Intense Friendship Research Articles

“Without friends no one would choose to live” in advance

In June 2016, Texas A&M University hosted its inaugural philosophy camp for teens. In this article, we address how running a philosophy camp for pre-college students can have a positive impact on both the campers and the staff, which included philosophy faculty, graduate students (Philosophy and English), and undergraduates. We designed the week-long (Monday through Friday, 9 a.m.–4 p.m.) philosophy camp with three aims: to introduce pre-college students to philosophical thinking and dialogue; to develop an intellectual community among the campers; and to provide a space in which young people could engage as equal partners in a series of spirited philosophical discussions. Drawing chiefly from our local community, we enrolled a diverse group of campers. We organized the week around themes that we thought would be of particular interest to pre-college students while also providing a broad view of the discipline. What we did not anticipate was the intense friendships that were formed, based on a shared love of philosophical ideas.

Holding Hands: Intergenerational Desire in Diana Wynne Jones's Fire and Hemlock and Ali Smith's Autumn

Abstract Diana Wynne Jones's Fire and Hemlock (1984) and Ali Smith's Autumn (2016) are two British novels that evoke an intense friendship between a girl and an older man. Their experimental narrative forms include a complex chronology, unreliable narrator, dream scenes, gaps, and a rich intertextual network to frame an intergenerational friendship that can be read as intergenerational desire. The experimental narratives and reflections on the fluidity of age enable Smith and Jones to evoke this controversial topic without fulling addressing it. A lot is at stake for Fire and Hemlock, given that it is addressed to young readers and there is concern that children's books could be used for grooming. Controversially, both novels locate the desire in the young girl rather than the old man and explore the agency and moments of disempowerment that the female characters experience. However, an age gap between childhood and adulthood is crucial in qualifying a relationship as “intergenerational desire,” and here, the novels’ experimental structures and fuzzy chronologies create ambiguity. In addition, the books create confusion about the nature of the attraction between the characters. They exploit the ambiguity that incomplete memories, unreliable narration, narrative gaps, metaphors, and intertextual references leave when thematizing what could be defined as friendship, kinship, love, and/or sexual attraction.

Constellations by Kate Glasheen (review)

Reviewed by: Constellations by Kate Glasheen April Spisak Glasheen, Kate Constellations; written and illus. by Kate Glasheen. Holiday House, 2023 [224p] Trade ed. ISBN 9780823450718 $22.99 Paper ed. ISBN 9780823454884 $14.99 E-book ed. ISBN 9780823455386 $11.99 Reviewed from digital galleys R Gr. 8-12 The 1980s in Troy, New York (and almost everywhere else) is an all but impossible time to freely explore or challenge gender identity, but Claire isn't trying to be an activist—they just don't want the first (and sometimes only) question they get asked to be whether they are a boy or a girl. Heavy drinking smooths out and dulls the sharp edges of their pain until they finally land in court-ordered rehab. Suddenly, Claire is surrounded by other teens who are also struggling with addiction, isolation, anxiety, and depression, and they feel part of a group for the first time. A terrific counselor, some new coping strategies to replace drinking, and bolstering from their new friends all combine to help Claire feel confident they will do okay after their release. Unfortunately, not all their friends from rehab fare as well, going back to lives that are just too heavy, too dark, or too hopeless to not revert to old, destructive habits. Exaggerated size and perspective emphasize raw experiences throughout the graphic novel as emotional faces sometimes fill the panel, crowding out everything else. The watercolor and ink illustrations add even more weight to the scenes, with shadows, color shifts, and even the posture of the characters all conveying despair and, even more notable for its scarcity, joy. An honest, straight-forward author's note identifies the book as having an autobiographical core as they also felt born [End Page 259] into a body that didn't match their identity, were crushed by societal expectations, and went through rehab where they formed intense friendships that were sometimes positive, sometimes traumatic. Glasheen ends with a quiet observation that even if the reader is not hurting as much as Claire, there is connectivity in that we all are carrying something that, if left untended or unspoken, could become too heavy to hold. Copyright © 2023 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

A Man of Our Times: Muḥammad ibn Dāwūd al-Iṣbahānī’s Pioneering Vision of Male Love

Abstract The ghazal chapters of Muḥammad b. Dāwūd al-Iṣbahānī’s poetry anthology Kitāb al-Zahrah include 109 brief poems attributed to baʿḍ ahl hādhā al-ʿaṣr (a Man of Our Times). Ibn Dāwūd has conventionally been assumed to be the author of these poems. The “Man of Our Times” poems stand out among ‘Abbāsid ghazal because of their focus on justice, their appeals to reason, and their depiction of brotherly friendship (ikhā’) imbued with passionate love (hawā). Moreover, their repurposing of motifs from the poetic canon, such as the lover’s desert wanderings and nature’s lamentation in sympathy with him, adds to their tone of erudition. This gives the impression that the relationship they describe is an intense friendship between educated men of similar age. As with other early ʿAbbāsid bodies of ghazal, the poems can be categorized according to rhetorical function. For the “Man of Our Times” poems, these subcategories are 1) personal messages, 2) aphorisms, 3) petitions for justice, 4) alienation narratives, and 5) urban narratives.

Teenage Time Use and Educational Attainment in Adulthood in Finland

We investigated the role of teenage everyday social ties in educational outcomes by examining the association between teenage time use and educational attainment in adulthood. The sample consisted of young people aged 10–18 from the 1979 Finnish Time Use Survey, and the same respondents’ educational attainment later in life recorded from population register data at the year of 40th birthday (n = 366 men and 393 women). We assessed the associations of time spent with the parents, on studying, leisure activities, as well as social connectedness with friends and participation in extracurricular activities, with educational outcomes. Our findings indicated that time spent with the father is positively associated with the likelihood of completing tertiary education for both daughters and sons. In particular, time spent with lower-education fathers was associated with teenagers’ future tertiary education. However, intense friendships and participation in extracurricular activities were not associated with academic achievement later in life. The findings suggest that educational attainment is partly explained by teenage time spent with the family. Less-educated fathers can enhance the attainment of higher education of their children by spending more time with their teenage children.

Everyone Dies Famous in a Small Town by Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock

Reviewed by: Everyone Dies Famous in a Small Town by Bonnie-Sue Hitchcock Elizabeth Bush Hitchcock, Bonnie-Sue Everyone Dies Famous in a Small Town. Lamb, 2021 [208p] Library ed. ISBN 9781984892607 $20.99 Trade ed. ISBN 9781984892591 $17.99 E-book ed. ISBN 9781984892614 $10.99 Reviewed from digital galleys R Gr. 8–12 The opening story, “Angry Starfish,” situates readers in familiar YA territory: Gina, furious with her father’s new relationship, takes her anger out on the new girlfriend’s daughter, Poppy, a young child who sublimates an unspecified trauma through an intense friendship with an imaginary friend. Readers of Hitchcock’s The Smell of Other People’s Houses (BCCB 4/16) will know this deceptively self-contained tale is leading somewhere, but where should they look? To Gina and the parental drama? Or to Poppy and her Elizabeth? As story after story unfolds, bouncing among locales in Alaska, Colorado, and the coastal Pacific Northwest, Hitchcock patiently guides readers along a shadowy path through twin mysteries involving a predatory priest and an abducted child, with clues to the solutions cagily hidden among the quotidian friendship, romantic, and domestic dramas that inexorably interconnect. Most tales are intriguing in their own right: the friends who suspect they might share the same father; a young man suffering from amnesia brought on by shellfish poisoning; the high school seductress with no compunction over lengthening her list of conquests; a wildfire that draws together a diffident young woman and a firefighter ready to break a troublesome relationship There’s an purposeful orderliness to the tales’ positioning that allows references and clues from previous stories to accumulate en route to the final reveals. This will inspire readers to count degrees of separation and ponder the temporal and spatial distances tragedy can reach. Copyright © 2021 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Rembrandt, Lievens, Dou

Taking license from Just Kids, Patti Smith’s 2010 memoir of her youthful, intense working friendship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, this essay examines Rembrandt’s artistic friendships with his colleague Jan Lievens, and his first pupil, Gerrit Dou. The burst of competitive, extreme co-creativity of Rembrandt and Lievens during their Leiden years comes to a head in their rendering of the raising of Lazarus; its strains are evident in Rembrandt’s Oriental heads. The life-long, seemingly more sustained friendship of Rembrandt and Dou is encapsulated in Dog at rest, Dou’s homage to his master as exemplary teacher. These two working relationships point not only to the power of artists serving as each other’s muses, but also to the need for further investigation into the value, and exploitation, of friendships for Rembrandt.

The role of social networks and intense friendships in study abroad students’ L2 use and speaking development

Abstract This article examines the connections among self-reported social network development, L2 use, and self-perceived speaking proficiency development in a group of Belgian ERASMUS students (n = 59) who studied abroad in different European countries (Austria, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Spain, Sweden, and the UK). The results suggest a number of differences between the participants in this study and the US cohorts who have been traditionally the focus of previous SA research. For example, the Belgian students report high levels of proficiency in the target language before going abroad and high levels of target language use while abroad. Furthermore, a number of social network variables point to differences between the ERASMUS students in the present study and the US students featuring in previous research. Nevertheless, the results also reveal some similarities, especially with regard to the social network variables ‘size’ and ‘intensity of friendship’ which were predictors of language gains for the group of students under analysis in this study and, consequently, corroborated findings of previous studies conducted with US cohorts.

The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison ed. by John F. Callahan and Marc C. Conner

Reviewed by: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison ed. by John F. Callahan and Marc C. Conner Ross Posnock John F. Callahan and Marc C. Conner, eds. The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison. New York: Random House, 2019. 1,072 pp. $50.00. “Editions of letters and diaries say that a writer has arrived, or is still with us, much more than biographies do,” Darryl Pinckney remarked in his review of Trading Twelves (2000), the Ellison/Albert Murray letters. The warmly celebratory response in major media to The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison upon its publication in the fall of 2019 ratifies Pinckney’s point. Expertly introduced decade by decade by the incomparable John Callahan, The Letters arrive as a great gift to American literature, an intellectual feast of over a thousand pages, a volume that easily takes its place among the most important collections by any American author. The letters above all allow us to bear intimate witness to the birth of Ellison’s ideas (highlights include the 1941 and 1945 letters to Richard Wright, the 1945 letter to Kenneth Burke, and the 1970 letter to Stanley Edgar Hyman) expressed with remarkable force and pungency. Yet intellectual ferment is only one strand in this tapestry; another reveals the private Ellison. His early letters to his mother Ida are often preoccupied with requests for money—he hangs with a fast crowd at Tuskegee—but eventually come to express anguished empathy for her isolation (deserted by her second husband and “toiling from morning to night”), some reassurance that he is special even if unemployed (“every one thinks I’m a little odd and a bit gifted”) and outrage at a world so indifferent to poor people (“I find myself wishing that the whole thing would explode”). These feelings culminate in an August 30, 1937 letter to Ida, the last one she reads before dying unexpectedly two months later. His romantic pain is vivid in two 1941 letters to Sanora Babb, herself a fledgling (white) novelist with whom Ellison was in love; in letters in the 1950s, he confesses to his wife Fanny his guilt and confusion in the wake of an extramarital affair while at the American Academy in Rome. A third strand are the exchanges with his literary circle—Murray, of course, but also during the 1950s, Saul Bellow, and more enduring if less intense friendships with Robert Penn Warren and Richard Wilbur. A fourth thread are the long, nostalgic letters to family and friends recalling the world of his fatherless childhood in Oklahoma City. “I have been returning on the average at least once over the last seven years,” he writes in 1971. “And when I get there, I’m like a ghost—or a Rip Van Winkle” who awakes to discover his world has changed. Each of these strands—I have summarized only the major ones—has its own particular cadence and voice, which makes The Selected Letters a virtuoso display of American prose. The Fall 2019 reviews and events (including a reading of letters at the Schomburg Library) reaffirmed Ellison’s cultural stature. And two of the major reviews (in The New Yorker by Kevin Young and on the front page of the New York Times Book Review by Saidiya Hartman) suggest that a younger generation of critics still find Ellison of considerable value even when some of their political and cultural views are at odds with his (I am thinking of Hartman’s feminism and Afropessimism). Hartman (December 19, 2019) subtly balances judgments: “ ‘Complexity,’ ” she begins, “was the term that Ralph Ellison deployed most often to describe black life and culture. And it is the term best suited to convey the character of this brilliant, often [End Page 241] disapproving and unsparing man.” Although “complexity” has long been a piety of literary humanism associated both with Ellison and with his fellow New York intellectual (and occasional antagonist) Lionel Trilling—suggesting their reverence for literature in the face of political and sociological reductionism—Hartman means something else by the word. This is clear from what soon follows upon “unsparing”: that Ellison’s “cult of the masculine hero” sought to restore “to the native son truth and...

Melville's Intervisionary Network: Balzac, Hawthorne, and Realism in the American Renaissance, by John Haydock

<i>Melville's Intervisionary Network: Balzac, Hawthorne, and Realism in the American Renaissance</i>, by John Haydock

‘Make this adult mess make sense again’: the psychic lives of gentrification’s children

ABSTRACT This paper advocates for increased scholarly curiosity about the painful and hopeful psychic agency of children and youth in critiquing neoliberal urban gentrification and imagining alternative forms of city life. It performs a geographically and theoretically informed reading of American director Ira Sachs’ 2016 film Little Men, a story about a brief but intense childhood friendship that is ended by an eviction. Drawing on the gentrification and psychoanalytic geography literatures, I turn to psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott’s key clinical observations regarding ‘antisocial’ children and youth. Bringing these tools into dialogue with Little Men, I consider the revealing differences between the film’s shooting script and the final cut, as well as the film’s reception. Little Men and its child protagonists, I argue, should inspire more fine-grained attention to gentrification’s psychic dimensions, which both animate the process and open it to contestation.

Gustav Landauer und Constantin Brunner. Umrisse einer Begegnung

Abstract In 1904, Constantin Brunner called Gustav Landauer the »most important exponent of anarchism in Germany«. In 1911, Landauer admired Brunner as »one of the most powerful thinkers« he knew. From 1903 until 1911 the two of them developed an intense intellectual friendship, sharing an interest in epistemology, mysticism and the philosophy of Spinoza. Their practical philosophies diverged quite substantially however. While Brunner believed in an anthropological divide within humankind, Landauer strove to integrate humankind on the basis of a spiritual renewal. The article attempts to outline their relationship and provide some clues as to what was at stake in the conflict that ended it.

On both sides of the bar. Bartenders’ accounts of work-related drinking

Bartenders are expected to control guests’ excessive alcohol consumption, but hazardous drinking is also common among staff in the bar industry. This paper explores bartenders’ accounts of work-related drinking and discusses how structural and cultural working conditions may impact drinking practices among staff. The data comprises 21 in-depth interviews with bartenders from different venues in Oslo, Norway: eight females and 13 males, aged 22–36 years (mean age 27). The analyses demonstrated three clusters of accounts of work-related drinking. First, the bartenders emphasised availability of alcohol in their work environment and that they perceived themselves as sophisticated drinkers. Second, drinking alcohol was described as a coping strategy to deal with stressful work and as a way of ‘coming down’ after high-energy work. Third, bartenders talked about their work as part of a lifestyle in which alcohol played an important role and they described intense friendships with colleagues. Occupational identity and identification with co-workers involved norms that encouraged a high level of alcohol consumption. Bartenders’ work and leisure time are closely intertwined and alcohol plays an important role in both areas. Server training programmes should be developed that take into account this workplace drinking culture.

Corrigan, Yuri Dostoevsky and the Riddle of the Self (review)

Slavonic and East European Review, 96, 4, 2018 Reviews Corrigan, Yuri. Dostoevsky and the Riddle of the Self. Studies in Russian Literature and Theory. Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL, 2017. viii + 238 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $120.00; $39.95. The starting point for this illuminating study by Yuri Corrigan is the tension apparent in Dostoevskii’s works between two opposing conceptions of the human personality: an inward-looking, romantic model that identifies the source of the divine in what Dostoevskii described as the ‘depths of the human soul’; and an inter-subjective model — Bakhtin’s Dostoevskii — that frames selfhood in radically relational terms. Tracing the loss of self to a collective personality throughout Dostoevskii’s oeuvre, Corrigan identifies the friendship between Vasia Shumkov and Arkadii Nefedevich in the seldom-discussed 1848 short story, ‘A Weak Heart’, as a paradigmatic relationship in which the self is ultimately replaced by the other. Key leitmotifs in Dostoevskii’s fiction appear for the first time in this early story, including Arkadii’s manhandling and dressing of Vasia (recapitulated, for example, by Razumikhin after Raskol´nikov’s illness) and his dream that Vasia is only pretending to sleep and seeking to escape, which Corrigan interprets as a strategy to evade the control of the other and preserve the self. For similar reasons, in Crime and Punishment, Raskol´nikov feigns sleep in front of both Razumikhin and Svidrigailov. A cluster of further recurring images, many related to sleep, death and traumatic memory, gain additional significance in Corrigan’s fine analysis: dead bodies discovered too late (Nelli’s mother in The Insulted and Injured; Nastas´ia Filippovna in The Idiot), and children tormented by adults whispering to them in the night (Murin’s mysterious hold over Katerina in ‘The Landlady’; Stepan Trofimovich in Demons waking his pupil Nikolai Stavrogin to inappropriately share his most intimate thoughts). Beating hearts that can be heard from a distance, the tears of one character falling on the face of another, and shadowy encounters on stairways all contribute to ‘a core imagistic vocabulary surrounding the phenomenon of the shared self’ (p. 45) that extends across Dostoevskii’s oeuvre. It is this that transforms the depiction of merely intense inter-personal relations into a unique model of the personality that paradoxically ‘annihilates the “I”’ whilst becoming a self. Corrigan accounts for the pathological extremes of Dostoevskii’s psychically wounded characters that are frequently elided in other interpretations, and looks beyond simplistic moral categories. We are in the realms of ‘not an essential conflict between good and evil, but the process by which the suppression of memory leads to a state of possession by others — or to a helpless compulsion to enact and re-enact patterns suggested and imposed by the minds of other people’ (p. 84). SEER, 96, 4, OCTOBER 2018 762 Following the chapter on the intense friendship and suppressed inner life at the centre of ‘A Weak Heart’, Corrigan turns to different conceptions of doubling and self-forgetting in various early works, re-calibrating the idea of self-consciousness to provide a welcome corrective to Bakhtin’s overly optimistic assessment of Dostoevskian dialogue. Jumping to the post-Siberian texts, the analysis of The Insulted and Injured addresses motifs of transparency, self-revelation and hidden traumas, arriving at a striking reinterpretation of the ‘Lazarus’ theme from Crime and Punishment. The chapter on The Idiot, focusing on the triadic relationship of Prince Myshkin, Rogozhin and Nastas´ia Filippovna, offers new insights, but in covering ground that has been investigated by so many critics, its originality appears less pronounced. The ‘empty’ self of Stepan Trofimovich in Demons as the source of the mass loss of personality afflicting the town, and the self displaced to an external object — the letter Arkadii has sewn into his clothes — in The Adolescent, both show to good effect how the motifs from the earlier works are recast to fulfil Dostoevskii’s more expansive later vision. The interpretation of The Brothers Karamazov addresses the main characters’ dreams as epiphanic experiences that represent ‘the very dramatic breach of a series of collective selves’ at the centre of the novel’s plot (p. 121), brings the study together effectively, but renders...

Cooke, Olga M. Andrei Bely's Petersburg: A Centennial Celebration (review)

SEER, 96, 4, OCTOBER 2018 762 Following the chapter on the intense friendship and suppressed inner life at the centre of ‘A Weak Heart’, Corrigan turns to different conceptions of doubling and self-forgetting in various early works, re-calibrating the idea of self-consciousness to provide a welcome corrective to Bakhtin’s overly optimistic assessment of Dostoevskian dialogue. Jumping to the post-Siberian texts, the analysis of The Insulted and Injured addresses motifs of transparency, self-revelation and hidden traumas, arriving at a striking reinterpretation of the ‘Lazarus’ theme from Crime and Punishment. The chapter on The Idiot, focusing on the triadic relationship of Prince Myshkin, Rogozhin and Nastas´ia Filippovna, offers new insights, but in covering ground that has been investigated by so many critics, its originality appears less pronounced. The ‘empty’ self of Stepan Trofimovich in Demons as the source of the mass loss of personality afflicting the town, and the self displaced to an external object — the letter Arkadii has sewn into his clothes — in The Adolescent, both show to good effect how the motifs from the earlier works are recast to fulfil Dostoevskii’s more expansive later vision. The interpretation of The Brothers Karamazov addresses the main characters’ dreams as epiphanic experiences that represent ‘the very dramatic breach of a series of collective selves’ at the centre of the novel’s plot (p. 121), brings the study together effectively, but renders the Conclusion, which touches upon ‘Dream of a Ridiculous Man’, perhaps slightly redundant. Unusually, there are no separate chapters on Notes from Underground or Crime and Punishment. The final stages of earlier chapters elucidate connections with the latter, but the former is mentioned only in passing, an absence that may indicate the extent to which the approach adopted by Corrigan departs from the mainstream of Dostoevskii studies, but nevertheless feels like a slight gap in his theory. The analysis he presents, however, more than makes up for the omission, perhaps particularly in relation to works that are often neglected: ‘A Weak Heart’, ‘The Landlady’, Netochka Nezvanova and The Insulted and Injured. This is a study that will be required reading for Dostoevskii specialists for years to come. UCL SSEES Sarah J. Young Cooke, Olga M. (ed.). Andrei Bely’s Petersburg: A Centennial Celebration. The Real Twentieth Century. Academic Studies Press, Boston, MA, 2017. xiii + 260 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Index. $99.00. A fine tribute to the memory of Georgette Donchin, author of the pioneering Influence of French Symbolism on Russian Poetry (The Hague, 1958) and of the Introduction to the Chicago Russian Specialities 1967 edition of Petersburg, and REVIEWS 763 much loved, gratefully remembered lecturer at the School of Slavonic Studies in London, this collection of studies by American, British, Scandinavian, Russian and Israeli scholars is a welcome contribution to our knowledge of Belyi’s extraordinary novel. Some of the articles have been previously published but are here cogently arranged and presented, often for the first time in English translation, by the editor in a helpful ‘Introduction’ (pp. 1–18). Preliminaries include a foreword by Thomas R. Beyer Jr. which emphasizes the not infrequent comparison drawn between Belyi’s Petersburg and Joyce’s Ulysses. Beyer regrets how little Petersburg is still read, not only in translation but, in spite of two comparatively recent academic editions, even in the author’s own country. Belyi himself, he tells us, had hoped that future generations would yield readers ‘who could make him accessible to others’. ‘This collection of authors’, Beyer concludes, ‘more than fulfils his wish’ (p. vii). The ‘Introduction’ is followed by ‘Acknowledgements’ which identify and contextualize individual contributors, and by Vladimir Nabokov’s charming, stream-of-consciousness reflections on Petersburg, originally delivered as a lecture and here seamlessly prepared from a rough draft in the Vladimir Nabokov Berg Collection at the New York Public Library by Brett Cooke, who maintains that the publication ‘elucidates Nabokov’s often-cited statement that Petersburg is one of the four great novels of the twentieth century’ (p. viii). Given these preliminaries, it seems legitimate to put the question: will this highly specialized symposium really make the novel more accessible to a wider readership? The answer is, at best, a...

William Klemperer

William Klemperer, 90, died on Nov. 5, 2017, in Watertown, Mass. “An innovative, versatile, and ebullient physical chemist, Bill was among the world’s leaders in the field of molecular spectroscopy. By using molecular beam techniques, he obtained unprecedented resolution and chemical scope. Especially important were studies of molecules linked by weak forces. He also developed a theoretical model that explained the profuse variety of complex organic molecules seen in vast, frigid interstellar clouds. As with his science, Bill delighted in his rose garden, in his many intense friendships with colleagues all over the world, and in his joyous family life. He left a legacy of a loving, zestful spirit.”—Dudley Herschbach, friend and colleague Most recent title: Erving Professor of Chemistry, emeritus, Harvard University Education: B.S., chemistry, Harvard University, 1950; Ph.D., chemistry, University of California, Berkeley, 1954; D.Sc., University of Chicago, 1996 Survivors: daughters, Joyce and Wendy; son, Paul; predeceased by

The Composer John Cage’s Experimental Music and the Problems of the American Musical Avant­Garde of the 20th Century

The article focuses on the ideological, theoretical and experimental foundations of the work of one of the most radical composers of the American musical avant-garde of the 20th century, John Milton Cage (1912—1992), covering the embodiment field of the idea of free musical composition, where sound and noise, as well as sound and silence, are in equal position. There are also revealed Cage’s experiments, which influenced the world of dance, fine arts, theater, opera, alternative rock, as well as his relationship with one of the leaders of the French musical avant-garde, Pierre Boulez, and with representatives of the American avant-garde — the artist R. Rauschenberg, the choreographer M. Cunningham, and others. The composer’s creativity opened the innovative key of new stylistic changes that paved the way for the modern art of postmodernity, the artistic demands that arose in the late 1960s, when the very life of John Cage was determined by numerous and intense friendships with the artists of the avant-garde community. The composer also radically changed the perception of music. His musical ideas largely determined the development not only of new tendencies in music, but also of the culture of the postwar avant-garde, while the experimental musical creativity contributed to destruction of the barriers between various spheres of artistic production — such as music, painting, dance performance — allowing for a new interdisciplinary work between different arts. Cage sought to view all kinds of sounds as potentially musical, urging the audience to accept all sound phenomena as equal. He carried out a revolution in music, in such a way as to make it possible to compose and perform any imaginable music, and claimed that it was necessary to strive for the music in which sounds would not just sound.

Brontë Violations: Liminality, Transgression, and Lesbian Erotics in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre

AbstractAmong the many 2016 works celebrating Charlotte Brontë's life and work in her bicentenary year, several essays were published that urge reinterpretation of her sexuality. Influenced by decades of work in gender studies, these essays intervene not only in Brontë scholarship but also more widely in long‐running debates on lesbian historiography of the 19th century that considers whether erotic attraction between women was manifested in passionate “romantic” friendship or in sexual practice. Jane Eyre includes deep currents of lesbian desire, a reading that violently upends the marriage plot. The intense friendships that Jane finds with other women throughout her narrative pilgrimage have traditionally been viewed in Brontë scholarship from a biographical perspective or through the feminist lens of female community. This essay argues instead that Jane's Lowood relationships with Miss Temple and even more with Helen Burns are erotic, with desire and consummation frustrated. Further, memoirist and visual artist Jane painstakingly delineates other women in sketches or paintings as well as in her narrative, displaying a transgressive expression of lesbian desire under the cover of conventional feminine auspices that is most evident in the miniatures she creates of Blanche Ingram and Rosamond Oliver. If the most canonical Brontë novel – and one of the most canonical of all Victorian novels – can be newly interpreted in relation to lesbian desire, there is undoubtedly even more exciting scholarship to come not only on the Brontës' life and work but also on other Victorian novelists, particularly noncanonical writers.

Arthur Sidgwick'sGreek Prose Composition: Gender, Affect, and Sociability in the Late-Victorian University

AbstractThe diaries and other papers of the Oxford classics teacher Arthur Sidgwick (1840–1920) show how men like Sidgwick used ancient Greek to demarcate the boundaries of an elite male social, emotional, and educational sphere, and how that sphere became more porous at the turn of the twentieth century through processes such as university coeducation. Progressive dons like Sidgwick stood by women's equality in principle but were troubled by the potential loss of an exceptional environment of intense friendships forged within intellectually rigorous single-sex institutions. Several aspects of Sidgwick's life and his use of Greek exemplify these tensions: his marriage, his feelings about close male friends, his life as a college fellow, his work on behalf of the Oxford Association for the Education of Women, and his children's lives and careers. The article recovers a lost world in which Greek was an active conversational language, shows how the teaching of classics and the inclusion of women were intimately connected in late-nineteenth-century Oxford, and suggests some reasons why that world endured for a certain period of time but ultimately came to an end. It offers a new way of explaining late-nineteenth-century cultural changes surrounding gender by placing education and affect firmly at their center.

Gerald N. Grob, 1931–2015

Gerald N. Grob, 1931–2015