symposion (1 to 3 Mai 2008) in Halle to this question. This introduction deals with the problems of different and may be incommensurable modes of ‘being‐in‐time’. How can different perspectives on time be combined, how can “close‐ups”, together with “long shots” (Gianna Pomata) make sense in the history of science? The quest for a narrative transporting the simultaneity of the non‐simultaneous, or, as Koselleck's “Zeitschichten” could be translated, of different layers of time, may start with a criticism of the homogeneous and empty time (Benjamin) and its colonizing connotations, or, with re‐examining historiographical concepts of discontinuity (e.g. scientific revolutions, breaks, eras and epochs) and their relationship to concepts of continuity. Recent accounts in the history of science have insisted on the non‐disposability (Unverfügbarkeit) of historical events, on their contingency. And this is possibly an effect of the different time‐structures of the objects of historiography.

Von der „Erfindung“ der Renaissance zur Praxis der Neorenaissance. Paris – Dresden – Berlin – Budapest

The conception of Renaissance as a specific artistic style and cultural epoch is remarkably young: it has been developped in the trend-setting circles of Paris around 1820–1830 – the French word is keeping the memory of this origin – and spread to other languages in the following years. There is a close connection between this historiographic concept and the development of Neorenaissance architecture from the 1830s onwards. In the years around 1840, Parisian domestic architecture and interior decoration were reviving the magnificent French culture of the reign of François I whereas the first renaissance of Italian Renaissance architecture emerged in Dresden. Particularly, the public and private buildings planned by Gottfried Semper (First Hoftheater, Dresden Gallery, Villa Rosa) were the decisive models for the establishment of the Neorenaissance system in German architecture. In Berlin, neoclassical tradition was continued by the Schinkel school into the second half of the 19th century, but in the years around 1870 the architects of the new capital of imperial Germany took up the Neorenaissance style in a general way. That's why the young Budapest architects who studied in Berlin took over the new architectural system and applied it systematically to the massive extension of the capital of Hungary realized in the 1870s. By this way, Budapest turned into the purest model of Neorenaissance urban architecture still existing in Europe.

Was there an Amerindian Atlantic? Reflections on the limits of a historiographical concept

Proponents of the increasingly prominent “Atlantic history” paradigm argue that ocean-centered, transnational perspectives shed crucial light on connections which tied together Europe, Africa and the Americas in the early modern period, and which older forms of national and imperial histories obscured. In spite of these scholars’ calls for the construction of a truly inclusive history of the Atlantic basin and all its inhabitants, Amerindian peoples have received relatively little attention in the work of Atlantic historians. This article examines the place Amerindians have held in scholarship on the early modern Atlantic. It argues that it is precisely because Atlantic history has been constructed from fundamentally Eurocentric categories like transatlantic empire and commerce that it has accorded little space to Amerindians. It points to this absence as an important shortcoming of such approaches, and suggests that Atlantic history will have to be reconceptualized in fundamental ways in order to bring Amerindians fully into the picture as historical actors.

Un semillero de controversias: La epopeya de Artigas de Zorrilla de San Martín

A polysemic text La Epopeya de Artigas (first edition 1910), reelaborated throughout one decade of deep social and political changes in Uruguay, showed some historiographical conceptions that tried to overcome pure and harmless erudition and the dryness of positivism, ignited the polemic, forcing his author to polemize with writers from different backgrounds and with different intentions.

Communications Revolutions: A Historiographical Concept

Communications Revolutions: A Historiographical Concept

History, Memory and Montage in Anne Duden's Das Judasschaf

AbstractThis article uses Theodor Adorno's ideas on the role of the artwork and Walter Benjamin's philosophy of history and his concept of ‘Eingedenken’ to examine the types of memory and the modes of remembering the Holocaust in Anne Duden's novel, Das Judasschaf (1985). It focuses on the complex re‐figuring of quotations, images, Renaissance paintings, and documentary materials in order to assess the politics of montage and the presenting of documents which interrupt the flow of the narrative. Analysis of the use of some contemporary historiographical concepts such as identification, empathy and ‘the gap’ feeds into the reading of Duden's text. The argument centres on non‐empathetic remembrance rather than identification with the victims as a more useful way of understanding the types of memory in the text.

Frömmigkeitsgeschichte und Kulturgeschichtsschreibung. Überlegungen zur Kirchenhistoriographie Karl Aners (1879–1933)

The discussion of German theology around 1900 was stamped by a dual perspective in regard to the ‘history of religion’. In the first instance the efforts at discussion pointed to a subjectivistic culture of religion and piety, while in the other it was a matter of a consistent historicization of positive religion. In the writing of church history K. Sell took up the first impulse and connected it with reflections of a collective historiographical concept (E. Gothein, K. Lamprecht). The historiographic interest thus lent credibility to a church-historical perspective of ‘folk religion’ or ‘popular piety’. K. Aner’s ’Das Luthervolk. Ein Gang durch die Geschichte seiner Froemmigkeit’ was the first collective history of piety of German Lutheranism to be written in the manner demanded by Sells. As a church historian presumably strongly influenced by the theology of Ritschl, Aner thereby united the idea of a historiography of piety with the concept of the writing of cultural history in the spirit of G. Freytag and K. Lamprecht, for which the concept of ‘folk soul’ served as a central category. Within the theological controversy concerning the controversial relationship between subjective and objective religion or between individualistic or collective interpretations of history, Aner’s assumed a position with regard to the historiography of piety that was as much against the followers of a program of consistently historicizing theology as it was against the representives of individualistic concepts of ecclesiastical historiography. He thus came to stand between the two opposing positions within the camp of liberal theology.

National Styles? Jacques Loeb's Analysis of German and American Science Around 1900 in his Correspondence with Ernst Mach

. In modern discourse about the history of science, it seems to be widely accepted that at the end of the nineteenth century, Germany was one of the leading countries in the production of science. In the past, historians of science tried to trace back a specific ‘German style’ of science that—in combination with other factors—determined this German dominance around 1900, especially in the life sciences. Considering the theoretical concept of ‘national styles’, it has to be kept in mind that around 1900, contemporaries already proclaimed ‘national styles’ of science as representations of national identity. Thus, the question arises as to how far existing historiographical conceptions of national styles may include earlier claims and prejudices. Careful reconstructions of contemporary discourses on national styles and inquiries into the ‘stylisation’ of a dominant, successful ‘German style’ are necessary. One of the contemporary critics of a ‘German style’ of science was the physiologist Jacques Loeb (1859–1924), who emigrated to the USA in 1891. Loeb corresponded regularly with the physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach (1838–1916). Ernst Mach can be considered Loeb's intellectual father with whom he corresponded about strategic, philosophical, and epistemological questions. Using the Loeb–Mach correspondence, the aim of the paper is to reconstruct Loeb's conception of a ‘German style’ of science and its differences to an ‘American style’. Changes in his views are discussed as well as the roots of his views and some of their consequences. Finally, Loeb's ideas on national styles and his working profiles before and after his emigration are compared to historiographical analyses of ‘American’ or ‘German’ styles of science around 1900.

Religion and Superstition in Reformation Europe (review)

Reviewed by: Religion and Superstition in Reformation Europe Robin B. Barnes Religion and Superstition in Reformation Europe. Edited by Helen Parish and William G. Naphy . (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. 2002. Pp. x, 239. $24.95.) This collection of nine essays purports to offer a discussion of "superstition," both as a historiographical concept and as a matter of religious debate in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. While one might presume such a loaded term to be a historiographical dead horse, Parish and Naphy warn against its lingering power. Unfortunately, their introduction confuses as much as it clarifies; they fail to supply solid conceptual background such as one might gain from Dieter Harmening's Superstitio. Moreover, the essays gathered here have no common theme beyond a concern with Reformation issues; they do not meaningfully explore the scope and significance of this general concept among early modern thinkers and polemicists. Basic questions regarding links between Reformation attacks on "superstition" and emerging Enlightenment attitudes remain unraised. Hence despite scattered points of value, the volume as a whole is disappointing. [End Page 784] Bridget Heal's essay on the Virgin Mary in Protestant Nuremberg shows that beneath apparent continuity, a genuine reform of Marian devotion occurred. Characterizing such shifts in understanding as "word games," the editors come close to misrepresenting Heal's perspective. Jason Nye discusses efforts by Catholic reformers of Rottweil to build a sense of Catholic identity by highlighting differences between traditional sacramental and devotional practices and those of Protestants. Maria Craciun argues that the ill-fated Jesuit mission to Transylvania was "militantly restorationist" rather than genuinely reformist. Both Nye and Craciun find Catholic reformers who preferred to denounce Protestantism as heresy rather than as superstition, a conscious perversion of truth rather than ignorant idolatry, but the editors muddy this distinction by maintaining that "heresy" was for Catholics "'superstition'... in the broadest sense." Eric Nelson argues that the "Jesuit legend," the dark image of a conspiratorial order threatening all Christendom, was created by both Catholics and Protestants. For Protestants, however, the threat had apocalyptic implications, while for Catholic critics it was mainly political and social. Are we meant to conclude that Protestant versions were more "superstitious?" Where "superstition" is a synonym for "myth," Protestant prophecy offers easy targets. Ute Lotz-Heumann finds increasingly explicit references to Archbishop James Ussher's presumed special prophetic gifts in the generation following his death (1656), and finds that such imagery "could be used to heighten Protestant national identity in times of crisis" (p. 129). Dale W. Johnson's essay on John Knox is predicated on the misleading assertion that "almost without exception" the Protestant reformers believed that prophetic dreams and similar secondary revelations had ceased with the age of the apostles. Johnson's ahistorical approach leads him to stress the "inconsistency" between the doctrine of sola scriptura and Knox's claims to prophetic insight. Nowhere is there any hint of possible connections between Protestant prophetic mentalities and the evolution of European self-criticism. Luc Racaut challenges the argument of Denis Crouzet that in sixteenth-century France, "Protestants rejected astrology whereas Catholics embraced it" (p. 154). No doubt Crouzet's picture is oversimplified; yet Racaut's denial of significant confessional differences regarding astrology is untenable. He points out that each side accused the other of reviving ancient superstitions, but fails to analyze adequately the bases of these perceptions. P. G. Maxwell-Stuart wishes to show that Protestant demonologists were no more enlightened than their Catholic counterparts: the variances lay "in the details and emphases, not in the principal thesis" (p. 182). But the key questions are precisely about matters of emphasis. Finally, Peter Marshall's discussion of ghosts in Protestant England acknowledges the Reformation's attempt to eradicate such beliefs, but argues that in daily experience and pastoral practice ghosts posed serious problems; neither learned nor popular culture was ready to abandon the traditional imagery altogether. The volume is partly successful as a contribution to the rapidly-expanding historiography showing that early modern reformers met with countless frustrations [End Page 785] in their campaigns against all they considered unscriptural and superstitious. But these essays do not help sort out the various meanings of the term...

György Ligeti and the Rhetoric of Autonomy

Composers’ self-representations – in articles, programme notes, and interviews – have exerted a significant influence on twentieth-century music scholarship, shaping not only the reception of particular outputs but also wider historiographical conceptions of the recent past. This article traces one particular mode of discourse through the published statements of György Ligeti – a ‘rhetoric of autonomy’, which tends to disavow allegiances to ‘schools’ or institutions and underplay stylistic or aesthetic commonalities with the work of other composers. This type of rhetoric, together with the image it promotes of an artistic culture created out of the polarized activities of individuals, colludes naturally with the now familiar pluralist paradigm of late-twentieth-century culture, a paradigm that much postmodern theory, despite its putative deconstruction of the ‘ideology of the unique self’ (Jameson), has left largely unchallenged. Except that, for an artist such as Ligeti, the rhetoric of autonomy may no longer accomplish its objective purpose. Within a cultural sphere increasingly subsumed by the commercial, the image of the radically autonomous creator, once powerfully symbolic of a refusal of the mass market, becomes inescapably caught up in its mechanisms as an explicitly promotional tool.

The Best (and the Worst) of Several Worlds: The Shifting Historiographical Concept of Northeastern Europe

This article deals with various concepts of space–time constellations related to the countries around the Baltic Sea, in German and Finnish historiography known as ‘Northeastern Europe’. Rooted in German national and historical thinking of the middle of the nineteenth century, the concept of ‘Northeastern Europe’ first emerged in the framework of German spatial perceptions of the southern borderlands of the Baltic Sea. This area was perceived as being dominated by the Germans in terms of culture, politics and economy. After the Second World War, such perceptions ceased to be politically correct and vanished from the agenda of policy makers and historical thinkers. In the 1970s, the German historian Klaus Zernack revitalised the subject, i.e. historical research on the Baltic Sea area, but not the earlier concept. In fact, the Baltic Sea area as a whole became a topic of historical thinking within the framework of Zernack's concept of the spatial divisions in the overall history of Eastern Europe. ‘Northeastern Europe’ now appeared as a synonym for the Baltic Sea area in general, including Russia and Poland as decisive historical factors. In the late 1980s, historical research on the Baltic Sea area became a topic of research also in Great Britain and the Nordic countries. Opening up politically after the implosion of the Soviet Union, the Baltic Sea area became a favourite object of research even in Poland and the Baltic states. Since then, whether there is something like ‘Northeastern Europe’ at all is a much debated question. But despite related concepts and notions the contents of ‘Northeastern Europe’ seem to become more and more congruent with the Baltic Sea area either as such or as a definite part of it.

Discovery or Invention: Modern Interpretations of Zhang Xuecheng

Zhang Xuecheng was an ordinary scholar in eighteenth-century China. But in modern times he was recognized as an extraordinary historian. His remark that Six Classics are all was especially praised as a remarkable breakthrough or distinct paradigm. This study, however, argues that the rediscovery of Zhang was in effect a modern invention. Six Classics are all is actually quite an old concept. At least from the sixteenth-century on, Wang Yangming had already set a precedent for Zhang, whose version of the dictum was quite similar to his predecessors as well as contemporaries. Zhang filled in little, if any, new wine in the old bottle. He found no new meaning in history, as he believed the so-called Dao, or Way, contained in the Six Classics was as eternal as the sun and the moon and applied to hundreds of generations to come. He had no intention of turning history against the Classics, or of replacing the Classics with history, as modern scholars have claimed. His view of history was well within the bounds of Confucian historiography. Zhang attached a great deal of importance to history, but he was not unique in this regard. His historiography rested almost totally on the laurels of orthodox Confucianism. He criticized Dai Zhen, but his criticism was generally based on moral grounds and it seems to have little epistemological significance. Zhang Xuecheng emphasized the importance of history to serve statecraft (jingshi), but this view, too, was scarcely original. In this regard, he was more a successor than an innovator. He remained a rather old-fashioned scholar in the eighteenth century. The rediscovery of Zhang in modern times actually reflects modern scholars' concerns. They read their own ideas into Zhang Xuecheng's writings. Zhang never considered the Classics or history as mere historical materials as modern historians do. Nor did Zheng try to secularize the Classics and history, which might have constituted a major breakthrough in the conception of historiography. A secularized Zhang was thus the invention of modern scholars. In addition, only modern scholars, like Collingwood and Qian Zhongshu, who consider the past dead, feel duty-bound to breathe new life into this moribund history. There are no striking similarities, as a modern scholar claims, between eighteenth-century Zhang and twentieth-century Collingwood. This study is as much interested in exposing misrepresentations as in revealing the modern concerns that helped invent Zhang. These concerns, in fact, reflect the dramatic changes of modern Chinese historiography.

The Other Prussia: Royal Prussia, Poland and Liberty, 1569-1772 by Karin s> Friedrich (review)

REVIEWS I35 Friedrich,Karin. TheOther Prussia.RoyalPrussia, Poland andLiberty, I569-I 772. Cambridge Studies in Early Modern History. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000. xix + 280 pp. Glossary. Maps. Notes. Bibliography .Index. /40.0: $64.95. 'DEUTSCHER Geist und standische Freiheitim Weichsellande'was the title of Theodor Schieder's vehemently anti-Polish 'Habilitationsschrift' on the historyof political ideasin Royal Prussiabetween I569 and I 772 submittedat the universityof Konigsberg in I940. Like many German historians before and after him, Schieder presented historical Prussia's history as that of a genuinely, and exclusively, German region, and his study of the political writingsof German-speakingPrussianburgherswas to prove that, over three centuriesof 'foreign'Polishrule,the province neverceased to 'feel'and 'think' German. As he argues in the preface to his study, his task as a scholar had been to highlight the historical legitimacy of German territorialclaims in a generation-long 'Volkstumskampf'that now, with Poland defeated by the glorious Wehrmacht and territoriallydismembered, had found its historically 'necessary' outcome. Precisely sixty years later, Karin Friedrichonce again addressestheproblematicof collectiveidentityin Royal Prussiain an excellent book that, in turn, not only thoroughly deconstructs the historiographical concept of Prussia's Germanness but also offers an admiringly well documented , and most convincing, alternativeinterpretation. Her study is, of course, not the firstattempt at criticallyre-examining the German historiographic tradition and developing a more adequate understanding of early modern discourses of political, confessional and cultural identityin the region. Since WorldWarII, PolishhistoriansStanislawHerbst, Janusz Mallek, Stanislaw Salmonowicz and Jerzy Serczyk have produced most valuable studies of individual aspects and segments of the intellectual and scholarly life in Royal Prussia and suggested new approaches to conceptualizing pre-modern territorial identity in a post-nationalistic perspective . More recently, German historiansof the younger generation, such asJorg Hackmann or Hans-JurgenBomelburg,joined such efforts.Nevertheless , Karin Friedrich'sbook marks a breakthroughin the debate over premodern Prussianidentity in at least two respects. It is, on the one hand, the firstcomprehensive studyof the political and scholarlyself-representationsof Royal Prussia'surban elites over three centuries covering the widest possible range of relevant sources -from the well-known and frequentlycited works of Reinhold Curicke, Christoph Hartknoch, and Gottfried Legnich down to the level of political and legal documents, letters,unpublishedpamphlets and scholarly writings, and poetry. On the other hand, by focusing on the discoursesof urbanand regionalpatriotismand, more specifically,by reading her sources as expressions of a pre-modern Prussiannation-buildingprocess in its own right, the author develops an interpretative framework that represents the hitherto most convincing solution to the problem of how to bring together, in the case of Royal Prussia, the complex phenomena of competing loyalties and alliances, social and culturalcleavages, political and religiousrivalryin a consistentanalysisof urbanelite identity.The notion of a specifically Prussian identity, even of a Prussian proto-nation, had as such 136 SEER, 8i I, I, 2003 been introduced to the discussion earlier by Herbst and Mallek however only as subsidiaryconcepts that help to explain why the allegedly prevailing process of polarization between 'Polish' and 'German' witnessed certain delays and 'set-backs'. Friedrich instead rejects the idea of categorically distinguishingbetween national allegiance and regional or local patriotism, and she provides ample evidence for her assumption that, if there was a leitmotifin urban discoursesof identity over time, it consisted in the memory of, and loyaltytowards,a Prussiannation of estatesunderthe common roof of the multi-national Polish-LithuanianRepublic. This does not imply closing one's eyes to the factthat, asthe authorstresses,'nationalantagonismbetween Germans and Poles was not invented in 1772' (p. 217). Throughout the period, the German language of the Prussian burghers was perceived, and politicallyinstrumentalizedon eitherside, as a markerof'otherness', liketheir protestantconfessionand urbanlife-style.Inparticular,theeighteenthcentury witnessed a rapid politicization of such cultural cleavages, and a mutual alienation of German protestants and Polish Catholics. But never did the Prussian patriots view their identity as essentially defined by linguistic, let alone ethnic Germanity. Instead, they 'imagined a community, albeit small, whose historyand sense of origin, constitutions,privilegesand parliamentary institutions connected the Prussian province with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as a harbourformany nations'(p. 9). The book is divided into nine chapters constructed according to a combination of chronological and systematiccriteria.Followingthe introduction , two chapters outline the provinces' political and constitutional history...

Acercamientos al teatro actual (1970-1995)

Acercamientos al teatro actual (1970-1995). Ed. by Fernando de Toro and Alfonso de Toro. Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert, 1998. 253 pages. As is the case with many collections of articles written by different specialists, the one edited by Fernando and Alfonso de Toro contains a combination of texts of unequal value and usefulness. The book is divided into four parts. The first consists of three articles discussing algunas refiexiones fundamentales. In the second section, there are six studies on new tendencies in contemporary theatre (including post-modernist traits and staging). The two articles in part three are devoted to technology and anthropology in the theatre whereas the six articles in the fourth section discuss, among others, the connections between cinema and theatre. Although some of the articles consider in a more detailed manner aspects of the Latin-American theatre, a number of them concentrate on significant theatre topics beyond the Hispanic world. In the space allotted to us, it will not be possible to review the seventeen articles in the collection. Although there is overlapping among them, each is an independent unit. Thus, this review will concentrate on those studies discussing issues of interest to this reviewer. In El porvenir del teatro en las fronteras de la modernidad by Luis de Tavira, the author uses excessively rhetorical discourse and, therefore, sheds little light on the promised subject. From the outset, Tavira speaks of certain significant theatre changes. In attempting to explain his views, he fails to define his terms and, therefore, here and elsewhere in the article one is faced with generalities which do not add anything new to what most in the field already know of the topics under scrutiny. On occasion, perceptive comments such as nuevo no esta en lo que vemos, sino en el modo en que vemos (14) are included without much elaboration. Throughout, there is an abuse of brief references to playwrights, theatre critics, thinkers, etc. which does not contribute substantially to providing a comprehensive view of the theatre nowadays. Consider, for instance, the famous quote of Max Estrella in Luces de bohemia on the links between heroes and the esperpento. The reference is so brief that its presence may be considered an example of name-dropping (not to mention that the quote is erroneously attributed to Valle-Inclan when, in fact, it comes from a character; in sum, the author of the article seems to ignore the basic narratological distinction between author and character). From time to time, certain significant historiographical concepts are blended in such as manner as to render them almost useless (for instance, modernity, vanguard, post-modernity) whereas too much space is devoted to the definition of oxymoron a well-known term to most in the field. …

Biblical Historiography and Literary History: A Programmatic Survey

AbstractThe issue addressed concerns relative literary chronology, involving the quest for historicity of literary witnesses and their literary history. The question of historicity was elsewhere shown to be bound up with the basic historiographical concepts embodied in the literary compositions. The manifestation of these concepts facilitates observations concerning literary relativity. The study of the literary history based on historiographical data and considerations pertains to two important facets. One is the primary and dependent formulation of historiographical concepts and the other is the changing manner of application of these patterns. Historiographical and geographical features that reflect the early monarchy figure in a specific manner up to the end of the first commonwealth, and as of Ezekiel, in Ezra and Nehemiah, as well as in Chronicles, a change in the application of these motifs is to be noted. The exilic period is, therefore, an incisive stylistic boundary.

Toward a Geo-Cinematic Hermeneutics: Representations of Los Angeles in Non-Industrial Cinema -- Killer of Sheep and Water and Power

Toward a Geo-Cinematic Hermeneutics: Representations of Los Angeles in Non-Industrial Cinema— Killer of Sheep and Water and Power David E. James (bio) The cultural landscape is fashioned from a natural landscape by a culture group. Culture is the agent, the natural area is the medium, the cultural landscape is the result. —Carl Ortwin Sauer It is commonly recognized that the loss of authority in the great paradigms of modernist culture was accompanied by a shift from time to space as the more fundamental category for cognition. 1 John Berger’s novel, G, for example, both instanced and articulated the sense that the narrative line of the traditional novel was no longer adequate to the complex synchronic patterns that make up contemporary experience. “Prophecy,” the narrative voice declared, “now involves a geographical rather than a historical projection; it is space, not time, that hides consequences from us.” Foucault reached similar conclusions, arguing that history had been the nineteenth century’s “great obsession,” so the “present [End Page 23] epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space;” and his proposal that our present experience of the world was one “of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein” inspired a generation of postmodern geographers. 2 As a consequence of the historical shifts these re-orientations manifest—and among them the closing of all spaces outside the global consolidation of capital must be reckoned as primary—the discipline of geography acquired a new importance, and generated new projects for cultural studies, notably questions about the relations between the local and the national, and then, as the international restructuring of capital transformed the status of the national itself, questions about the local and the global. In film studies, the response has been primarily a re-investment in the national as a fundamental historiographical concept, a somewhat paradoxical development since the world-wide hegemony of the American corporate entertainment industries leaves the concept of any other national cinema with little more than a heuristic value—a fact that is often the very point from which these studies begin. 3 Commonly approaching cinema as essentially representation (rather than material production, which will be the particular concern of the present essay), projects of this kind have comfortably intersected with both postmodernist assumptions of the collapse of all reality into media spectacle and poststructuralist conceptualizations of reality as textuality. So, for example, the introduction to a recent collection of geographical considerations of cinema takes as it point of departure Baudrillard’s conflation of the city and the cinema, a conflation that understands the cityscape as itself a screenscape: “Where is the cinema? It is all around you outside, all over the city, that marvelous, continuous performance of films and scenarios.” From such a standpoint, David Harvey’s attempt to retain an ontological difference between film and reality, one that obliges him to affirm that film is “in the final analysis, a spectacle projected within an enclosed space on a depthless screen,” appears to be a distinctly uncinematic foreboding, and therefore to be discredited. 4 Whatever the overall status of readings of contemporary social reality as intrinsically cinematic, their claims are nowhere more pressing than in Los Angeles where, for the century of its existence as a major city, cinema has been central to its economic, social, and cultural developments. All have been shaped in [End Page 24] the magnetic field of cinema; and cinema, as it has imitated urban growth in metastasizing at points increasingly remote from the original downtown center, in Silver Lake, Hollywood, Culver City, the San Fernando Valley, and (as the mutual imbrication of the electronics and the entertainment industries bridges the north/south division of the state) now in Silicon Valley, has preoccupied the entire region. As Reyner Banham observed, “Hollywood... the movies found Los Angeles a diffuse fruit-growing super-village of some eight hundred thousand souls, and handed it over to the infant television industry in 1950 a world metropolis of over four million.” 5 More scrupulous historians have recognized the formative role of other industries, though from real-estate through aerospace to crack cocaine, they have exhibited a Hollywood-like combination of spectacle and...

Reflections on Historiography in Montserrat Roig's L'hora violeta

Reflections on Historiography in Montserrat Roig's L'hora violeta1 Akiko Tsuchiya Washington University in St. Louis Between the publication of her first book in 1970 and her premature death in 1991, Montserrat Roig, one of the most prominent Catalan writers of the post-Franco era, consistently explored the construction of the female subject in relation to Catalan history and to the question of national identity. Roig made her literary debut with the publication of a book of short stories, Molta roba i poc sabó ...i tan neta que h vokn (1971), for which she won the Victor Cátala Prize in 1970. This work was followed by a trilogy of novels on the lives of women of the Catalan bourgeoisie, from the turn of the century to the transitional years immediately following Franco's death: these novels include Ramona, adéu (1972) [Ramona, adiós], El temps de les cireres (1977) [Tiempo de cerezas], and L'hora viokta (1980) [La hora viokta]. The sequence of these novels shows an evolution away from a narrative mode marked by vestiges of neo realism, to one that questions accepted conceptions of subjectivity, referentiality, and historiography in an overtly self-reflexive way. Roig's preoccupation with the relationship between history, subjectivity, and representation culminates in L'opéra quotidiana (1982) [La ópera cotidiana], perhaps Roig's most accomplished work of fiction in the complexity of its explorations of the political issues of gender, class, and (Catalan) national identity within the frame of a highly self-conscious literary discourse.2 In addition to sevetal other works of fiction, Roig has also distinguished herself through her journalistic writings, including her book EL· catahns als camps nazis (1977) [Nochey niebh: ks cataUnes en los campos nazis], which is to become a key autobiographical intertext in L'hora violeta. In Roig's work, notions of sexual or national identity are intimately linked to the problems of historiography, or, more specifically, to the ways in which history is put into discourse.3 While the recovery of history —particularly the unofficial histories of the oppressed, the excluded, and the marginalized—is central to Roig's intellectual project, she simultaneously explores the nature of a historiographie process that enabled one master narrative to gain legitimacy over all others within a concrete sociopolitical context of Francoist Spain. Roig thus shifts our attention from "history," traditionally understood to be a chain of verifiable facts Arizona Journal of 'Hispanic Cultural Studies Volume 2, 1998 164 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies or events "out there" in the real world, to the theoretical problems surrounding the narrative (re) construction of these events. A consideration of history as, above all, a discursive event in Roig's work allows us a vision of the ways in which notions of historiography shape historical discourse and, by extension, what we call the historical referent. To use David Herzberger's words in a different context, Roig's novels "have both history and the writing of history as referent" (9). Many of Roig's novels dramatize the process by which private narratives and fictions of socially marginalized or otherwise decentet ed individuals may be used to cteate an oppositional notion of collective history .4 As is the case in most totalitarian societies, Francoist historiography had as its goals the elimination of all counterdiscourses and the construction of the myth of a unified and homogeneous Spain whose essential "truth" was to be preserved throughout time.5 Such a historiographie enterprise inevitably led to the production of a hegemonic narrative from which all difference and relationality were erased, be they of gender, sexuality , nationality or class. Roig challenges not merely the false historical narratives generated by Francoist historiography, but more importantly the very conception of historiography that makes possible the production and reification of such narratives in the first place. L'hora violeta, published shortly after Franco's death, is exemplary in posing such a challenge. On one level, it chronicles the transition between dictatorship and democracy through the intrahistoria of three women, which focuses on their experiences in the private sphere of the home and the family. As Christina Dupláa has observed, Roig constructs a female "genealogy" as a way...