Literary Perspective Research Articles

Music’s Obedient Daughter ed. by Sabine Lichtenstein (review)

Reviewed by: Music’s Obedient Daughter ed. by Sabine Lichtenstein David Menzies Lichtenstein, Sabine (ed.) Music’s Obedient Daughter. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2014. Pp. 507. An astonishing range and breadth of essays are presented in this text, skillfully curated by Sabine Lichtenstein. The essays contained within hold thought-provoking examinations of the timeless relationship between text and music. Unique to these seventeen essays is a refreshing emphasis on the treatment of music and text on an equal footing—they all treat opera from a literary perspective, [End Page 221] that is, from a basis on the libretto. The essays demonstrate how many of of the greatest works of opera came from this understanding. We are reminded of somewhat tempestuous artistic relationships—beginning with Striggio and Monteverdi, to Mozart and Varesco, to Puccini and Illica and Giacosa. Some composers, such as Pfitzner and Wagner, chose to avoid this struggle and simply wrote their own libretti. The collection begins with Eddie Vetter’s “The Power of Music: Striggio and Montverdi’s L’Orfeo”, presenting the source of the libretto and the treatment of this by both composer and librettist. Jacques Boogaart’s “Octavia Reincarnated: Busenello’s and Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione di Poppea” explains how Monteverdi and Busenello manage the persona of Ottavia, providing an account of the first opera based on an historical character (9). Tim Carter’s “In the Operatic Workshop: The Case of Varesco’s and Mozart’s Idomeneo” investigates various mutations of the sources for the text, and presents an outline of librettist and composer collaboration. Caryl Clark’s “The Librettist’s Dilemma in London: Badini’s and Haydn’s Orfeo ed Euridice” reflects on the “conditions of possibility” portrayed in Badini’s libretto created for Haydn’s operatic debut in London (107). Irmlind Capelle’s “Hans Sachs—The Relation of Lortzing’s Opera to Deinhardtein’s Drama” demonstrates the challenges Lortzing faced by introducing new elements within the drama, while attending to the original drama. Heather Hadlock’s “Classical Parody and Burlesque in Orphée aux Enfers by Crémieux, Halévy and Offenbach” discusses modern French operetta and the origins of the libretto from the demi-monde of Paris. John Neubauer’s “Burning the Heretics and Saving Don Carlos: Méry’s, Du Locle’s and Verdi’s Don Carlos” presents the various sources of the libretto, from Saint-Réal to Schiller and examines how a writer may choose to deviate from historical sources in the advancement of drama (192). Katherine Syer’s “Tracing Wotan’s Incendiary Past: The Evolution of Storms and Fire in Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen” considers the numerous changes that Wagner made to his libretto for the opera, highlighting the “process of reassignment and it’s far-reaching impact on the dramaturgy and the music of the Ring” (218). Vincent Giroud’s “Manon at the Opera: From Prévost’s Manon Lescaut to Auber’s Manon Lescaut and Massenet’s Manon” provides a study of the various incarnations of the Manon character throughout opera, drawn from Abbé Prévost’s original tale. Kasper van Kooten’s “Reflections on the Genesis and Dramaturgy of Illica’s, Giacosa’s and Puccini’s Madama Butterfly” focuses on Puccini’s divergent views from Illica’s and Giacosa’s libretto. Helga Hushahn’s “The End of a Line: Strauss’ and Hofmannsthal’s Elektra” presents a complex relationship between a composer and a librettist, one that resulted in one of the most intriguing operas of the twentieth century. Sabine Lichtenstein does double duty as editor and contributor in her stimulating [End Page 222] essay “Hans Pfitzner’s Palestrina, Eine Musikalische Legende”, discussing the “stillness, mysticism and music” contained within this work (326). Loes Dommering-Van Rongen’s contribution in “The Musical Personality of Don Quixote: Manuel De Falla’s El Retablo de Maese Pedro” introduces the genre of puppet opera and the textual influences commencing with the original Cervantes source. Michal Grover-Friedlander’s essay “Transformations of the Killing of a Boy: Weill’s and Brecht’s Der Jasager” examines the various mutations of the libretto, originating from a Japanese tale, and outlines the transformations this story takes over time. Ruth HaCohen’s “A...

THE SHAPE OF HISTORY: ON READING LI WAI-YEE

Ever since Hayden White declared that as a literary artifact the historical text is indistinguishable from fiction, the study of historiography has ceased to be the prerogative of historians. It is thus no accident that we owe some of the finest recent works on theZuo zhuan, China's oldest narrative history, not to historians but to scholars of Chinese literature. In her splendid book onThe Readability of the Past in Early Chinese Historiography(Cambridge 2007) Li Wai-yee demonstrates just how fruitful it is to treat Chinese historiography from a literary perspective. She puts to rest the “idea that kernels of historical truth can or should be separated from the rich verbal fabric” in favor of “what is more germane to the sense of history,” namely “the conscious formulation of patterns and principles to understand the past” (Li 2007, pp. 2–3).

“Du holde Kunst”: Lyrikvermittlung im Radio by Friederike Gösweiner (review)

Reviewed by: “Du holde Kunst”: Lyrikvermittlung im Radio by Friederike Gösweiner Joseph McVeigh Friederike Gösweiner, “Du holde Kunst”: Lyrikvermittlung im Radio. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2012. 331 pp. Although much has been written about radio as a medium for German-language communication and cultural dissemination, most of it originates in and focuses on radio in Germany, while few such studies consider Austria’s radio landscape since 1945 from a purely literary perspective. Friederike Gösweiner’s summary of a recent research project at the University of Innsbruck seeks to rectify this shortcoming by examining Austrian radio’s longest-running literary series Du holde Kunst from its creation in 1945 to the release of a database of the program’s content by orf in 2009, comprising some 3,433 broadcasts. Roughly the first third of the book presents a useful theoretical and methodological framework for considering possible approaches to the study of literature in radio, while the remainder of the book looks closely at the history and makeup of the popular program of poetry and music that regularly greeted generations of Austrian listeners on Sunday mornings and holidays. Although the author attempts to provide a brief cultural history of the postwar era in which Du hold Kunst came about, there are some notable gaps. That the program was first created by rwr, or the radio station Rot-Weiss-Rot, which had a specific programming agenda of reorientation, is barely mentioned, for example, while left unexamined is the sharp competition between the American network and that of ravag, its Austrian counterpart, which resulted in both networks offering their own version of the program in 1954–55. The author does, however, draw an important cultural parallel to the program by citing the reintroduction of the Salzburger Festspiele after World War II as an example of the conservative cultural tenor of the first postwar decade. To be sure, when the program, created by Ernst Schönwiese and produced by Eligius Scheibl, was first broadcast on October 14, 1945, the prevailing cultural message in Austria was one of continuity with the past (pre-1938), which provided for many listeners a source of hope to help them transcend their everyday [End Page 143] hardships. In fact, the title of the program comes from a poem by Franz von Schober and addresses the consolation that art provides in life. In this way, the program fit very well into the cultural policies of the Austrian state, as well as of the Allied occupying forces, by reinforcing the notion that German-language culture was not entirely compromised during the Nazi period. Because it was such a long-running show, Du holde Kunst provides a valuable insight into the shifting lyrical canon from the postwar era to the present day. Throughout most of its run, the content of the program included much lyric poetry from the literary canon of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. The poets whose texts most frequently appeared on the program are those one might certainly expect: Goethe (appears in 594 broadcasts), Rilke (560), Mörike (379), Eichendorff (319), Hölderlin (276), and Hofmannsthal (185). However, once the Austrian State Treaty was signed with the Allies in 1955 and the occupation radio networks disappeared, the selection of authors began to expand to include younger writers of the postwar generation, such as Jeannie Ebner (1957), Ingeborg Bachmann (1958), Paul Celan (1959), Thomas Bernhard (1966), and many others. Even Bertolt Brecht breaks into the list in 1960, despite the boycott of his plays on the Viennese stage dating back to the mid-1950s. Changes of this sort were determined—within certain limits—by the tastes of the various producers of the program through the years. In the end, however, the listening audience could still broadly shape the selection of texts. For example, attempts to move the program in a more experimental direction in the 1990s by employing more contemporary music and texts by less-known authors resulted in a sharp drop in listeners and were soon abandoned in favor of more familiar fare. However, another reason favoring traditional texts over contemporary ones was the additional cost of royalty payments to living authors. As a...

Small Business Incubation and the Entrepreneurial Business Environment in South Africa: A Theoretical Perspective

Small business entreprises and entrepreneurs face numerous challenges that include lack of managerial skills, financial challenges, lack of credit, lack of access to markets, usable technology, low production, lack of interest by employees, and inadequate institutional support. The paper presents various literary perspectives on small business incubation in South Africa, the state of innovation-oriented business environment and the significance of small business incubators for developing and promoting SMEs and entrepreneurship in South Africa. Business incubators provide a good platform for the convergence mechanisms for supporting knowledge-based enterprises, both before and after their incubation. Overall, it is worth noting that business incubators do not replace entrepreneurial initiatives, but create better conditions for entrepreneurship. Furthermore, the increasing number of business incubators in South Africa shows that the right kind of business environment is increasingly being acknowledged as an important factor contributing to the success of SMEs, entrepreneurship and the local economy. Conclusions and future studies are proposed. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2014.v5n23p264

Utopian Relations: A Literary Perspective on International Law and Justice

This article posits an interpretation of Thomas More’sUtopiathat focuses on the ways in which the nature of justice within a putatively ideal state is illuminated by references to international relations and the law of nations. Like Plato’sRepublic,Utopiauses differences of scale to provide a lens through which to examine the operation in one context of a unitary concept that is more visible elsewhere. Justice is constructed as a single concept; thus, in the same way that Plato uses the justice of thekallipolisto provide insight into the justice of an individual, More uses the justice of the international community to provide a macroscopic perspective on justice as it exists within a sovereign state. Through discussions of trade, diplomacy, war and empire, Utopian understandings of international law and justice are revealed. The ideal organisation of the state is then characterised as one in which the resulting notions of justice, defined as the correct operation of laws that accord with natural law, are institutionalised.

Troubled Relations: Parallels Between the Vita Bonifatii prima and Bonifatian Epistolary

This article examines the relationship between the Bonifatii et Lulli Epistolae (BLE) and the Vita Bonifatii auctore Willibaldo, adopting a literary perspective in order to consider how the differing agendas of the BLE and the Vita Bonifatii complicate modern scholarship’s understanding of that relationship. In the attempt to deepen such knowledge, this paper concerns itself primarily with the life’s hagiographic use of the BLE, rather than, as has been more usual, the philological and historical dynamics of its preservation. The ultimate aim is to lay out a more rigorous and systematic framework for considering these parallels which takes into account the often radically different functions of epistolary records and hagiography.

The ‘hard’ problem from a literary perspective: on cognitive literary criticism

Theories of consciousness have a long history but they became a topic of interdisciplinary inquiry only in the late twentieth century. Beginning in the 1980s, a disparate range of disciplines converged on the view of the human mind as an information-processing organ, launching the fertile field of cognitive neuroscience. However, before the expansion of cognitive studies, the field that produced the most sustained forms of thinking about consciousness was literature. In particular, capturing consciousness was the spur to a great modernist ambition, as the development of the ‘stream of consciousness’ method in the early twentieth century attests. Even so, a gap remains between cognitive studies and literary studies. While the new field of cognitive literary criticism has produced a body of work that is extremely wide-ranging, at this nascent stage there are a great many problems that arise when attempting to generate an interpretive framework that can build on knowledge across the divide between cognitive studies and literary studies, and these issues remain difficult to resolve. To comprehensively synthesize neurobiological knowledge with the literary is to create nothing less than a model of knowledge that goes from the molecular to the aesthetic; from the objective to the subjective, from mechanism to experience. It is to unite the ‘two cultures’ or, in the lexicon of cognitivism, it is to solve what is known as the ‘hard’ problem. This paper will examine the symptomatic issues that apply to the field of cognitive literary criticism, discuss possible resolutions that might be found in the future and reflect on the relevance of cognitive science to the study of literature.

A Literary Perspective on the Environment: Rethinking Development through Art

Due to the environmental crisis that chokes contemporaneity, it is of paramount importance for society to rethink our physical and abstract behaviours towards nature. Ecocriticism, providing a bridge between literature and nature, allows us to reorganise proven problematic notions, such as progress and development, which tend to gradually separate human beings from the space they occupy. Such separation results in a detachment that hinders our ability to transcend metropolitan, narrow-minded, biased judgments regarding the future of developing countries like Brazil, and perhaps artistic tools like literature are the only ones capable of broadening our reflections for inviting us to go beyond preconditioned perspectives. This article aims at showing how Milton Hatoum’s novel The Brothers (2000) implies that we must look for distinct possibilities of developing our spaces, more specifically the Amazon, and, through the analysis of the book as well as the impact of development on the region, the dialogue between literature and nature is proposed. First the theoretical approach on both nature and literature is delineated, followed by a discussion on how important it is to (re)connect subjects and environment, and then by analysing the novel’s characters which evince the side effects of “progress” and “growth” in the Amazonian region. The result is a problematisation of normative dichotomies such as savage/civilised, past/future, subject/space, underdeveloped/developed, and the conclusion that, for development to stop being detrimental to nature, we shall avoid believing in a “faceless environment” (Campbell, 18), that is, one needs to start observing the impact of such development on the lives of those inevitably and automatically marginalised by it.

Corps étrangers dans le Journal de voyage de Montaigne

The Journal de voyage written by Montaigne in the 16th century is presented as a simple report of alternating experiences following certain events and the physical condition of the traveller, which contrasts strikingly with the writing of the Essais, which exemplifies continuous inner movement. Indeed, the Journal de voyage is presented as a collection of anecdotes and experiences recounting the effects of a displaced body, without drawing any particular meaning from this. Yet this lack of both reflection and judgment does not prevent the reader from approaching the story from historical, philosophical or literary perspectives.

Social Cognition: A Literary Perspective

The set of procedures called variously mindreading, mentalizing, or social cognition — broadly put, the process by which we know others — is one that literature can dramatize in peculiarly intense ways. This essay describes three accounts of these procedures in current cognitive scientific debate — Theory Theory, Simulation Theory, and Interaction Theory. It is argued that each account alone struggles to capture the strange blend of immediacy and opacity that confronts me when I seek to grasp the minds of others. Through close readings of two literary passages (one by François Rabelais, the other by Victor Hugo), it is further argued that literature can by contrast do exactly this. To read ‘cognitively’ is thus both to reveal and to enlist literature's power to think about thinking.

The Literary Interview: Toward a Poetics of a Hybrid Genre

This article brings together the scattered research from the French, English, and German research traditions on the literary interview, that is, the extensive personal interview given by (or in some cases also conducted by) a literary author. The literary interview can be regarded as a hybrid genre for several reasons. First, it belongs to both the media and the literary domains. Second, its authorship is not only divided between interviewee and interviewer but also affected by editing and publishing interventions. Third, it mixes features of an oral interaction and of a written or edited communication. As a result, the literary interview as an object of study raises important questions about notions like genre, authorship, authorial positioning, and discourse at large. From a literary perspective, moreover, new light is also thrown on some of the basic characteristics associated with the personal interview in general: the “pact” or assumption of authenticity; the tension between format, on the one hand, and spontaneity, on the other hand; and the formal strategies used to (re-)create the encounter in the interview text. Both as a historical object and as a present-day, culture-specific practice, the literary interview is an interesting case of the dynamic interaction between the media and literature in contemporary cultures.

Global nautical livelihoods in the late nineteenth century: the sea careers of the maritime writers Frank T Bullen and Joseph Conrad, 1869–1894

At the level of the individual, there can be few better examples of the global nature of maritime history than the travels and experiences of merchant seafarers serving in foreign-going commercial ships whatever period is chosen for investigation. By the 1870s the numbers of seafarers from maritime countries making international voyages were numbered in their hundreds of thousands and their collective global experience was penetrating an increasingly literate society ashore through sea travel writing and maritime fiction, as well as through their presence when between voyages. Bullen and Conrad were exact contemporaries born in 1857 whose time at sea was often in general trading vessels of the lower class of merchant sail shipping, though both served time in better class vessels and served in steam shipping. Their careers are representative of the collective of seafaring of their times. The paper makes a comparative study of the two sea careers with reference to internal and external social elements, and to the commercial and geographical dimensions of their voyages. Conrad’s life has been exhaustively examined, though principally from a literary perspective. Bullen, in contrast, has received little detailed attention. Both sea careers have been reconstructed using official records and autobiographical writing. The paper commences with a re-examination of “global” as the preserve of ocean navigators in contrast to the current usage related to economic activity and cultural transfer. It concludes with the suggestion that there is scope for the development of a systematic methodology for comparing sea careers.

From Ruth Snyder to Young Woman: Sophie Treadwell’s Feminist Rewriting of "The Crime of the Century"

Drawing on recent theoretical scholarship on gender and its relation to language and power (Butler: 1990, Felman: 1985, Irigaray: 1985), I analyze Machinal, by Sophie Treadwell, from a linguistic and literary perspective and demonstrate how the author creates a radically new syntax that disrupts common assumptions on woman's place in society, while providing a powerful representation of patriarchal oppression inherent in language. Through a textual analysis of selected passages, I demonstrate how Treadwell deliberately refuses the appropriative logic implicit in the process of naming, and stages the opposition between silence and language as her privileged way to express Otherness itself. First produced in New York in 1928, Machinal, is based on the infamous Snyder-Gray criminal case. Convicted in 1927 together with her lover, Judd Gray, for the killing of her husband, Ruth Snyder was found guilty of murder in the first degree and electrocuted. Treadwell, an unconventional journalist, actress and playwright, chose to write a play rather than to report on the case, thus offering her audience an alternative view on the woman's culpability.

Case Presentations: A Response to Walter Stone

Case Presentations: A Response to Walter Stone Howard Kahn1 issn 0362-4021 © 2014 Eastern Group Psychotherapy Society group, Vol. 38, No. 2, Summer 2014 163 1 Assistant Clinical Professor, Child Study Center, Yale University. Correspondence should be addressed to Howard Kahn, PhD, 436 Orange Street, New Haven, CT 06405. E-mail: howard. kahn@yale.edu. In response to Dr. Stone’s piece on case presentations, I first want to enthusiastically support his thoughtful endorsement of the usefulness of writing and publishing case material. Stone offers us his agreement with Aron’s perspective that case material “may be offered in the spirit of learning, sharing experience and thought, and encouraging reflection and contrasting perspectives” (Aron, 2013, p. 582). Aron went on to cite the “brilliant and groundbreaking work of Freud as reporter of case material,” and he says, “Certainly, as a clinician, case presentations stimulate my thinking about particular situations I am facing or clarify aspects of a theory” (p. 582). He sensibly offered us the caution of respecting the privacy of our patients and their right to maintain control over confidentiality and exposure of their personal lives. Finally, I agree, as Stone says, that case studies are not proof of a theory. They are open to discussion and controversy. Indeed, clinical examples invariably invite discussion, which, although at times acrimonious, is also the path to thinking more deeply about how we care for our patients and what we expect to share and/or teach about our work and theories. Stone addresses the fear of criticism or embarrassment attached to presenting one’s work to colleagues, for making “subtle mistakes . . . expose[s] his or her misunderstandings or lack of clinical skill.” He implies that there exists some objective standard by which critical assessments may rightly be made. In my opinion, such assessment by colleagues is out of place, inappropriate for the proper use of case study material. Let us consider adopting another paradigm or approach to case material that 164 kahn would lend itself less to polemic and argument; one that could enhance our own perspectives, invite dialogue, and improve training by promoting wisdom and sharing of information. I propose that the traditional perspectives of literature and folklore, with their emphasis on relationships within and between people, be background for understanding and evaluating case study material. I include literature that existed before writing, in songs and folktales (this includes therapy supervision) and, of course, theater, where dialogue, in the present, is of central importance. The literary perspective provides a suitable setting for developing a deeper understanding of others and ourselves. The case study in psychotherapy fits right in, because each vignette illustrates the nuance and variation of relationship encounters, which can unfold and be observed. Adopting a literary or aesthetic perspective would eliminate the constraint placed on the writer to be theoretically sound, to be a good scientist, or to be “correct” by some external theoretical standard of clinical skill. The case study is literature. It is a record of the therapist at work. The usefulness or power of case study material comes from the depiction of the relationship between therapist and patient in the actual therapy session. As such, it provides the material for the study of the ongoing relationship between these two people (or the group) that takes place in the particular situation we call therapy. I agree with British psychoanalyst Peter Lomas (as cited in Fierman, 2002), who, in his book The Case for a Personal Psychotherapy, wrote that “psychotherapy refers to a situation in which one person is aiming to help another to grow by offering him a relationship that has much in common with those in ordinary living but takes place in an unusual context” (p. 44). The case study, which is closest to ordinary human interaction, does not call for or benefit from higher levels of theoretical analysis to be useful for teaching and learning. Alan Kasdin (2008) has written, in his assessment of evidence-based research and practice, that “much of psychotherapy is not about reaching a destination (eliminating symptoms) as it is about the ride (the process of coping with life)” (p. 147). Louis Fierman (2002), in the preface to his book of...

Dick Allen Preferred Not To: A Reconsideration of Baseball’s Bartleby

INTRODUCTION During the course of his major-league career, Dick Allen a lot of things: he was the 1964 NL Rookie of the Year and the 1972 AL Most Valuable Player; his 351 home runs are more than Hall of Famer Ron Santo; his 1,119 RBI are more than Hall of Famer Rod Carew; and for those who pray at the alter of saber-metrics, his adjusted OPS+ is higher than the greatest slugger of all time, Hall of Famer Hank Aaron. Because of all that he did, the MLB Network in 2012 ranked him as a member of its Top Ten Not in the Hall of Fame (he was ranked number nine). However, despite all that he did, Dick Allen, like Mel-ville's is remembered more for what he preferred not to do: he preferred not to listen to his manager or follow the edicts of team and league officials; he preferred not to cooperate with reporters; occasionally he preferred not to inform anyone of his whereabouts; and at times he preferred not to play the most difficult sport of all, one which requires lightning-quick reflexes, pinpoint accuracy, and split-second decision making--all while forming a response to a hardball honing in with ill intent at over ninety miles per hour--without first stopping at a tavern or two (or three) on his way to the ballpark. Because of all that he and all he preferred not to do, Allen became one of the most controversial players in the history of a game replete with them. As Sports Illustrated summed him up in 1970, He is known as a man who hits a baseball even harder than he hits the bottle.... Allen shakes the game's Establishment and stirs up its followers as no other player can.(2) Because of what he and what he preferred not to do, nearly every baseball fan with an opinion has a strong one when it comes to Dick Allen. Throughout the arc of his productive yet strange and oftentimes maddening career, and in the decades thereafter, the debate over who was ultimately to blame for the controversy that seemingly followed Allen wherever he went raged on, and rages still today. Were Allen's repeated transgressions his fault? Team management's? The media's? The fans'? Who is responsible for the tragedy that was Dick Allen? For all of his talent, and despite how much his teammates seemed to like him wherever he went, who is to blame for the fact that no matter where his travels took him over the course of his fifteen-year career--Philadelphia, St. Louis, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia again, and Oakland--disharmony, dissension, disagreement, and disruption invariably came along for the ride? Why is it that one of the most talented players of his generation was summed up by the preeminent baseball historian Bill James as someone who did more to keep his teams from winning than anybody else who ever played major league baseball(3) This article attempts to examine Allen's career through a unique lens--the one provided by Melville's classic short story, Bartleby, the Scrivener. In so doing, this article will show that although Allen's foibles were in many ways his own, they were also, perhaps in greater part, the inevitable result of a larger injustice perpetrated on the black athletes of the 1950s and '6os--those players who emerged a generation after Jackie Robinson broke Major League Baseball's color barrier in 1947 and who were compelled to endure the brutal racial double standard that arose in the wake of Dodger president Branch Rickey's Great Experiment. In the end, through the lens of Bartleby, the Scrivener, the systemic injustice that preyed on Allen and that ultimately became the catalyst for much of what enveloped him emerges. Drawing on an analysis of Bartleby from a legal and literary perspective, focusing primarily on what it has to say about social hierarchies and the role of compassion in the workplace, this article aims to provide a more complete understanding of the factors that affected Allen and other black ballplayers of his era while they tried to navigate their journey through what had been, up until very shortly before their arrival, a whites-only game. …

(„Ich grolle nicht” w „Cudzoziemce” Marii Kuncewiczowej. O pieśni z perspektywy interdyscyplinarnej

The paper focuses on the song as a syncretic, literary-musical genre. The appearance of song quotes in a novel (Cudzoziemka by Maria Kuncewiczowa) represents an interesting case, which may nevertheless be examined from purely literary perspective. However, a more profound interdisciplinary reading, which combines the elements of analysis of a piece of prose and a piece of music, enables a better interpretation of this particular motif in the novel.

Commons-based peer production and artistic expression: Two cases from Greece

This essay narrates, from a creator-observation perspective, the production of two works of fiction, a book of short stories and a play, based on the principles and technologies of Commons-based peer production. This is potentially interesting from both the Commons-based peer production and the literary perspective. Even though both seem well-matched by their prima facie lack of profit orientation, Commons-based peer production case studies rarely deal with fiction, and regarding plays, artistic creativity is still mostly associated with one, maybe two authors. After tracing and analysing the Commons-based peer production phenomenon, the case studies show concretely the fate of the specific projects as well as how, nowadays, people can get involved in collaborative artistic projects inspired and catalysed by Commons-oriented principles and technologies.

The ‘Cloister Life’ of the Emperor Charles V: Art and Ideology at Yuste

In this article I consider the brief retirement of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V in the Hieronymite monastery of Yuste, the paintings with which he surrounded himself, and how these have been understood by later scholars. While the Hieronymite Order was unique to Iberia, and Yuste was sited in a remote part of Spain, elements of Charles’s living quarters may be connected to his childhood in Flanders. Focusing on the paintings of Titian and Michel Coxcie, especially in relation to Sebastiano del Piombo’s works, I show how both Titian and Coxcie produced paintings that appealed to Charles’s very particular religious sensibilities. I conclude by examining literary and painterly perspectives on Charles’s retirement, particularly those from nineteenth-century Britain and Spain.En este artículo estudio el retiro de corta duración del emperador Carlos V al monasterio jerónimo de Yuste, los cuadros con que se rodeó allí, y cómo han sido entendidos por estudiosos posteriores. Mientras que la Orden Jerónima solo se encuentra en Iberia y Yuste se situaba en una parte remota de España, hay elementos de los aposentos de Carlos V que se pueden relacionar con su infancia en Flandes. Concentrándome en los cuadros de Ticiano y Michel Coxcie, en especial con relación a las obras de Sebastiano del Poimbo, muestro cómo ambos Ticiano y Coxcie pintaron cuadros que apelaron a las sensibilidades religiosas muy particulares del emperador. Termino examinando perspectivas literarias y pictoricistas del retiro de Carlos V, en particular las de Gran Bretaña y España en el siglo XIX.

Women and migration in South Africa: historical and literary perspectives

When Indians migrated from India to Natal in the mid-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries as both indentured and free Indians, women were an important component of the newcomers. The lives of indentured women have only recently begun to gain critical attention in South African historiography. The narratives of free or ‘passenger’ Indian women have largely been narrated from the vantage point of ‘passenger’ males in the context of their arrival and settlement in Natal. The inclusion of their narratives into the history of Indian South Africans will stimulate a rethinking of the gendered experiences of Indian immigrants in the context of concomitant differences among ethnic groups, social mobility and the processes of acculturation and integration. Moreover, it will bring to the fore a category of immigrant women whose histories have yet to be fully explored and documented

Homecoming

Philosophical and literary perspectives are combined with psychoanalytic ones in an attempt to provide a comprehensive conceptualization of the theme of homecoming. The concepts of home and homecoming are presented as symbolic representations of fundamental psychical functions, and their vicissitudes as subjective manifestations of basic psychic organizations. The hypothesis is put forward that the ability, or lack thereof, to work through the process of mourning of a lost object colors the evolution and outcome of any reckoning with such a notion and what it stands for. Literary sources are used to supplement and explicate psychoanalytic understandings regarding how the concept of homecoming is being made use of, within unconscious dynamics observed in a number of analytic cases.