Mimetic Art Research Articles

Nerval et l’opéra-comique: le dossier des Monténégrins by Michel Brix, Jean-Claude Yon

8/4 Reviews while Elizabeth Stephens maps the pathologizing of sexual excess' onto Foucault's discourse of themonstrous and itsnormalization. Rae Beth Gordon opens the final section with a deft and wide-ranging examina tion of the interplay of pleasure and pain infin-de-siecle aesthetic judgement. She traces the repercussions of widely espoused theories of psychophysics (whereby internal pleasure and pain are scientificallymeasured through bodily responses to works of art), and particularly underscores the deliberate provocation of painful (and also unconscious) sensations by artists such as Gustave Moreau. Carol Rifelj explores the painful quest forbeauty in early-century fashion, a quest whose goal seems contradicted in contemporary novels, where precisely when she is not a "fashion victim", woman's pain may be investedwith erotic power' (p. 249). Claire Moran closes the volume with a return to considerations of religious suffering, this time in French and Belgian painting, showing how the crucifix served as a motif both of the artist's suffering and of his joyous release from the confines of mimetic art. With an emphasis on literature from the early half of the century and theory and art from thefin de siecle, this volume is an engaging contribution to the discourse surrounding the shiftingground of representing, understanding, and using pleasure and pain innineteenth-century France. University of Lethbridge Beth Gerwin Nerval et Vopera-comique: ledossier desMontenegrins. ByMichel Brix and Jean Claude Yon. Namur: Presses universitaires de Namur. 2009. 277 pp. 38. ISBN 978-2-87037-608-9. Despite his inexplicable marginalization by contemporary criticism, Gerard de Nerval, incomparably lucid writer of visions, is of course canonized by the pub lication of his CEuvres completes in the Pleiade edition. These are, however, less completes' than theymight seem; notably, they do not include works on which Nerval collaborated with other authors, such as his writings for the theatre and opera. It is toMichel Brix, one of the Pleiade contributors and among themost eminent Nerval scholars of our day, that we owe a precious series of supple mentary publications. For this re-edition of Nerval's libretto Les Montenegrins, Brix has collaborated with Jean-Claude Yon, a specialist in the cultural history of nineteenth-century theatre and opera. Alongside ameticulously researched intro duction that situates the work in the troubled world of Parisian theatre around 1848, the volume includes the twomain versions of the opera (themanuscript of 1848, and theprinted version as performed in 1849), aswell as the original scenario written inNerval's own handwriting, probably in 1847. Despite his collaboration with the dramatist Edouard Alboise, Nerval's mark isunmistakably present inboth versions. Nerval himself had never travelled toMontenegro, taking his inspiration from Nodier's writings on the region as well as his story Tnes de las Sierras'. While the MLR, 105.3, 2.010 875 plot is set against the historical backdrop of the struggle for influence between Napoleonic and Russian forces inMontenegro, the opera ismost memorable for its echo ofNerval's own obsession with the transcendence of death and time. The Dantesque name of the heroine, Beatrice, suggests her role as guide to theworld beyond death. She disguises herself as the vampiric ghost ofHelene, who returns to theMaladetta castle on the anniversary of her death, but who, like theHelen of Faust, stands for the transcendence of time by beauty since her ghost takes the form of the dead beloved. Echoes ofNervaFs most famous poem traverse this central scene with itsapparition of the lost one 'Dans la nuit du tombeau' (p. 90). And that Beatrice's love for the young French officer should stem from an initialmovement of pity at the thought of his absent mother is no surprise to those familiar with his work. Here is no fin-de-siecle vampire, but a trulyNervalian vision inwhich a powerful and implicitlymaternal feminine figure ismomentarily glimpsed beyond the barrier of death. Christ Church, Oxford Jennifer Yee Flaubert's 'Tentation: Remapping Nineteenth-Century French Histories ofReligion and Science. By Mary Orr. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2008. xi+ 352 pp. ?50. ISBN 978-0-19-925858-1. How do we read Flaubert's monstrous, discordant, and disruptive Tentation de saint Antoine7. Of the first,sprawling 1849 version, readers who come to Flaubert through other...

Freccero on Blow-Up : Toward a Macro-Vision of Italian Film

Freccero on Blow-Up:Toward a Macro-Vision of Italian Film Millicent Marcus (bio) I can pin-point the exact moment of my conversion to Italian cinema studies. It happened in Spring 1970 when Freccero delivered the lecture that would form the basis of his ground-breaking essay "Blow-Up: From the Word to the Image." Though I could never have begun to fathom the career-defining effects of this lecture at the time, on some level I sensed that radically new scholarly prospects were opening before me. First and foremost I was struck by Freccero's daring critical leap, across centuries, cultural registers, and disciplines, from Dante to Antonioni, from the rarefied reaches of the 14th century Italian poetics to the mass media representation of mod London in the late 1960's, or more broadly, from the "Word" to the "Image" of his article's subtitle. That my professor of Dante studies, who had led me through the winding pathways of medieval philosophy, theology and literature, to arrive at a reading of the Commedia as a summa of Western thought and as a touchstone for all subsequent Italian cultural evolution, would subject a contemporary film to his most rigorous and learned scrutiny—this struck me with the force of revelation. But to take the full measure of Freccero's break-through achievement, we must "historicize" the entrance of cinema studies into the Academy. On the threshold of the 1970's, film was unthinkable as course material within the Liberal Arts curriculum, which consigned such study to vocationally tainted Schools of Communications. But by bringing his most sophisticated and learned critical techniques to bear on [End Page S224] Antonioni's work, Freccero elevated the film to the highest level of textual seriousness. And he did so by showing precisely how the filmmaker himself, within Blow-Up, makes explicit the passage from high to mass cultural pursuits, from censorious to complicit use of the media, in short, from "Word" to "Image." I began this paper by invoking the metaphor of conversion to explain my disciplinary turn in the aftermath of the lecture on Blow-Up, and I'd like to develop that metaphor, given its centrality to Freccero's own scholarly quest. If conversion is literally a "turning around," in my case it was also a "turning away"—away from the moralizing association of the movie screen with the back wall of Plato's cave, the place of mystification and illusion that keeps its occupants in a state of untruth. Freccero's analysis broke down the either-or distinction between film and literary text, between cinema as a shadowy simulacrum of the material world, and the written word as a step toward enlightenment. In making Blow-Up the focus of his most impassioned interpretive scrutiny, Freccero gave his benediction to the film medium as the venue for working through the anxiety that has always accompanied the mimetic arts, from Plato on, with their power to seduce us away from the path to true knowledge. Cinema is ideally equipped to bring that anxiety to a head thanks to its technologically-driven claim to reproduce the "real." But self-conscious filmmakers build into their art an awareness of the equivocal powers of illusionism that the technology puts at their disposal. Bertolucci does so at the end of The Conformist, literally enacting the myth of Plato's cave as an allegory for the mechanisms of filmic projection. I'd like to show you a clip from the film's enigmatic final frames, which include all of the ingredients of Plato's scenario, but positioned in such a way as to confound any easy reading of the analogy it suggests. Everything is there: the grotto in the coliseum façade; the fire; the prison bars; the shadowy object of desire; someone who looks. When Marcello turns his gaze into the camera our own location within the cave of cinema is exposed. Film may be a mere exercise in illusionism, Bertolucci is saying, but it also has the power to unmask and to examine its status as lie. Antonioni will do this in Blow Up, by challenging the basis of the cinema's truth claims, as...

Life is a Passacaglia

Life is a Passacaglia Stephen Davies I With its countless cultural variations based on and laid over the endlessly repeated bass melody of evolution, life is a passacaglia. As an evolved species that reached its modern form 30,000 BP or earlier in the late Pleistocene, we members of the species homo sapiens share the same perceptual, affective, and cognitive systems. These not only register the way the world is, they organize our engagement with the world in ways that reflect our common interests and concerns. We want and need the necessities first for survival and then for raising children to an age at which they too can raise children to maturity, this being the measure of our successful evolutionary adaptation. That is, we seek and value fresh air and clean water, food, shelter, companionship, stimulation, cooperation and all the other means to survival and reproductive success. (I allow, of course, that there is some cultural variability in what counts as food and on what foods can be eaten, and similarly for many of life's patterns and situations.) Our shared biology and the way the world is together dictate that the tunes to which different cultures dance are variations on an underlying, pan-cultural theme, which is the human condition. Moreover, because we are deeply self-reflective and profoundly social, we are fascinated by the motives, patterns, and dynamics driving human interaction. We are mesmerized by pride and prejudice, crime and punishment, by love, jealousy, justice, revenge, compassion, trade, betrayal, peace, and violence. And again, despite a plethora of surface social differences in the ways such human characteristics are manifested, the universality of these human vectors is readily apparent. Notwithstanding the undeniable impact of local [End Page 315] cultural and environmental factors on the organization of life within different societies, other humans are never entirely alien or opaque to us because we inhabit a single world and share a common biology, with the result that we inevitably experience the same joys, fears, challenges, and desires. Narrative and representational arts often feature these common themes of human existence and teach lessons in life at no expense to the audience beyond their imaginative involvement.1 As well, we are absorbed by presentations of strong emotions, and these can be apparent in the sounds of music and in decorative arts as well as in more directly mimetic art forms. As one would expect, the attraction of art that deals with universal aspects of human experience and basic emotions transcends the boundaries of culture. The tragedies of the ancient Greeks are no less powerful and meaningful now than in the past, and are cross-culturally accessible also, as are, for example, the Hindu Ramayana and Mahabharata epics. Meanwhile, all cultures elaborate stories of ghosts, adventure, lost and found love, heroism, exploration, endurance, friendship, trust, and the like. Many universal human preferences are the product of our ancestral evolution. We evolved to like sweet and fatty foods, for instance, because they were nutritious and hard to come by in the late Pleistocene. We preferred landscapes offering distant views that showed signs of water and life, as well as concealed places that could be used for shelter and as lookout points. We found bodily and especially facial symmetry attractive in members of the other sex because it signals health, which in turn indicates fecundity. More generally, the markers of sexual attractiveness functioned as predictors of the health of potential offspring. In general, we valued prototypicality, but were also drawn to specimens that are unusual without thereby qualifying as deviant.2 It is possible to discern the basis for a proto-aesthetic in these judgments, a biologically conditioned propensity to find some things naturally beautiful or appealing and others ugly or scary. And this tendency comes to us as part of our biological endowment, however we overlay it with traditions of cultural refinements. Artists are able to take and exploit the aesthetic inclinations just described. For example, artistic designs featuring symmetry are claimed to inherit the beauty and appeal attached to symmetry in evaluating the bodies of potential sexual partners.3 And by recreating and stylizing visual and other patterns that are attention-grabbing in nature...

The Artificial and the natural: an evolving polarity

Genetically modified food, art in the form of a phosphorescent rabbit implanted with jellyfish DNA, and robots that simulate human emotion would seem to be evidence for the blurring boundary between the natural and the artificial. Yet because the deeply rooted concept of nature functions as a cultural value, a social norm, and a moral authority, we cannot simply dismiss the distinction between art and nature as a nostalgic relic. Disentangling the cultural roots of many current debates about new technologies, the essays in this volume examine notions of nature and art as they have been defined and redefined in Western culture, from the Hippocratic writers' ideas of physis and techne [note: bar over e] and Aristotle's designation of mimetic arts to nineteenth-century chemistry and twenty-first century biomimetics. These essays--by specialists of different periods and various disciplines--reveal that the division between nature and art has been continually challenged and reassessed in Western thought. In antiquity, for example, mechanical devices were seen as working against nature; centuries later, Descartes not only claimed the opposite but argued that nature itself was mechanical. Nature and art, the essays show, are mutually constructed, defining and redefining themselves, partners in a continuous dance over the centuries.ContributorsBernadette Bensaude-Vincent, Horst Bredekamp, John Hedley Brooke, Dennis Des Chene, Alan Gabbey, Anthony Grafton, Roald Hoffmann, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, William R. Newman, Jessica Riskin, Heinrich Von Staden, Francis Wolff, Mark J. Schiefsky Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent is Professor of History at the University of Paris X. She is the author of A History of Chemistry and other books. William R. Newman is Ruth Halls Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at Indiana University, Bloomington. He is the coeditor of Secrets of Nature (MIT Press, 1999) and author or editor of several other books.

Towards Defining "Postrealism" in British Literature

There is... a certain kind of contemporary avant-garde art which is said to be neither modernist nor antimodernist, but postmodernist; it continues the modernist critique of traditional mimetic art, and shares the modernist commitment to innovation, but pursues these aims by methods of its own. It tries to go beyond modernism, or around it, and is often as critical of modernism as it is of antimodernism. (220-221)

THE UNACKNOWLEDGED LEGACY

This paper presents a critical discussion of the treatment of mimetic art, and particularly poetry and the theatre, in the work of the Athenian philosopher Plato (427–347 BC). It centres on Plato’s discussion of the corrupting powers of the arts in the Republic, and the implications that his fierce attack on poetry and theatre have for his construction of the ideal polity. The legacy of Platonic ideas in later elaborations of the corrupting power of the arts is discussed. Furthermore, the paper investigates the relationship between current debates on cultural policy and the Platonic idea that the transformative powers of the arts ought to be harnessed by the state to promote a just society. The conclusion thus reached is that “instrumental cultural policy”, rather then being a modern invention, was in fact first theorized precisely in Plato’s Republic.

Cinema and its Discontents: Jacques Ranciere and Film Theory

Cinema and its Discontents:Jacques Rancière and Film Theory Tom Conley (bio) Jacques Rancière may have entered a French pantheon of film theory in 2001 after his publication of an array of essays on classical and contemporary films in La fable cinématographique. In that book Rancière posited cinema to be "to the storytelling art what truth is to falsehood."1 Cinema rejects the Aristotelian poetics of fables and fabulation by reconfiguring the Greek philosopher's hierarchy that favored muthos, the rationale of a plot, over opsis, the "sentient effect of the spectacle." The camera records its stories via linked actions, headed toward various resolutions by way of often unforeseen twists and turns. The dramatic progression of the Aristotelian scheme is betrayed, however, when the camera records information and evokes sensations that go both against the grain of dramatic progress and in myriad directions, many of which are beyond the director's or editor's control and have little to do with the narrative. Citing an early essay by Jean Epstein, Rancière notes that the intelligence of the playwright submits to that of the camera, a machine that "records this infinity of movements that create a drama of an intensity a hundred times greater than any change of fortune." The camera, Rancière continues (along a Benjaminian line reminiscent of the last pages of the "Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility") hardly reproduces things "such as they are gazed upon. It records them such as the naked eye does not see them, such as they happened to be." He then adds a flourish, recalling Gilles Deleuze's words on sentience in the first pages of his Cinéma 2: L'Image-temps, when he describes things "in their state as waves and vibrations, before their qualification as objects, persons, or identifiable events by their descriptive or narrative properties" (8). Rancière shows that Epstein intuited the power of film even before the onset of sound (said to have since attenuated the expressive force of its silent images [we have only to recall images that Epstein might have known, such as Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks]), linking film's power to the American industrialization of the seventh art, and anticipating a good deal of film theory. Yet Epstein's reflections, adds Rancière, are based on pre-Romantic aesthetic theory in Kant, the Schlegels, Schiller, Herder, and even Hegel. [End Page 96] The German school inaugurated, as Deleuze and Godard also force us to recall, an "aesthetic age" (16) that follows and undoes the order of inherited mimetic arts. The passive register of the camera, which indeed doubles the intensity of the spectator's intellective and sentimental gaze, causes conscious and unconscious elements of the work to be of a same texture. It dislocates the artistic privilege that a creator had owned when he or she was said to "impose a vision" upon a form. Rancière then complicates the point when he notes that the "machinic mechanism" [dispositif machinique] of cinema in fact suppresses the "active labor of this becoming-passive" (17) because it is in all events already and always passive in nature. It hinders [contrarie] the aims of "modernist" aesthetics in which it is found, by opposing the aesthetic autonomy of art to its former submission to a representational mission (17). In the new aesthetic age, art can be found anywhere and everywhere, and so too can aesthetic values, all over and about the frame. Yet cinema works against—hinders, thwarts, even runs contrary to—its own tendency to follow the new aesthetic principles it heralds. That is why Rancière defines a cinematographic fable as a fable running contrary to itself. The fable or narration belonging to Aristotelian poetics is undone by the art of the camera, but the camera cannot fail to let its gaze concatenate the many sensations and impressions it brings forward, thus also belonging to the narrative arts. Unlike André Bazin or Gilles Deleuze, Rancière cannot countenance a pure cinema of the kind that the former championed in Charlie Chaplin's burlesque gestures, if only because the clownish tramp already belonged to an established aesthetics...

Modernist Aesthetics in Joseph Roth's "Radetzkymarsch": The Crisis of Meaning and the Role of the Reader

Joseph Roth's narrative of fin-de-siecle Austro-Hungary depicts an aesthetic transition from realism to a modernist subversion of realist conventions.1 Although the novel contains such realistic devices as a fictional world anchored in a specific time and place, a plot with a credible ending, plausible characters, and an omniscient narrator, Roth subverts the thematics of destiny and the strategies of illusion-hallmark traits of late realism.2 In particular, Roth punctures the realist illusion of the wholeness of the text with a self-reflexiveness ubiquitous in German Romantic works which not only exposes the machinations that produce mimesis, but also subverts the basis of realism, the tacit assumption that fictional reality contains an intrinsic order. This use of Romantic irony addressed to the reader challenges the presupposition that an irreversible cause-and-effect sequence of events shapes the protagonists' inevitable destinies and draws attention to the process of narration. This self-reflexiveness creates a self-consciousness of the text as artistic artifact in which the author's aesthetic shaping of the narrative through linguistic devices, not an intrinsic cosmic or historical force, creates order among disparate events and alerts readers to their own role in the aesthetic enterprise of producing meaning. This self-conscious depiction of the text's order and meaning as products of increasingly obsolete linguistic stratagems of the nineteenth-century novel exposes the precarious role of language in transforming a chaotic reality into a meaningful narrative and demands the readers' participation in discovering/constructing the text's meaning. Although the fictional works of Roth's contemporary, Carl Einstein, an anti-realist novelist and art critic, differ from Roth's, his aesthetic theories reveal the debates concerning the novel of Roth's generation and shed light on modernist aspects of Roth's work. Einstein distinguishes between a self-conscious, artistic order imposed upon fictional reality and one that appears inherent in the world of mimetic novels. In an essay Uber den Roman (1914) Einstein notes that the plot of a psychological novel is based upon the logical development of cause and effect, a psychologically motivated chain of events.3 He proposes an alternative novelistic form ruled not by psychological motivation, but by the randomness of auctorial caprice: Also das Kunstwerk ist Sache der Willkur (Einstein 127). As Neil Donahue notes: notion of arbitrariness undermines the logical connectedness required for naturalistic depiction in visual or verbal art [...].4 In this alternative art form, laws of formal composition as an aesthetic order replace the order of logical causality in mimetic art. Einstein perceived causality and artistic form as opposites and believed that a chronological ordering of events as a linear sequence of causes and effects destroyed the autonomous, closed form of the total work of art.5 Roth's work is transitional because it consists of a balancing act between Einstein's two paradigms for the novel. At first reading, the decline of the empire appears to be the result of an inevitable historical destiny, the teleological design of a realist novel that consists of a linear cause-and-effect sequence of events. The narrator's intrusive commentary, however, calls attention to authorial manipulation of the narrative that is so pervasive in German Romantic, modernist, and postmodernist prose. The narrator subverts the illusion of an inherent order, often depicted as fate in nineteenth-century fiction, through self-reflexive commentary on the storytelling process that fictionalizes events through the techniques of mimesis and verisimilitude, which create meaning. Both this questioning of an intrinsic order and the allusions to an arbitrary aesthetic one in Roth's novel underscore art's dubious role in imposing order onto a chaotic world. Specifically, cyclical, repetitive aesthetic patterns and the leitmotif, a prevalent technique in music, subvert the novel's linear plot and mimetic function. …

Portrait prints and codes of identity in the Renaissance: Hendrik Goltzius, Justus Lipsius, and Michel de Montaigne

A portrait is just a portrait, or so it often seems. By its very nature a portrait makes a tacit claim to being simply what it is, as if one must somehow forego certain of the usual questions one is inclined to ask of any representation. Whether or not we conclude that the sitter actually sat for the occasion, once the figure is identified the main question has been answered. From there we turn to description and speculation. Yet in the much discussed category of mimetic art, portraits present a vexing sequence of problems for the interpreter. In the Renaissance the imaged portrait was but one manifestation of an emerging interest in private disclosure within the public sphere. Take, for example, the concurrent rise in the importance of biographies and personal testimonials such as the dedicatory preface and the epigram. Then there was the concertedly self-conscious cultivation of the letter, not just as a means of private exchange but as a mode of public discourse and an opportunity for self-advertisement. However, the most compelling of all Renaissance genres of self-representation is the personal essay.

The Theater in Modernist Thought

It is the peculiar fate of the theater to find itself suspended between two types of art. 1 As a performing art, it relies on the physical presence of human beings executing their artistry the way musicians play music or dancers dance. As a mimetic art, however, it turns these performing human beings, along with stage props and light, into material used for the purpose of representation. This double allegiance has given rise to many of the theoretical debates, schools, and practices of the theater. In particular, it has fueled the recurring fantasy that theatrical mimesis can be unmediated. Characters, objects, and speech need not be translated into a different medium—descriptive prose, a flat canvas, celluloid—but can instead be transferred directly onto the stage where they may act as what they really are. This fantasy does not describe the actual practice of the theater, which inevitably relies on forms of abstraction, displacement, condensation, and estrangement, but it nonetheless remains a promise or theoretical possibility that has attracted the theater from its inception. Indeed, various poetic and aesthetic doctrines from the Aristotelian unities through naturalism to the rise of a new physical theater in the twentieth century legitimate themselves through the theater's supposedly direct mimesis of space, time, and action.

"To show scorn her own image": The Varieties of Education in The Taming of the Shrew

"To show scorn her own image": The Varieties of Education in The Taming ofthe Shrew Dennis S. Brooks University ofNebraska-Lincoln Recent work on The Taming ofthe Shrew has contended that such problematic features of the play as the open-ended Sly framework, the interrelationships among the various subplots, Petruchio's treatment of Kate, and Kate's notorious final speech are illuminated by such themes as patriarchy, game-playing, and the Ovidian transformations that Shakespeare uses throughout this phase of his career.1 However valid these approaches may be, the disparate themes, anomalies, and subplots of The Taming of the Shrew coalesce into a dramatic unity when framed by the broader Renaissance debate over education. To be sure, The Shrew is a romantic farce; it would be a mistake to reduce the play to a simple examination of the timeworn nature vs. nurture debate. But to approach The Shrew without considering Renaissance theories of education is analogous to approaching The Tempest without taking into account Renaissance beliefs concerning magic.2 1 shall argue below that, while Renaissance education theorists vigorously debated the most efficient and effective means to impart literacy and numeracy, all sides agreed that education was a complex process of socialization. Through it, the student learns to acquiesce to the prevailing social hierarchies by internalizing the dominant value system and tempering those passions that threaten social order: namely, irascibility and concupiscence. Such self-mastery enables the student to accept his or her designated role in society.3 This theory of education undergirds The Shrew's Induction and the play-within-the-play. In the context of this theory, both the on-stage lord and his courtiers and Shakespeare's audience, ranging from groundlings to court wits, might have viewed Petruchio and Kate not only as a swaggering, patriarchal boor and an Amazonian icon, but also as exempla of the educative function of mimetic art. Groundlings and wits alike in the on- and off-stage audiences would have seen Kate's tantrums as a mirror of their own lack of self-control, her transformation into a submissive wife as a reflection of their potential for Renaissance versions of educated civility, and Petruchio's roughand -tumble approach to courtship and marriage as exemplary of a pedagogy that might move them from incorrigibility to civility.4 Lucentio's and Hortensio's love-in-idleness and their wooing of 8 Rocky Mountain Review Bianca, in which they appropriate conventional tutorials not to educate but to seduce, illustrate a miseducation that fails to socialize and results in misfits like Sly who press what knowledge they possess into the service of their asocial appetites. The Shrew does not reflect a consensus in Renaissance pedagogy, for there was none. The play does, however, depict with broad brush-strokes two dominant continental pedagogies: the regimented rote learning advocated by reformation and Jesuit theorists, and the private tutorials championed by some of the more innovative humanists . These two approaches vied for the attention of English intellectuals disenchanted with the English grammar school tradition. In The Shrew, Shakespeare weighs both and, finding them wanting, proposes as an alternative what I call, following Sidney, an eikastic education.5 In an eikastic education, the theatre is the model classroom : students and teachers together act out lessons, and teachers seek to allure students to virtue through worthy models found in art, just as "great poets . . . allure the credulous to their improvement ," and poetry "lurefs] away nobler souls from those foundering under moral disease" (Boccaccio 78). It is in this spirit that the lord produces for Sly a play-within-the-play in which Petruchio's courtship of Kate and their subsequent marriage constitute her education in self-mastery. First in the Induction, then in the playwithin -the-play, Shakespeare explores the use of arts to tame humanity's asocial passions in the interests of civility. Shakespeare's belief in the ability of the arts to temper anti-social impulses and attitudes echoes the belief, widely held among Renaissance education theorists, that moral education is a fundamental means of socialization. Reformers and Jesuits alike viewed the academy as a place in which the human personality could be refashioned in conformity to their...

"To Show Scorn Her Own Image": The Varieties of Education in "The Taming of the Shrew"

Recent work on The Taming of the Shrew has contended that such problematic features of the play as the open-ended Sly framework, the interrelationships among the various subplots, Petruchio's treatment of Kate, and Kate's notorious final speech are illuminated by such themes as patriarchy, game-playing, and the Ovidian transformations that Shakespeare uses throughout this phase of his career.' However valid these approaches may be, the disparate themes, anomalies, and subplots of The Taming of the Shrew coalesce into a dramatic unity when framed by the broader Renaissance debate over education. To be sure, The Shrew is a romantic farce; it would be a mistake to reduce the play to a simple examination of the timeworn nature vs. nurture debate. But to approach The Shrew without considering Renaissance theories of education is analogous to approaching The Tempest without taking into account Renaissance beliefs concerning magic.2 I shall argue below that, while Renaissance education theorists vigorously debated the most efficient and effective means to impart literacy and numeracy, all sides agreed that education was a complex process of socialization. Through it, the student learns to acquiesce to the prevailing social hierarchies by internalizing the dominant value system and tempering those passions that threaten social order: namely, irascibility and concupiscence. Such self-mastery enables the student to accept his or her designated role in society.3 This theory of education undergirds The Shrew's Induction and the play-within-the-play. In the context of this theory, both the on-stage lord and his courtiers and Shakespeare's audience, ranging from groundlings to court wits, might have viewed Petruchio and Kate not only as a swaggering, patriarchal boor and an Amazonian icon, but also as exempla of the educative function of mimetic art. Groundlings and wits alike in the onand off-stage audiences would have seen Kate's tantrums as a mirror of their own lack of self-control, her transformation into a submissive wife as a reflection of their potential for Renaissance versions of educated civility, and Petruchio's roughand-tumble approach to courtship and marriage as exemplary of a pedagogy that might move them from incorrigibility to civility.4 Lucentio's and Hortensio's love-in-idleness and their wooing of

Traditional Chinese Plays.

The world of traditional Chinese drama can be at once fascinating and bewildering to the uninitiated Western observer. Attuned to his own dramatic conventions, he is hard put to apprehend the delicate fusion of poetry, music, and subtle gesture which is the essence of Chinese theatre. Because of these difficulties, the task of translating traditional Chinese drama must go far beyond the conventional literary treatment and evoke the entire world of stagecraft and directing. Longing for Worldly Pleasures (Ssu Fan) is a lyric monologue in which a young Buddhist laments the waning of her youth in the seclusion of the convent. The brief piece involves a complexity of mood which makes it an actor s tour de force, undertaken only by the most highly skilled performers.Fifteen Strings of Cash (Shih Wu Kuan), a much longer play, is a comic murder mystery satirizing bureaucratic ineptitude in the administration of justice. The comic lead role of Lou the Rat is a virtuoso part which illustrates the intricate mimetic art of the traditional comic actor and was the play s main appeal to Chinese audiences.