European Contemporaries Research Articles

Travels Toward Modernity in Post-Revolutionary America

If our goal is to capture a sense of connectedness between post-revolutionary encounters with modernity and those of later times, Lewis Perry writes, could not tell a traditional story, and we would have to experiment with language and form in order to show our recognition of the fragmentation of public experience and the illogical flow of private consciousness (p. 269). In Boats Against the Current, Perry has taken this experimental approach. The traditional scholarly historical narrative (mixing precise chronological development with explicit topical coverage) is missing. Instead, we find twentythree seemingly disjointed essays, most very short but some lengthy, on a diversity of topics, decades, and issues. In the end, it becomes clear that Perry's fragmented mode of presentation is a good match for his material and his messages. Perry begins the volume with Alexis de Tocqueville's address to his European contemporaries in Democracy in America (1835) on the direction that America was taking Europe: Carried away by a rapid current, we obstinately keep our eyes fixed on the bank, while the stream whirls us backward-facing toward the abyss. Ahead, Tocqueville added, lay the prospect of a world where nothing any longer seems either forbidden or permitted, honest or dishonorable, true or false. Toward the end of his book, Perry repeats Tocqueville's observation and couples it with a fragment from one of Ralph Waldo Emerson's 1841 lectures: Nothing solid is secure; everything tilts and rocks. For Perry, Tocqueville and Emerson captured the essential dilemmas of modern living as they became somewhat discernible during the postRevolutionary decades-the sense that old verities were ebbing without clear replacements, causing everyday life to seem to tilt and rock. In the traditional historical narrative, one expects the author to define modernization precisely and fully at the onset. Perry delays definitional issues until his twentieth and twenty-first chapters, providing in the interval

The rape of the text: reading and misreading Pope's Essay on man

Rape of Text deconstructs history of criticism of An on Man to account for, and to reverse, over 200 years of deformation and trivialization of Pope's text by literary critics, philosophers and historians of ideas. First published in 1733-34, An on Man, Alexander Pope's best-known philosophical poem, was highly praised by many of Pope's European contemporaries, including Voltaire, Rousseau, Kant and Hume. The poem, divided into four Epistles, deals with nature of man and his place in universe, man as an individual, man in society and man in pursuit of happiness. Voltaire called An on Man - the most beautiful, most useful, most sublime didactic poem in English language, but what was formerly regarded as pinnacle of 18th-century is now largely unread or misread. In contrast, Harold Bloom described as a poetic disaster of absurd theodicy. After showing why commonplaces about inscribed in Pope scholarship are suspect because of mutual and abiding hostility of logocentric and aesthetic traditions of misreading, Solomon rebuts objections made to Pope's philosophy in a series of chapters demonstrating more appropriate strategies for interpreting Pope's persona, tone, methodology, argument and figurality. Cumulatively, chapters characterize a discourse world of middle-state academic sceptism that Pope shared with his admirers. Although characterization of Pope's discourse world in Rape of Text has implications for Pope and for 18th-century scholarship beyond Essay on Man, it also has implications for reading all philosophical poetry. Solomon contends that criticism of Essay on Man is only an extreme example of deformation that occurs routinely when literary critics or philosophers interpret philosophical poetry, and, in final chapter, he calls for a naturalization of philosophical poetry as a genre as necessary remedy to what he suggests is our present willful blindness.

Jewish mysticidsm in Spain : some cultural observations

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Questions and Veracities: Reassessing the Chronology of Ives's Choral Works

purpose of this article is to introduce and address problems of chronology of Ives's music and to propose an objective method for redating it. In order to do so, it is necessary first to understand origin of most scholarship on Ives, including that on chronology of his works. In his autobiographical writings Essays before a Sonata (1920), postface to 114 Songs (1922), and Memos (begun 1931), created a self-portrait that was expanded by scholars after his death, beginning with Henry and Sidney Cowell's authoritative biography, Charles and His Music. results were collectively dubbed Ives by Frank Rossiter in his 1975 study, Charles and His America, 1 and its outlines are familiar: isolated genius largely self-taught, a businessman rather than a professional musician, tied to no schools and refusing to propagandize his own music,2 whose experimental works were composed significantly earlier than pieces by European contemporaries exhibiting similar approaches. Until quite recently, legend virtually dictated Ives's role in twentieth-century music history This image of as Yankee pioneer has been reassessed from various angles, beginning with Rossiter's study and Victor Fell Yellin's 1974 review of Harold Farberman's recording of Ives's cantata Celestial Country.3 Rossiter identified origins, purposes, and limitations of legend and its potential to obscure the truth about [Ives's] creative life.4 Yellin examined influence on Ives's work of his teacher at Yale, Horatio Parker (1863-1919), as well as Ives's compositional attitude and abilities after his graduation in 1898. His placement in historical context continued with Robert P. Morgan's 1978 article, Ives and Mahler: Mutual Responses at End of an Era, and J. Peter Burkholder's two studies, his 1983 dissertation The Evolution of Charles Ives's Music, and 1985 book, Charles Ives: Ideas behind Music. These studies reconnected Ives's music to European tradition through analyses of form and procedure.5

Changing Song: The Marxist Manifestos of Nakano Shigeharu

Nakano Shigeharu (1902-1979), leading twentieth-century Japanese poet and social critic, transformed the revolutionary culture movement of the 1920s. Positioning Nakano's thought within the very of Japanese Marxism, Miriam Silverberg applies textual analyses to his pre-war writings to form a new perspective on the of the politics and culture of the Japanese left. Her book relates Nakano to the Western Marxist tradition, recognizes the existence of a Japanese Marxist theory of commodity culture, and uses this theory to illuminate the era. In particular, Silverberg addresses how Nakano, like his European contemporaries, worked toward a critique of mass culture, illustrating how Japanese thinkers in the 1920s and 1930s adopted Marxism as the dominant method of political and intellectual inquiry. This book draws on Marx's writings and those of Georg LukNBcs, Walter Benjamin, Antonio Gramsci, Bertolt Brecht, and Mikhail Bakhtin to present Nakano as a Marxist critic and poet. Close readings of Nakano's essays, poems (most of them appearing for the first time in English), fiction, and prison letters trace Nakano's changing song or consciousness through four stages--from his discovery of history in the mid-1920s to his refusal to be silenced during the late 1930s, when he produced a series of scathing attacks on intensifying state repression.

The Social Calculus: Deference and Defiance in Later Georgian England

The history of the long reign of George III has recently been shaken by a vigorous and determined revisionism. A temblor of this magnitude has not been felt since Sir Lewis Namier mounted his prosopographical revolution more than half a century ago. Indeed, it has been suggested that J. C. D. Clark's English Society actually will surpass the influence of Namier's Structure of Politics. If so, it is difficult to imagine the combined impact of English Society, Rebellion and Revolution, The Dynamics of Change, The Memoirs and Speeches of James, 2nd Earl Waldegrave, the host of articles already published, and the plethora of words certain to be typeset in the relatively near future.Perhaps Clark's relentless torrent of prose will relegate to the historiographical scrap heap virtually all existing scholarship about the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in favor of his corrected model of Hanoverian England. Already Clark claims that the standard account depicting eighteenth-century England as “an economically progressive society, increasingly secular and individualist in its ethos and distinctively demarcated from its European contemporaries” is, quite simply, “no longer tenable.” Clark's most recent pronouncement declares that “the revisionists’ [i.e. his] views of the period now command widespread acceptance.” The revisionist view cannot be fairly summarized in a single statement (though the phrases “ancien regime” and “confessional state” both manage nicely to encompass a great deal), but a passage Clark cites to illustrate England at the death of George III serves as a point of departure.

Unintended Pregnancy in America and Abroad

U.S. women under age 25 are far more likely to become pregnant than are comparable young women in other developed countries; however, there is no such differential among older women. Young American women appear to be no more likely than their European contemporaries to marry or to engage in intercourse at a young age, but they do seem less likely to practice contraception. Why should this be so? There are grounds to argue that young American women have more limited access to effective contraceptives than do comparable Europeans, but the problem undoubtedly has social and economic aspects as well: No other Western nation has the ethnic and socioeconomic diversity of the United States--a diversity that includes the existence of an underclass alienated from middle-class values. Limited evidence also suggests that young Americans, regardless of social class, may be more prone to risk-taking than young people in other countries. Finally, another attribute of American society that undoubtedly contributes to the problem of high pregnancy rates is our ambivalence toward sexuality: Sex saturates American life--in television programs, movies and advertisements--yet the media generally fail to communicate responsible attitudes toward sex, with birth control remaining a taboo subject. In addition, a deep-seated ambivalence toward sexuality has prevented Americans from responding to the problems of unintended pregnancy as rationally as have other Western nations.

Understanding Sam Shepard's Realism

Understanding Sam Shepard's Realism William W. Demastes Sam Shepard is a playwright who developed in the 1960's and in many ways is still a product of the 1960's. His early work clearly reflects the experimentation and innovation of that turbulent era in American theater. But his more recent work has adopted a traditional bent that has often led critics to wonder if Shepard has lost the vitality of his early period. This turn to the traditional, however, is not the result of a loss of faith in the ideas and ideals of the Sixties but is the result of a maturing process that has allowed Shepard to drop the more sensational trappings of experimental theater and blend the distilled thought of the period into more traditional forms. The clearest reflection of that revitalizing fusion is a surfacing in his works of realism, the dominant form in American theater for at least the last eighty years. Shepard's realism has given new life to and demonstrated the flexibility of the realist form while at the same time making his own work more accessible to a wider audience and aligning it with a long tradition in American theater. Robert Brustein, in his essay "The Crack in the Chimney: Reflections on Contemporary American Playwriting" (1979), applauds the earlier efforts of Shepard, noting that his work is a breakthrough that essentially brings American theater up-todate with the current thought and expression of its European contemporaries. Former dramatic efforts in America have been mired in outdated perceptions of reality; Brustein notes that in Arthur Miller's works, for example, "the premises underlying Miller's themes and actions . . . belong to the eighteenth century, which is to say the age of Newton, rather than to the twentieth century, the age of Einstein."l Brustein is specifically attacking America's obsession with realism and naturalism. According to WILLIAM W. DEMASTES currently teaches in the English Department at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville. He is the author of a forthcoming book entitled American "New Realism" in the Theatre of the 80s. 229 230Comparative Drama Brustein, naturalism's strict causal connections—actions causing equal and opposite reactions—involve a system that modern thought has finally shown to be too reductive and simplistic to illustrate human action with credible accuracy. Miller is not the only one to follow this pattern, though. It is pervasive in much of American drama, even in O'Neill and even in his masterpiece, Long Day's Journey Into Night.2 The historical cataclysms of the mid-twentieth century have brought that certainty of understanding into serious doubt. But despite such events, eighteenth-century rationalism and nineteenth -century naturalism have remained the dominant modes of understanding and explanation, in America at least. With the arrival of the 1960's, however, American drama began to reflect more accurately the changing thought already reflected in European drama—in absurdist theater, for example. Using the non-realistic Suicide in B Flat (1976) as illustration, Brustein notes that, like European absurdism, Shepard has here succeeded in "disintegrating the causal conventions of realistic theatre"3 so prevalent in American theater. In fact, this process of disintegration has caused Rodney Simard to see Shepard less as an American dramatist in particular than a postmodernist in general. Simard goes as far as to align Shepard with European artists rather than Americans, arguing that Shepard's plays "deny cause and effect like Stoppard's works" and noting that an insistence on viewing Shepard as an American "obscures his contribution to postmodern drama."4 But while at one time Shepard's early works expose the inadequacies of traditional American realism and naturalism, more recently he himself has turned to realism. It is a conversion which has resulted in some concern that Shepard has given up his postmodern aspirations. The shift, however, was not to return to old causal patterns, but to turn to a form that had worked so well for other American playwrights in their efforts to deal with another dominant American obsession: the disintegration of the American family. That obsession certainly identifies O'Neill—and Miller and Williams also, among others. And the realistic form seems particularly well suited to...

Plans and Models in 15th- and 16th-Century Ottoman Architectural Practice

Although written sources frequently refer to plans and models used by Ottoman architects during the 15th and 16th centuries, these plans and models are believed to have disappeared completely. In this article, two unknown late-16th-century Ottoman plans are introduced, while other known examples thought to antedate the 17th century are redated on the basis of their previously unnoted watermarks to the second half of the 15th century. These unusual plans shed light on Ottoman architectural practice, which has remained largely unknown since Ottoman architects did not leave behind treatises comparable to those of their European contemporaries. Their drafting technique can be related to a broader context of Islamic drawings from the East, as well as to contemporary plans by European architects. However, they are also characterized by a unique set of conventions which distinguish them as a group. After discussing these plans, the article addresses problems posed by the lack of detailed elevation drawings and the question of whether Ottoman architects used models in designing building facades. The different functions of models are traced through written and visual documents in an attempt to distinguish between commemorative models and utilitarian construction models aiding the design process. As in the case of ground plans, parallels with contemporary European architectural practice are stressed throughout. Finally, the wider implications of these plans and models, concerning the mode in which abstract architectural ideas were communicated and disseminated throughout the Ottoman empire, are dealt with.

Common-Time Displacement in Mozart

n the music of Mozart and his central European contemporaries, the characteristics of common time generally agree with descriptions of quadruple meter found in moder-day treatises and textbooks. A hierarchic order of metrical accents dictates that within the four-beat measure, the first beat bears more weight or emphasis than the third. In late eighteenth-century music that conforms to this hierarchy of accent, the common-time measure constitutes a structural yardstick, and the phrasing may be counted in numbers of measures without recourse to fractions.

Travels of Alexandre Yersin: letters of a pastorian in Indochina, 1890-1894.

TRAVELS OF ALEXANDRE YERSIN: LETTERS OF A PASTORIAN IN INDOCHINA, 1890-1894 JACK E. MOSELEY* Medicine today, in America and elsewhere, owes much to the microbe hunters of nineteenth-century Europe who established and propagated the germ theory. One of the lesser known but exceedingly versatile of these microbe hunters was the Swiss-born doctor Alexandre Yersin, codiscoverer of the diphtheria exotoxin and discoverer of the plague bacillus, whose genus is named in his honor [I]. This gifted physician —the protégé of Louis Pasteur and Emile Roux—left a legacy of nearly 1,000 letters, many over 10 pages long, which he had written to his mother. Detailing over 40 years of his life and work, the collection was discovered in Switzerland in 1970 by the doctor's descendants and donated to H. H. Mollaret, plague specialist of the Pasteur Institute of Paris. Dr. Mollaret made the letters available for translation by myself and publication in the United States. The following selections concern primarily the earlier biographical aspects of the correspondence, particularly those highlighting Yersin's remarkable experience as a ship's doctor, explorer, and cartographer in the Far East. The following letters have not previously been published. Alexandre Yersin (see fig. 1) was a small, quiet physician whose slender stature rarely measured above the shoulders of many of his nineteenth-century European contemporaries. It is, perhaps, understandable that some of his professional colleagues tried to dissuade him H. H. Mollaret and Jacqueline Brossollet of the Pasteur Institute of Paris, Albert Coblentz of the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Paris, Robert P. Hudson of the Department ofthe History of Medicine of the University of Kansas, Caroline Hannaway of the Institute of the History of Medicine of the Johns Hopkins University, and Thomas K. Akers of the University of North Dakota served as historical advisers for this manuscript. Additional assistance in its preparation was provided by the Logan Clendening Traveling Fellowship in the History of Medicine and the following faculty and staffof the University of North Dakota: Lorraine Etti, Vonda Somerville, Colleen Kenefick, Lowell Gallagher, Claudine Moseley, and Brenda Perry. The manuscript is dedicated to Bessie F. Presley, 1905-1980.»Address: 2843 St. Paul Street, Baltimore, Maryland 21218.© 1981 by The University of Chicago. 0031-5982/81/2404-0249$01.00 Perspectives inBiology andMedicine · Summer 1981 | 607 from leaving a flourishing medical career in Paris in 1890 to pursue the rigors of exploration in colonial Indochina [2]. The 27-year-old physician had not once been to sea or traveled farther than to a few countries in Europe. The sketches of Paris he frequently sent to his mother in Switzerland were the only indication of the cartography skills he might possess for mapping the uncharted lands of which he dreamed [3]. Yersin was born in the French-speaking Canton of Vaud in Switzerland , on September 22, 1863. He came to Paris in 1885 to study medicine at the renowned Faculty of Medicine ofthe University ofParis. As a medical student, his decision to specialize in microbiology came to the attention of Louis Pasteur and Emile Roux, who became his inFig . 1.—Alexandre Yersin, circa 1894, wearing the medal of "la Légion d'honneur" awarded by the French government for his discovery of die plague bacillus in Hong Kong in June 1894. 608 J JackE. Moseley ¦ Travels ofAlexandre Yersin structors and mentors [3]. Yersin's doctoral thesis of 1888 described his work in experimentally induced septicemic tuberculosis, known later as "la tuberculose expérimentale, type Yersin" [3, p. 197]. Also in 1888, Roux and Yersin worked closely on a series of filtration experiments which led to history's first isolation of a bacterial toxin, the exotoxin of Corynebacterium diphtheria [3, p. 197]. In 4 ofthe 6 years that followed this discovery, Yersin traveled widely in Indochina as a colonial physician, explorer, and cartographer. He documented hisjourneys, and the days leading up to them in France, in biweekly letters to his mother in Morgès, Switzerland. His first-person accounts, as reproduced in the following passages, contribute to his biography, in particular to that 4-year period of transition and travel, 1890-1894, which prefigured his future medical career in...

Ode on a Grecian Urn: Keats’s “Laocoön”

E D I T O R ’ S C H O I C E * O D E O N A G R E C I A N U R N : K E A T S ’ S “ L A O C O O N ” JO H N J . TEU N ISSEN a n d EVELYN J . H IN Z University of Manitoba “ f ' i VJriticism based solely upon general principles may lead to conceits which sooner or later we find to our shame refuted in works of art.” 1 Though G. E. Lessing, who made the observation in his Laocoon: An Essay upon the Limits of Painting and Poetry, was pointing to the consequences of the ut pictura poesis premise as it was reflected in the critical theories and practice of his eighteenth-century European contemporaries, to few situations is his analysis more directly applicable than to Keats’s Ode on a Grecian Urn. For not only is the Ode a work of art which poetically illustrates Lessing’s thesis that the methods and objectives of the painter and sculptor are different from those of the poet, the very argument of the poem concerns the “conceits” which have developed from the ut pictura poesis generalization, specifically the idea that the spatial arts are superior to the temporal. Furthermore, it would seem to be precisely a tendency to argue from general principles which has prevented critics from recognizing that it is this aesthetic issue which is the true subject of the Ode. Interpretations of the Ode generally fall into two major categories: either the Ode is approached as a poem which is concerned with the relative attrac­ tions of art and life; or it is approached as Keats’s dramatization of the para­ dox of the “silently speaking” urn, his own attempt to approximate the art of sculpture. Within these two general categories there are areas of disagreement, but basically these consist in the positive or negative expression of the same common approach. Thus in the case of the former category, some critics argue that the poem celebrates art over life, while others argue that Keats is *The category of “Editor’s Choice” has been established by the Advisory Editorial Board for those essays which, for reasons of subject, methodology, conclusions, or the like, fail to gain the unqualified acceptance of the usual panel of readers for the Journal but which the Editor feels should nevertheless — perhaps because of their very unortho­ doxy or controversiality — be offered to the readers of English Studies in Canada for their consideration. E n g l is h St u d ie s in C anada, vi, 2, Summer 1980 on the side of life versus art, and still others argue for a quasi-platonic or philosophical reconciliation between them. Similarly, in the case of the latter approach, some critics argue that Keats does successfully demonstrate that the urn is a “historian” and concern themselves with the way in which he dramatizes this paradox, while others argue that it is not a very convincing demonstration.2 In a few studies, most of them brief explications of single lines, tentative suggestions have been made that point in the direction we shall be taking,3 but no systematic or extensive study of the Ode as a work which explores and refutes the ut pictura poesis thesis and in turn gives the laurels to poetry has been conducted, while instead the two approaches we have outlined continue to reflect the prevailing tradition in criticism of the work. Now the reason for this situation, as suggested at the outset, would seem to be the very tendency which Lessing decried of arguing from general prin­ ciples or conventional données. For the cornerstone of the “life versus art” approach to the poem stems from a kind of universalizing habit whereby the “urn” is assumed to be synonymous with and symbolic of all art, instead of representing the plastic or visual arts per se. Similarly, the premise which seems to inform discussions of the urn’s ability to speak is that the historical climate during which Keats composed the Ode was one which saw the archeo­ logical discovery of the Elgin Marbles and...

Popeye and the American Dream

It was alfred frankenstein, I believe, who first observed that the characteristic subjects of painters like William Sidney Mount and George Caleb Bingham were visual counterparts of that “American Adam in Eden” theme, which many historians of literature had identified as “the central myth in the American novel since 1830”. Man unspoiled, in a new relationship to nature, is their common concern. As David W. Noble has written in The Eternal Adam and the New World Garden:The American novelist then, beginning with James Fenimore Cooper, cannot write within the traditional conventions of his European contemporaries. He is precluded by his nation's romantic self-image from being an analyst of social and individual comedy or tragedy. Our novelist must be a metaphysician and theologian. He must always begin with the question: is it possible that Americans are exempt from the human condition? Is it possible that men in the new world have escaped from the need to live within community, within a framework of institutions and traditions—have escaped even from the need to live within a mortal body, or a soul that is divided against itself? Can nature indeed redeem man, heal his spiritual division, and lift him above the constraints of social class?

Reviews : European Thought and Literature Contemporary Political Philosophers. Edited by Anthony de Crespigny and Kenneth Minogue. London : Methuen, 1976. xvii + 296 pp. £2.75

Reviews : European Thought and Literature Contemporary Political Philosophers. Edited by Anthony de Crespigny and Kenneth Minogue. London : Methuen, 1976. xvii + 296 pp. £2.75

A Contemporary Biography of Ras Alula: A Ge'ez Manuscript from Mänäwē, Tämbēn—I

European contemporaries regarded Ras Alula, Emperor Yohannes's general, as one of the most prominent leaders of Ethiopia in the crucial period of the last quarter of the nineteenth century. This was a period in which the country was struggling to remain independent during the ‘scramble for Africa’. The Ras was referred to as ‘the best native general and strategist that Africa has perhaps produced in modern times’, and ‘undoubtedly’ the ‘greatest leader that Abyssinia has produced since the death of the Emperor Theodore in 1868’. His Italian adversaries thought in 1885 that ‘Ras Alula is the most serious, the most influential, and the strongest personality in today's Abyssinia. The word of Alula is heard with enthusiasm and confidence by the King’. A Sudanese Mahdist historian wrote that ‘Ras Allulā was one of the famous and brave men in war, very experienced in the tactics of battles. He was a bone in the throat of the British, Italian, and Turkish [Egyptian] empires’. A British soldier and diplomat was of the opinion that ‘the Abyssinian generalissimo’ was ‘apparently the moving spirit of that country’.

A small gibbon-like hominoid from the miocene of Uganda.

A new palate from Napak IV in Uganda, dated at 19 million years or older, provides information about the facial morphology of a small Miocene hominoid from East Africa. The fossil resembles small extant gibbons in most features of facial and papatal morphology that are preserved, more so than does its European contemporary, Pliopithecus (Epipliopithecus) vindobonensis. The Ugandan hominoid is most closely related to the small Kenyan hominoids formerly placed in the genus Limnopithecus.

Haast's glacial theories and the opinions of his European contemporaries

Abstract The glacial theories of Julius Haast and some other nineteenth-century New Zealand geologists are examined, and compared with the theories put forward in Europe during the same period. The evidence suggests that Haast worked by applying current European ideas to the New Zealand scene, and did not, as his published writings might suggest, develop his theories merely on the basis of his own observations. It appears that an inductivist methodology of science does not account adequately for Haast's procedures.

The pleistocene prehistory of Siberia

Very little is known about the prehistory of Siberia prior to the Sartan (“Main Würm” = “Main Wisconsin”) Stadial of the Last Glacial. It is not yet clear whether this is result of the inadequacy of investigations so far or of the fact that human occupation was relatively limited in pre-Sartan times. The Sartan occupation of Siberia has been well documented by the discovery of a relatively large number of open-air sites in the major river valleys of the region. The large numbers of broken-up animal bones found at many of these sites, in combination with rich inventories of bone and stone artifacts and remains of structures, hearths, ect., show that the Sartan inhabitants of Siberia were comparable in level of cultural development to their European (Upper Paleolithic) contemporaries. More particularly, they seem to have been effective big-game hunters, fully capable of exploiting the comparatively rich game resources of their open country environment. As in Europe, evidence from Siberia suggests that the environmental change (especially reforestation) which took place at the end of the Last Glacial led to decreased reliance on big-game hunting and increased emphasis on other modes of subsistence, especially fishing.

Galdos and Galdosistas in the United States: On the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Author's Death

THROUGHOUT 1970, the fiftieth anniversary of the dea o Benito Pdrez Gald6s (1843-1920), the international world of literature is honoring the Spanish master's artistic achievement.' Hispania is pleased to join such well-known journals as Symposium2 and Cuadernos hispanoamericanos3 in dedicating an entire issue to Gald6s' memory.* The fact that this is the first issue of Hispania ever dedicated completely to one author is indicative of the importance and high esteem which Gald6s enjoys both in the field of Hispanic belleslettres and among the members of our own American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese. Gald6s, of course, would be the first to protest that he does not merit the honor we are paying him. Always a very shy and sincerely self-effacing individual, Gald6s did, nevertheless, acquire national and international fame within his own lifetime; and now, fifty years after his death, he is generally considered the most important Spanish author of the nineteenth century and the greatest Spanish novelist since Cervantes. Creator of more than 8,000 fictional characters in seventy-seven novels, twenty-six plays, many short stories and several costumbrista sketches, Gald6s achieved importance and esteem comparable to those of his nineteenth-century European contemporaries, Dickens, Balzac, Zola, Tolstoy, and Dostoievsky. At the time of his death in 1920, Gald6s was so well-known and beloved by his fellow Spaniards that an estimated 30,000 people paid their respects as his body lay in state in the City Hall in Madrid and an even greater number honored him by marching in his funeral procession.

The Theatre of the Absurd in Spanish America

The sophistication of the contemporary Spanish American theatre links it seriously with the world avant-garde movement. Following the break with the domination of the Spanish tradition which prevailed until the experimental period of the late 1920's and 30's, the Spanish American playwrights became more eclectic in their orientation, expanding their vision to include their European and North American precursors and contemporaries. The reality-illusion conflicts of Pirandello, the alienation techniques of Brecht, the existentialist preoccupations of Camus and Sartre, and more recently, the absurdist inclinations of Beckett and Ionesco provided models which have been incorporated within a Spanish American context. The stimulus to themes and techniques has resulted in a new wave of experimentation which has been widespread, making itself felt in all the major theatrical capitals of Spanish America. The last fifteen years, especially, have been characterized by renewed vigor and activity. In the front rank are such contemporary dramatists as Argentina's Osvaldo Dragun, Puerto Rico's Rene Marques, Guatemala's Garlos Solorzano, and Mexico's Emilio Carballido. These playwrights, and others with a similarly significant production, are the interpreters of a Spanish American reality. Their socio-psychological awareness has resulted in the creation of serious new plays commenting on particular aspects of the social and human condition. Their plays transcend national limitations and become significant commentaries on a universal scale. Much of the sensationalism, melodrama, and sentimentality associated with earlier plays has been suppressed through improved control over dramatic structure and technique. Complex lighting and sound effects intensify the total theatrical experience, as well as the new dimensions added through the use of spatial dislocations, constructed around a double or revolving stage, and temporal dislocations involving flashbacks or unexplained sequences of time. Their characters are vital, complex creations, mul tifaceted, who function on different levels simultaneously. While incorporating avant-garde devices and techniques acquired from the absurdists into their plays, these dramatists see the absurdity