Sense Of History Research Articles

As Humanidades e a Universidade: crise e futuro

Este artigo trata de compreender as HUMANIDADES neste período histórico respondendo a algumas questões aqui formuladas. Aborda o sentido da tecnologia e os processos que gera no mundo, particularmente, nas universidades de países como o Brasil. Examina como a Universidade realiza seu trabalho científico cada vez mais tributário da técnica, e sua submissão às agendas das empresas. Quais as implicações das Humanidades em nossas instituições de ensino e pesquisa diante desse processo? Como compreender a prática das universidades com pesquisas vinculadas às inovações tecnológicas em diferentes campos do saber técnico, com o objetivo de imaginar possível a aceleração da história atendendo aos desígnios do mercado? Como os países pobres enfrentarão essa necessidade de resgatar a história como processo e não apenas como presente? Como as Humanidades deixarão de ser tributárias desse pragmatismo exigido pela dinâmica acelerada do mundo para resgatarem o seu papel crítico diante do processo histórico?

Mito, historia y razón: entre Schelling y Adorno

Este artículo fundamenta la tesis de que el descubrimiento de elementos inconscientes en la base de la consciencia y de sus procesos de formación propició desde Kant una visión esencialmente crítica del sentido de la historia y una creciente comprensión del papel de la mitología para la conciencia humana. El estudio de este movimiento de crítica de la razón parte 1) de algunos descubrimientos de la filosofía clásica alemana sobre las presuposiciones de la consciencia que condujeran 2) a la comprensión de la historia como “caída”. La análisis de Schelling de los marcos del pasado —ruinas, megalitos y textos arcaicos— muestran así a la conciencia histórica asentada sobre un pasado inmemorial, del que se libra mediante una revelación. 3) La discusión de la mitología como fenómeno esencial a la conciencia histórica tiene como conclusión, según Schelling, la interpretación literal o “tautegórica” del mito, y 4) una concepción esencialmente mitológica del lenguaje y del significado en general. 5) Las concepciones de Schelling son comparadas con algún pensamiento filosófico sobre la historia en el siglo XX, a saber, la tesis de Husserl sobre la relación entre historia y conciencia y 6) con las concepciones de la relación entre mito y Aufklärung de Adorno y Horkheimer. Como conclusión, 7) la filosofía de la identidad de Schelling se contrasta con la concepción adorniana de lo no-idéntico, en lo que se refiere especialmente con la comprensión de la historia y del tiempo y la relación de la conciencia europea con la colonización y la violencia.

‘[T]his world is now thy pilgrimage’: William Michael Rossetti's Cognitive Maps of France and Italy

This paper takes as its starting point the conceptual metaphor ‘life is a journey’ as defined by Lakoff and Johnson (1980) in order to advance a new reading of William Michael Rossetti's Democratic Sonnets (1907). These political verses may be defined as cognitive-semantic poems, which attest to the centrality of travel in the creation of literary and artistic meaning. Rossetti's Democratic Sonnets is not only a political manifesto against tyranny and oppression, promoting the struggle for liberalism and democracy as embodied by historical figures such as Napoleon, Mazzini, Cavour, and Garibaldi; but it also reproduces Rossetti's real and imagined journeys throughout Europe in the late nineteenth century. This essay examines these references in light of the issues they raise, especially the poet as a traveller and the journey metaphor in poetry. But its central purpose is to re-read Democratic Sonnets as a cognitive map of Rossetti's mental picture of France and Italy. A cognitive map, first theorised by Edward Tolman in the 1940s, is a very personal representation of the environment that we all experience, serving to navigate unfamiliar territory, give direction, and recall information. In terms of cognitive linguistics, Rossetti is a figure whose path is determined by French and Italian landmarks (Paris, the island of St. Helena, the Alps, the Venice Lagoon, Mount Vesuvius, and so forth), which function as reference points for orientation and are tied to the historical events of the Italian Risorgimento. Through his sonnets, Rossetti attempts to build into his work the kind of poetic revolution and sense of history which may only be achieved through encounters with other cultures.

The syntax of two types of sluicing in Tamil

AbstractRecent analyses of sluicing focus on the underlying structure of the sluiced clause, i.e. sluicing as deriving from full-fledged wh-questions, or from reduced clefts (Ross 1969, Guess who? In Robert I. Binnick, Alice Davison, Georgia M. Green & Jerry L. Morgan (eds.),Proceedings of the Fifth Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, 252–286. Chicago, IL: Chicago Linguistic Society, University of Chicago; Merchant 2001,The syntax of silence. Oxford, NY: Oxford University Press; Craenenbroeck, Jeroen van. 2010b.The syntax of ellipsis: Evidence from Dutch dialects. Oxford, NY: Oxford University Press., inter alia). In this paper, we investigate two sluicing strategies in Spoken Tamil, namelycase-marked(CM) andnon-case-marked(NCM) sluicing. In addition to the morphological distinction with respect to the presence/absence of grammatical case on the wh-sluice, we argue that the two types of sluicing differ in the configuration of the underlying embedded CP. For CM sluicing, the sluiced clause is derived from a full-fledged interrogative CP at the underlying level, whereas the bare wh-sluice undergoes leftward wh-scrambling to the CP-initial position followed by TP-domain deletion at PF. While we contend that most A/A’-diagnostics are uninformative of the type of operation wh-scrambling in Tamil involves (contra Sarma 2003, Non-Canonical word order: Topic and focus in adult and child tamil. In Karimi Simin (eds.),Word order and scrambling, 238–272. Malden, Oxford: Blackwell), various properties of the CM wh-sluice (e.g. scope, negation, adverb placement, multiple sluicing) can still be described by postulating that the wh-sluice involves A’-scrambling. For the second type of sluicing (NCM sluicing), the sluiced clause involves a biclausal structure formed by a normal sentence and a null copular question. We claim that the NCM wh-sluice is derived fromSpad(Sluicing Plus A Demonstrative), since the null copular question can be accompanied by a demonstrative, cf. English ‘John met someone, who is that?’ and Dutch spading (Van Craenenbroeck 2010b). Spad is not derived from a full-fledged interrogative CP, and therefore its wh-sluice does not involve any scrambling operation. The present analysis of Tamil sluicing refutes the claim that reduced clefts are one underlying sluicing source in Dravidian languages, and moreover invites an inquiry of whether Dravidian as a language family in the historical sense always receives a homogeneous analysis, given the immense parametric variation among branch languages. In the same vein, we contend that any claim about the ‘principles’ of Dravidian syntax must be supported by strong cross-linguistic evidence at the microscopic level.

The animated moving image as political cartoon

ABSTRACTFor all the technological developments that have punctuated the timeline of political cartooning, the digital media revolution has ushered in an era where cartoonists find themselves, for the first time, operating in a news-publishing context that supports both silent static images and audio-visual moving images . Animation has emerged as a vehicle that exploits both the cartoonist's customary drawing skills as well as the new-media affordances of sound and motion. Categorically acknowledged by some prize-giving institutions but not others, and accepted by some (but not all) cartoonists, the place of animation in the political cartooning tradition remains nebulous. In this article I examine and compare the material and teleological characteristics of print media political cartoons and animated political cartoons. Writing primarily from an Australian perspective, I take as my set selected works of five prominent Australian political cartoonists who have also negotiated an animation practice. I conclude that political animations diverge from printmedia political cartoons in terms of visual style, but not function. In critically reflecting on the viewpoints of prize givers, scholars and cartoonists themselves, I determine that the alignment of the two image types within a single, political cartooning tradition is not only possible in a categorical sense, but also desirable in a historical sense.

Modern Illuminations in Poetry and Music: Charles Wuorinen's Ashberyana

MODERN ILLUMINATIONS IN POETRY AND MUSIC: CHARLES WUORINEN’S ASHBERYANA SARAH ROTHENBERG OURTEEN YEARS AFTER ITS CREATION, Charles Wuorinen’s Ashberyana stands as a tour-de-force of musical text-setting, bringing together, to mutual benefit, the work of two contemporaneous artists at the height of their powers. Wuorinen’s compositional agility, wit and deep understanding of English language poetry rise to the idiosyncratic challenges of John Ashbery’s poetic genius. The resultant work, composed in 2005, is a transparent and illuminating marriage of music and text in which the audacious inventiveness of each artist shines with diamond-sharp brilliance. This year, as we celebrate Charles Wuorinen’s 80th birthday, we also mourn the death of John Ashbery, who died this past September at the age of 90. Eleven years apart in age, these two men, distinct in personality, share key attributes: towering intellects, fierce artistic independence, and profound historical knowledge of their respective art forms. (As well as a taste for dry martinis.) Thoroughly committed to modernism, each possesses a rare historical sense of his own place in the larger trajectory of his respective art-form—the embodiment of F 248 Perspectives of New Music authentic artistic personality as outlined by T. S. Eliot in his seminal essay, Tradition and the Individual Talent. Eliot argues that true originality does not spontaneously appear, but is tied to an understanding of the past; even if the brilliance of innovation seems completely new, a seeming rebellion against all that is current, the sustainability of such brilliance is tied to an understanding of tradition: [Tradition] cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labor. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense, which we may call nearly indispensable to anyone who would continue to be a poet beyond his twenty-fifth year; and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature . . . has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.1 This keen knowledge of artistic past, in both Wuorinen and Ashbery, provides the foundation for daring originality—both of these artists understand what has preceded the moment into which they are born. John Ashbery was quietly erudite, an insatiably curious reader who continually dug into the past, with a refined taste for the obscure, from such early surrealist poets as Raymond Roussel back to medieval times. He was also a great music-lover, with a large and diverse record collection , who cultivated a special penchant for forgotten composers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in addition to following his musical contemporaries. He wrote eloquently and prolifically about painting, was active as an art critic in the 1960s, and shared deep friendships with many artists of his time. Associated with a rigorous modernism, Wuorinen’s concept of the modern is one in which tradition holds with innovation. Occasional overt homages to music of the medieval, renaissance, and classical traditions have figured throughout his compositional career, as evidenced in such early works as Two Lute Songs of Thomas Campion (1956) and Salve Regina: John Bull (1966); several works inspired by the Renaissance genius Josquin Desprez—Josquin: Ave Christe (1988), Josquiniana (2002), Ave Maria . . . Virgo Serena (Josquin) (2007)— Jan’s Dowland (2014); and, recently, cadenzas for a Haydn piano concerto, which were preceded over five decades ago, in 1965, by cadenzas to a Mozart concerto. These tributes, besides being delightful musical works, serve as a gracious acknowledgement of techniques that have informed Wuorinen’s approach to composition. Modern Illuminations in Poetry and Music 249 With his deep respect for craft, Wuorinen’s roots go back to the two seminal modernists of the last century, Schoenberg and Stravinsky—as testament, their photographs sit side by side on a music stand in his study. Wuorinen absorbed the late works of Stravinsky with such depth that they become a springboard for his own distinctive style; this was recognized in his tribute of 1975, A Reliquary for Igor Stravinsky, in which Wuorinen received...

Caste Memes: Power, Politics of Memory, and the Historical Imaginary

Two great dictators of the first half of the 20th century, Mussolini and Hitler, won the political consent of their people, i.e, Italians and Germans, above all, by pandering to an abstract idea - the sense of history. Even as we move on into the 21st century, as a wave of fundamentalism engulfs many parts of the world, it strikes us hard as we observe that political consent is won by not promising a future to a people, but by reminding them of a perfect past which the populace can only imagine, and will cherish in so doing. At the level of corporeal performativity, it seems (and history is evident), people will protect this imaginary sense of history at all costs. The conclusion of this study is that it is a craving, not for a utopian future but, very often, for a utopian past that drives human political action. Human beings, this essay will try to establish, even as they move towards the future whilst living in the present, want a memory of a great flawless past to be present in what we will henceforth call the ‘historical imaginary’. Also, this paper tries to study (by looking at an anthropological case study involving the Pramalai Kallar subcaste of South India) how Collective Memory of Castes and Subcastes is subject to politics and how such politicised memory appeals to the historical imaginary insofar as it evokes the lower castes to not only speak but also actively participate in the rhetoric of populism, and contribute to the promise of the return of a Utopia now bygone. “The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” - Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.

Dead Money and Modernity: America's Great Depression

Dead Money and ModernityAmerica's Great Depression Joseph Fronczak (bio) Charles. R. Morris. A Rabble of Dead Money: The Great Crash and the Global Depression: 1929–1939. New York: PublicAffairs, 2017. xvi + 389 pp. Figures, appendix, notes, and index. $29.99. Kenneth J. Bindas. Modernity and the Great Depression: The Transformation of American Society, 1930–1941. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2017. 277 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $39.95. As the calamitous year 1929 began, Calvin Coolidge was in his final months as president of the United States. In January, he addressed the officials charged with drawing up the federal budget, and he used the opportunity to pass on what he considered sturdy economic principles learned from past trials. In particular, he suggested that it had been "wise governmental policies, and particularly wise economy in Government expenditures with steady reduction of the national debt," that had restored the country from what he called "the great depression of 1921." Everything about Coolidge's comments would sound, a decade later, utterly outmoded: his easy confidence in austerity's ability to remedy economic crisis; his use of the noun economy to indicate government's thrifty husbandry; and, perhaps above all else, Coolidge's use of the phrase "the great depression" to refer to anything other than the economic collapse that the country, and the world, would soon endure.1 Such was the magnitude of the great slump that followed 1929 that it transformed Americans' sense of history, their sense of where they stood in time. They began to see themselves as living in an extraordinary epoch disconnected from the past, as if the present had somehow fallen out of the progressive march of history they had once taken for granted. Indicative of this new exceptionalist consciousness, Americans soon took to using the phrase "the great depression" to almost exclusively refer to their own present-day predicament, no longer to the economic downturns of the past like the one Coolidge had reflected on. With time, as the crisis stretched on, Americans began to speak of "the Great Depression" as an almost mythological being, maintaining its godlike "grip" on all the world: one early example was a Christmas letter written in 1931 to [End Page 483] the Detroit Free Press, which vividly described "the clutches of that deplorable condition that will be historically known as the Great Depression." Even as Americans were still figuring out what to call their "deplorable condition," conspiracy theories began to mushroom about what—or who—had caused it all, as when, also in the final days of 1931, demagogic congressman Louis T. McFadden denounced German-born Jewish banker Paul Warburg as "the man who engineered the great depression."2 Neither Warburg nor anyone else, of course, had "engineered" the Depression, and McFadden himself was eventually denounced as a Nazi-sympathizing antisemite; the Detroit Christmas letter-writer, however, was proven correct with time. Many decades later, historians and the public alike still understand the period following 1929 as a discrete historical period and still refer to it as its contemporaries decided to, as the Great Depression. Considering how contentious of a matter periodization is, both in the moment and in historio-graphical reflection, it shouldn't be taken for granted that this would be so. Yet as a historical period, the Depression era stands out in modern history, not only because of the traumatic world war it spawned, but because of its own immense scope. A comprehensive catastrophe, the Great Depression was not only an economic slump, it was a period of political breakdown, social disruption, intellectual illusion, and environmental disaster. Global both in the sense that it hit every country on earth and that its consequences were felt by investment bankers and fruit pickers alike, the Great Depression was nothing less than, in the words of Eric Hobsbawm, "the most traumatic episode in the history of capitalism."3 The most traumatic episode in the history of capitalism, yes, and yet what economic historian Peter Temin wrote of the Great Depression in 1975 remains true: that "it is surprising how little we know about its causes." Part of why this is so has to do with the difficulty of...

Personality, Impersonality, and the Personified Detachment of Wyndham Lewis

Personality, Impersonality, and the Personified Detachment of Wyndham Lewis Heather Arvidson (bio) Few words invoke the pieties of high modernist aesthetics with the force of "impersonality," which, since the early twentieth century, has served as shorthand for the fragmented forms, intellectual detachment, and imperious command of abstraction and allusion conventionally associated with modernism. Even as scholarship of recent decades, and the new modernist studies in particular, has dismantled any notion of a unified modernist aesthetic, privileged statements of the so-called doctrine of impersonality by T. S. Eliot and James Joyce continue to exert a grip on received understandings of modernism's formal investments. Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1919) supplies a formidable touchstone, presenting a cryptic "impersonal theory of poetry" imagined with all the austerity of scientific objectivity.1 Eliot claims that in acquiring an "historical sense" of aesthetic tradition, the artist undergoes "a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable," and hence submits to "a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality" ("Tradition," 102, 103). This formulation has come to stand more broadly for modernists' rejection of subjectivity as the expressive basis for art. Its institutionalization is not only a product of the New Criticism that championed Eliot's iconic severance of the artist from the art work but was—importantly for this article—well underway in the 1920s, as may attest Laura Riding's 1928 complaint of the "ritualistic impersonality" of emergent modernist orthodoxy.2 Less well known is that "impersonality" lived an equally vibrant discursive life outside of art in transatlantic print culture. [End Page 791] Coeval with modernism, elaborations on what was "impersonal" about modernity—in culture, science, industry, and human character—proliferated in newspapers, mass and middlebrow magazines, scientific periodicals, and works of sociology and political analysis. Equivocal in valence and remarkably catholic in semantic application, impersonality was both "in the air, part of the 'climate of opinion'" and resolutely in print, grafted to debates about the prospects of the individual within urban industrial life.3 As John Dewey put it, "the invasion of the community by the new and relatively impersonal and mechanical modes of combined human behavior is the outstanding fact of modern life."4 Yet impersonality at times bore a more sanguine aspect, as when Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy proclaimed that "to impersonalize scientifically the material sense of existence—rather than cling to personality—is the lesson of to-day," or when Bertrand Russell pronounced that "the desire for a larger life and wider interests, for an escape from private circumstances … is fulfilled by the impersonal cosmic outlook of science as by nothing else."5 As such examples suggest, impersonality and its cognates accommodated meanings that ranged from a pervasive hazard for personhood, emotion, and intimate connection to an interpersonal or scientific ideal; from urban alienation to collective affiliation; from the machine to mythic consciousness; from subpersonal matter to the transpersonal soul. In short, what cultural historian Warren I. Susman has famously called "the culture of personality" was deeply entangled with a culture of impersonality, and it was within this broader context that modernist impersonality acquired its durable correlation with modernist aesthetics.6 No one was more alert to the enmeshment of personality and impersonality, or more convinced of the debt modernism owed to this discursive background, than Wyndham Lewis. In addition to the roles for which he is best known—novelist, painter, critic, polemicist, and Enemy-at-large—Lewis also served as modernist impersonality's reverse engineer. As part of an impossibly vast project to "lay bare the widely-flung system of cables connecting up this maze-like and destructive system in the midst of which we live," he sought to diagram the ideological workings of the interwar status quo of British and American culture.7 In the process, he seized impersonality as a key hermeneutic. In defense of the allegedly persecuted "Person" of Western culture, Lewis's immense critical output of the second half of the 1920s and early 1930s reiteratively attempted to dismantle the "rationale" that impersonality "possess[es] today."8 Lewis recasts impersonality as a key narrative of the era—and one on...

Impossible Photographs: Images of War from Rossellini to dOCUMENTA 13

Impossible Photographs:Images of War from Rossellini to dOCUMENTA 13 Domietta Torlasco (bio) I How can a critical practice of the image affect the way we make war visible? How can it not only increase the visibility of war-related events but also rearticulate the very frames through which war acquires visibility? Here I adopt the term "frame" to name the aesthetic and political parameters according to which certain regions of the visible are included in (or excluded from) a given image and, concomitantly, a certain past or present comes into view while another remains in obscurity. I am thus concerned with the system informing the relationship between the visible and the invisible—what Jacques Rancière has called "the distribution of the sensible"1—to the extent that it also regulates the relationship between different temporalities as well as our relationship to what we might describe as the time of war. To make war visible is also to make time visible. It is to abide by or disturb the chronological, linear order that has too often taken hold of our sense of history. In particular, the obsession with the instant and the instantaneous—chronology [End Page 110] as a mere succession of instants or points in time—has played a crucial role in the fields of both audiovisual media and warfare, leading to the development of a "vision machine," in Paul Virilio's apt formulation, for which speed constitutes the new law of profit.2 The critical practice of the image I am tracing counters the conflation of visibility and acceleration, truthful documentation and instantaneity. It refuses to aim at the visible as if it were a target to be destroyed and, concurrently, forgoes "capturing" the moment as if it were an entity to be isolated and secured. By doing so, such a practice also refuses to place images within a determinate context—as if they were here and not beyond, now and not then, incapable of haunting us, the viewers, from more than one place and more than one time. As critics answering the October questionnaire on art and antiwar opposition have remarked, any attempt at making war visible today must confront the logic of the media spectacle of the September 11 attacks.3 The RETORT collective, following Guy Debord's critique of capital's new power of accumulation and control over images, has argued that the attacks constitute an example of image warfare—for the United States, a defeat in the very domain of spectacular visibility that has sanctioned its symbolic and material dominance on the world stage. Significantly, RETORT refuses to separate these horrific events from a long history of aerial bombing, a history of terror from the air that begins with the Italian assaults on Libyan territories in 1911, culminates in the atomic blasts that obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and continues after World War II through a series of allegedly pacifying military interventions around the globe. "Bombing," they maintain, "is a constitutive feature of modern life."4 In fact, the spectacle operates by isolating discrete events and making them hypervisible at the expense of other variously related occurrences. We are all too familiar with the images that were produced during the attacks on the World Trade Center, and indeed, this very familiarity betrays a logic of mediatic enclosure. Writing in Artforum only a few months after the attacks, Sarah Boxer observed that "the events of September 11, 2001, were beyond measure. But when the day ended, the visual limits were fixed. The editors of news agencies and newspapers had their film."5 I interpret her comments as a way of signaling that these images had become intractable in their very specificity—self-identical and immediately expressive—and as such had already entered the arsenal of the war to come. "For all time," Boxer explains, "there would be certain balls of fire, certain bits of debris, certain last views of the World Trade Center, certain running crowds, certain spectators, certain firefighters, certain oxygen tanks, certain [End Page 111] ruins, and certain shirts."6 She also notices that most front pages of newspapers "decided to focus on the instant that the second plane hit," as if by...

Dialogue: The Latest Mark of Modernity

Dialogue:The Latest Mark of Modernity* Leonard Swidlerdialogue@temple.edu Modernity, as historians customarily use the term today starts with the eighteenth century and is characterized by two terms: the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason. As the "Age of Reason" indicates, Modernity has several "marks," and one foundational Mark is reason. Before the Enlightenment, the test questions about what is true were "Does the Tradition prescribe it?" or "Does the Church Authority affirm it?" or "Is it in Scripture?" However, from the eighteenth century onward, the shapers of Western civilization tended to ask none of those old test questions but, rather, "Is it reasonable? Does it make sense?" If yes, then it is accepted; if not, it is rejected. Another equally central mark of Modernity emerged in the eighteenth century: freedom. Think of the blazing words that were first written just blocks from where I have been teaching for over half a century in Philadelphia: "All men are created equal!"—the American Declaration of Independence. Philadelphia, whose very name means "brotherly/sisterly love," is likewise the birthplace of human rights, articulated first by the founder of Pennsylvania, the English Quaker William Penn, and then supremely in the Constitution of the United States. Also beginning in the late eighteenth century, a third mark of Modernity began to emerge and attained full flowering in the nineteenth century: a sense of history, dynamism, evolution. This is when especially German thinkers such as Leopold von Ranke developed "scientific history writing," [End Page 453] seeking to learn in newly developed, scientifically sifted ways to come ever closer to describing the past wie es engentlich gewesen, "how it really was." They found, not only through scientific history but also through the newly created social sciences (sociology anthropology psychology), that human life was always moving, changing, and developing: Being human was not a fixed given but an on-going "work in progress." Even the newly developing physical sciences (for example, Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species in 1859) pointed in this direction. We humans evolved from a millennia past to what we are now, and we are continuing to evolve, but now mainly on the mental, spiritual, and cultural levels, as was so brilliantly perceived and articulated by that Jesuit paleontologist-seer Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. These three were the new marks of Western civilization: reason, freedom, and dynamism. However, they did not remain marks only of Western civilization. Through European empires (English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Belgian), through exploding global trade, through modern communications—what was initially Christendom morphed into Western civilization, and still further today to the burgeoning global civilization, which is deeply characterized by the newly emerged fourth mark of Modernity, dialogue. Before focusing in depth on dialogue, I note that in the last part of the twentieth century some thinkers were critical of the Enlightenment—arguing that it was superficial and that we have since discovered subterranean forces that are really shaping human life. These thinkers and their predecessors increasingly uncovered underground forces. Three of these formative late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century thinkers were Marx, Durkheim, and Freud. Marx argued that the underlying economic forces were what really directed the societal "superstructure," forces such as philosophy, law, ethics, etc. For Durkheim, the drive for continued existence of the community created religion and morality. For Freud, all human urges are fundamentally products of often-destructive sexual drives. As the unearthing of the subterranean forces continued in the twentieth century they were named the "hermeneutics of suspicion." Some said that they undermined the superficial understanding of humanity of the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason. Then, the term "Postmodernism" flourished for a few decades at the end of the twentieth century, but it faded away as a fad, and a more sober realization returned that understands these various hermeneutics of suspicion to have contributed to an ever-deepening [End Page 454] understanding of the depth and breadth of human reason in all of its incompletely charted breadth and depth. I will now reflect on dialogue, the fourth mark of Modernity, to see how it flows from the first three marks and thence to why it will be the life-blood of Modernity from...

The End of Reconstruction, Again: Dylann Roof, Thomas Dixon Jr., and the Transhistorical Structures of Racist Feeling

The End of Reconstruction, Again:Dylann Roof, Thomas Dixon Jr., and the Transhistorical Structures of Racist Feeling Gordon Fraser (bio) On the night of Barack Obama's election to the presidency, the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman expressed an understandable hopefulness about the future of race relations. "Breaking with our racial past," he predicted, would be the "least" of our problems. Friedman closed his column with words that bridged the troubled past and the hopeful future. "The Civil War is over," he wrote. "Let reconstruction begin."1 Yet by invoking the Civil War and Reconstruction, [End Page 174] Friedman identified a more complicated history than he may have intended. Reconstruction had been a political experiment, conducted between 1865 and 1877, in which the Congress of the United States attempted to enforce legal and civic equality across race in the former Confederate states. For a brief moment, it seemed to work. By 1887, for instance, seventeen African Americans had been elected or appointed to Congress.2 But according to observers as diverse as William Dunning and W. E. B. Du Bois, the experiment failed.3 Thousands were lynched as multi-racial city, county, and state governments were overthrown in white supremacist coups d'état.4 The United States would witness a century of de jure racial apartheid, followed by the lingering de facto segregation of today. Like the civil rights era (1948–1970), Reconstruction constituted what Michael Omi and Howard Winant have called a "great [moment] of … mainstream political upsurge." Backlash followed both periods.5 We are witnessing a similar backlash today: an energized racism overlapping with and subsequent to the administration of the first black president and the renewal of emancipatory movements for justice. The emergence of white supremacist militias in city centers has forced all but the most craven to acknowledge that racism is resurgent in US political life. To push Friedman's metaphor just a bit further: If Obama's election ushered in a "reconstruction," then we in the aftermath of the Obama administration should be extraordinarily cautious about what came after the first Reconstruction: Plessy v. Ferguson, the Wilmington political coup, and Jim Crow. I raise the specter of Reconstruction's long aftermath not to conflate its historical particularity with that of the present but rather to suggest that historical parallels might enable us to think about the structural operations of racism. We need to understand, I think, not simply how US society enables racial despotism but how the experience of that despotism by its ostensible beneficiaries enables its reinvigoration. We need a scholarship not simply of race but of racism. Such a scholarship might begin, I think, by reading newly resurgent racisms as structures of feeling. As formulated by Raymond Williams half a century ago, structures of feeling offer an analytic for explaining messy, even incoherent, systems of belief. As lived and expressed, such structures appear more often as "a latency" across and between formal ideologies.6 Williams explains: "The new generation responds in its own ways to the unique world it is inheriting, taking up many continuities, that can be traced, … yet feeling its whole life in certain ways differently, and shaping its [End Page 175] creative response into a new structure of feeling."7 While social, legal, and political structures might pass from generation to generation relatively intact, structures of feeling, partly articulated and even internally contradictory, are invented anew. I suggest that understanding racism as such a structure would enable us to confront its four primary vectors—racial terrorism, state violence, reactionary politics, and exclusionary laws—not as a coherent project to be contested ideologically but a cluster of latent, even contradictory, potentials. We might begin exploring such structures of racist feeling in Shelby, North Carolina. Dylann Roof, who would be convicted of murdering nine people in the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, was arrested in Shelby. When Roof was captured in June 2015, a news report described his appearance in the small community as "unlikely."8 Perhaps it was. But the town, like the AME Church of Charleston itself, offers kinetic depth to an observer with a sense of history. Shelby was also the childhood home of the...

Sergel in Naples and Pompeii: an Artistic Station in the Dark

This contribution considers eighteenth-century visits to the antiquarian collections in Naples in the context of recent accounts of neoclassical art, and in particular Andrei Pop’s reading of it through his introduction of the notion of “Neopaganism”. The article argues that visits to Portici and the excavations at Herculaneum and Pompeii have been improperly amalgamated with the Roman study journey undertaken by artists and tourists. Noting the novelty and excitement of the archeological findings, but also the tight control on visitors and strict prohibition of any form of copy that signifi ed the “extraction” of images of the Neapolitan treasures, the article argues that artists’ visits to collections of antiquities must be treated as an anomaly in the study regime. The contribution draws from several records of visits, highlighting a small artists’ excursion that included the Swedish sculptor Johan Tobias Sergel. In such records, but also in Sergel’s sculpture, it finds evidence for the idea that Naples can be framed in terms of the budding fascination with a violent antiquity and with “natural” drives accompanying the rise of “Neopaganism” in the late 1760s. The intimate nature of some of the objects recovered, along with the dramatic relationship to the drama of sudden death and the sense of history having been “cancelled out” for the buried towns, made it difficult to sustain traditional attitudes of “admiration” for antique models

An Inclusive History for a Divided World?

ABSTRACTThe article discusses various historiographical problems created by Soviet music and, more broadly, music under the so-called ‘totalitarian’ regimes for the conventional modernism-driven narrative of the twentieth century. It reviews a number of existing challenges to the dominant narrative within musicology and related fields such as art and architectural history, and it proposes ways in which we can move forward. In conclusion, the author considers the new challenges to the breaking down of cold-war barriers, not only in a historical sense, but also today, in the midst of a new cold war.

Romanticism, Now & Then: An Introduction

Romanticism, Now & ThenAn Introduction Bruce Holsinger and Andrew Stauffer In April 2018, the eight scholars whose work appears in these pages convened on the grounds of the University of Virginia around the subject "Romanticism, Now & Then." This issue of New Literary History appears on the eve of the journal's fiftieth anniversary, and it reflects the founding editor's vision for its special issues more broadly: "The organizing center of the issue is a single subject—the problems of literary history—treated from diverse areas, perspectives and disciplines."1 The field of Romanticism, at least in English departments, has played a formative role in the development of literary history as a discipline. It has been the pivot, in some ways, between questions of the philological and the cultural, the practical and the theoretical, the formalist and the historicist—no doubt in part as a legacy of what Richard Macksey has identified as "the Romantic welling up of a search for method that was to be the common concern binding together the humane disciplines."2 At the same time, the issue grapples with Romanticism, according to sound NLH precedent, as at once a "theme, a method, and an intellectual problem," in Rita Felski's phrase, both timely and "untimely."3 Romanticism's ambiguous temporalities are the founding problem of the essays presented here. Our title, "Romanticism, Now & Then," echoes the structure of the journal's name, in which "New" and "History" bookend the "Literary" as antagonistic yet codependent temporalities. We here frame Romanticism with a similar set of terms: the "now" of our cultural and scholarly moment rubbing against the "then" of the past—the now of Romanticist theory and criticism working upon the then of literary history. As Jonathan Sachs has recently observed, the Romantic era was marked by cultural pressures in both directions: a sense of accelerated novelty shadowed by a growing awareness of deep time.4 In that contact zone, historicism found its methodological posture and idiom, what James Chandler has called the "enabling framework" that Romanticism provided for the task of "historical analysis."5 As the essays presented here suggest, such intertwining of object and method remains the contested signature of the field. [End Page v] At the same time, the phrase "now and then" brings to mind the occasional nature of Romanticism: its fitful arrivals and sudden fadings, its revolutionary cycles and self-vexed creations, its present tenses and tense presences across the uncertain timelines of subjective experience—what Tristram Wolff identifies in his essay here as "Romanticism's willful yet casual self-difference, and the resulting arrhythmia at its heart." Almost inevitably, we are brought back to the occasion of reading. Romanticism clearly inherited from the eighteenth century what Christina Lupton has called "a temporally discontinuous practice of reading," and thus of textuality more broadly: the literary cultures of Romanticism "depended on and reproduced temporal striation," installing heterochronicity in its objects and subjects alike—including its present day critics.6 Since contemporary critical frameworks are in many ways shaped by the discourse and ideologies of the Romantic era, this issue's framing resonates with its subject matter, the spontaneous overflows of April now collected in something like tranquility. In the same spirit, our title also looks forward, its "then" pointing toward futurity. The new literary historian abides in the dawning of what William Wordsworth names "something evermore about to be."7 This is especially true for the Romanticist, for whom revolutionary breakages seem always predicated on the enshrinement of the past, and contemporaneity upon an urgent sense of historicity. From the perspective of at least six disciplines—English, musicology, American studies, African American and African studies, art history, and comparative literature—and various national traditions and transnational currents, this issue explores the abiding concepts and keywords of Romanticism, while also discriminating among the various methods, forms, and cultural and political valences of Romantic art in different contexts, here and there, now and then. Our hope, in the midst of the ongoing Romantic bicentennial, is to prompt newly vital consideration of what Romanticism has been as a field of study and where it might be heading as our subject matter enters its third...

Memory texts and Nazi concentration camps: a comparative analysis

How do visitors make sense of history at dark tourism sites, and how do onsite experiences help to structure memory? Asserting that the memory-making potential of tourism sites arises from discursive foundations, this paper analyses textual presentation and enactment at four Nazi concentration camp sites (Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland, Buchenwald and Dachau in Germany, and Mauthausen in Austria). Data suggest that concentration camp sites are experienced by visitors within three distinct but interwoven texts: linguistically, in texts of dissonance provided by managers onsite; symbolically, in texts of absence fostered during visitors' personal encounters with sites; and imaginatively, in creative texts personally constructed during visitors' experiences onsite. Each of these texts stimulates cultural memory, communicative memory, or a combination of both. Together, they are foundational elements of a genre of dark tourism discourse that organises texts, their producers and 'readers' (tourists, others), and relevant contexts to construct meaning and provoke collective memory.

The Nietzsche’s Reflection on History: Historical Sense and Nihilism

The present article aims to investigate the narratives considerations of Nietzsche’s history, based on his writings in which the critique of historical culture is revealed from its lack of historical sense and his nihilist state, establishing a close relationship between the two themes, making the understanding of the second magnify its critical position.

Sartre аnd America

The article is devoted to the North American Sartre Society, which was founded in 1985. The author as its co-founder develops his point of view presenting during panel discussion of Sartre’s relations with the United States on the 2015 meeting. He devoted a lot of papers and books to Sartre’s philosophy. Some of them are presented in the references. The author reflects at a somewhat deeper level on Sartre’s attitudes towards USA in the context of its history and international relations, saying about philosopher’s contradictions, the strategy and tactics of his self-disinvitation. The author traces Sartre’s transition from one myth of America to another in later life. Sartre’s initial experiential encounter with the American reality was by no means entirely positive, but he did like New York City, feeling a sense of freedom in the midst of its crowds that he retained as an important part of his picture of America when back in France. Freedom, an open future, almost unlimited possibilities, and a lack of a sense of history of the sort by which Europe is shackled. Several events of the postwar world history such as Korean war, then Vietnam war paved the way for Sartre’s most salient later attitudes towards America. Meanwhile, Sartre had accepted an invitation to present lectures at Cornell University in 1965. But after American massive bombing of North Vietnam in 1965 Sartre responded by disinviting himself from Cornell by way of protest. Recounting these events, the author of the paper recalls so-called “Cornell Lectures”, which were saved in unfinished manuscript form and have been given the title “Morale et Histoire”. A serious interest in American political life is shown on Sartre’s and Beauvoir’s visit to Cuba as guests of Fidel Castro and Sartre’s participation in Lord Bertrand Russell’s independent War Crimes Tribunal.

Tombs, Images and Identities in Ancient Anatolia

Self-definition of ancient Greeks was created under the influence of socio-historical events, reflecting both, the relationship between Hellenes themselves and attitudes towards others. Greek wonder as a selfgenerated process yielded to a growing awareness that the drive towards advancement, observed in certain regions of Greece, was probably not possible without the external impetus of an extensively integrated Mediterranean world (Rollinger 2006, 197-226). The influencing factors for self-definition of ancient Greeks were a shared myth of descent, a shared territory, and a shared sense of history. Many scholars assume, that a sense of Greekness among Dorians, Ionians, Aiolians and others was finally crystallized throughout the number of military conflicts in which they were involved during the Classical period. Its seems probable that Athens played a major role both in the invention of the barbarian concept and in the substitution of cultural for ethnic criteria in the self-definition of Greeks. In their self-definition, Greeks seem to be deliberately stylized as antinomy to what they considered to be typical for others. Similarly, as a response to the strong pressure from the Persians, the national awareness of the Anatolians was formed. Interestingly, in some cases local ethnic groups had chosen cultural elements that had been associated with Greeks or Persians for their self-definition.

A compreensão histórica do fracasso escolar no Brasil

RESUMO O texto, organizado em três partes, discute o modo como a ideia de fracasso escolar foi posta em questão no Brasil. Na primeira delas, o autor aborda as condições de produção das pesquisas sobre o tema, prestando atenção ao sentido histórico do seu emprego como noção de análise. Na segunda, examina material produzido sobre o tema, na forma de pesquisa ou de tradução para o português, a fim de problematizar o registro mais comum da sua história. A terceira parte propõe que a mobilização popular por escolarização entre os anos 1970/1980 em São Paulo é um elemento explicativo relevante, mas ausente da reflexão sobre a elaboração da noção de fracasso escolar como categoria de análise em educação.