Mixed Genre Research Articles

Féeries: Études sur le conte merveilleux XVII e –XIX e siécle 5, Le Rire des conteurs (review)

Reviewed by: Féeries: Études sur le conte merveilleux XVIIe–XIXe siécle 5, Le Rire des conteurs Elizabeth Wanning Harries (bio) Féeries: Études sur le conte merveilleux XVIIe–XIXe siécle 5, Le Rire des conteurs, ed. Jean Mainil. Université Stendhal-Grenoble 3: UMR Lire, 2008. 186pp. €19. ISSN 1766-2842. ISBN 978-2-84310-123-6. The fifth volume (2008) of the new journal Féeries is an important contribution not only to the study of the fairy tale, but also to the theory and practice of fiction in the eighteenth century, particularly in France. Under the general title “Le Rire des conteurs,” the volume includes essays by eight versatile and knowledgeable scholars, who have looked carefully at the laughter that tales provoke from about 1690 to the publication of Charles Mayer’s Cabinet des fées in 1785–86. Their searches for the sources of this laughter illuminate the tales themselves and their intertextualities, as well as placing them in the context— perhaps even in the centre—of eighteenth-century narrative experimentation. In his opening essay, Jean Mainil (the editor of this volume) shows the ways in which Mme d’Aulnoy plays with the fairy-tale genre itself, particularly in the framed tales produced, read, and written by the characters in her novels Le Nouveau gentilhomme bourgeois and Don Gabriel Ponce de Leon. Here he recapitulates some of the conclusions from his book Madame d’Aulnoy et le rire des fées (2001), but concentrates on the influence of Cervantes’s elaborate fictional games. Like Don Quixote, the characters sometimes attempt to relive the tales they have heard and read, but they also write them. The friction between the tales they supposedly create and their parodic context is part of Mme d’Aulnoy’s comic verve. (Mainil also summarizes and evaluates the other essays that appear in the volume.) Several contributions explore the relationships between fairy tales and other literary forms of the period. Jean-Paul Sermain sketches [End Page 159] three situations in Perrault and three in Galland to show how they produce a “choc comique” as the daily meets the marvellous and fantastic. He touches on some of the reasons why tales often make it possible to laugh at terrible situations. Perhaps the most valuable part of his essay is his placement of these early French tales in the eighteenthcentury movement towards the mixing of genres and modes. Like many other forms, these tales move away from the strict division of comic from tragic; they make readers see “un même moment dans les deux perspectives du plaisant et du pathétique” (28). Nathalie Rizzoni, in her essay “Féerire à la foire,” studies a group of plays from the first half of the century—many of them still in manuscript at the Bibliothèque Nationale—that stage fairy-tale material. Her account of the friction between their different modes (the comicrealistic, the supernatural and fantastic, and the theatrical with its characters from the commedia dell’arte) indirectly supports Sermain’s account of mixed genres. As she points out, the fragmentary effect is still more striking on the stage than on the page and activates the spectator much as some contemporary fiction activates the reader. (She describes some wonderful scenes that mix geographies real and imagined, or characters from different walks of fiction, or fantastic metamorphoses with comic licentiousness.) She also suggests that these plays deserve a much larger role in French theatrical history, linking as they do the tales of the late seventeenth century with nineteenth-century theatrical “féeries.” I do not have the space to treat several essays on individual writers and works in detail: Manuel Couvreur’s “Du Sourire à la Morsure: l’humour dans la traduction des Mille et une nuits par Antoine Galland”; Françoise Gevrey’s “L’Amusement dans Grigri de Cahusac”; and Nicolas Veysman’s “Le Rictus moral de Marmontel.” But all of them show, sometimes brilliantly, the continuing emphasis on fictional games and bricolage that characterizes the fantastic fiction of the period. The only essay I found somewhat disappointing was Jan Herman’s “Les Contes hiéroglyphiques de Horace Walpole et la question...

Negotiating Peace in Northern Ireland: Film, Television and Post-feminism

I examine the role that visual representation of the Troubles has played in securing the peace process in Northern Ireland. I do this by considering a number of television representations produced during the ceasefire period and since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement. A number of film and television productions were screened from 1992 onwards in which the subject matter centred on the Northern Irish conflict. I propose that these productions include not only narratives aimed at making sense of the conflict but post-feminist discourses on femininity, masculinity and in particular the ‘new man’. From a feminist position the article will identify why it is crucial to appreciate the ways in which these post-feminist discourses are being employed to give meaning to the post-Ceasefire situation. It will consider a number of different genres but will conclude with an analysis of the recent genre mix, the docudrama. The article revisits my earlier research on pre-Ceasefire representations in The Crying Game (1992) and a series of television adverts produced by McCann-Erickson to help secure the Peace Process. It concludes by examining their discursive relationship to the most recent post-Ceasefire representations in a number of docudramas. These productions ‘re-imagine’ key historical events – Bloody Sunday (2001; first screened on ITV, January 20, 2002) and Sunday (2001; first screened on Channel 4, January 28, 2002) – and more recent atrocities such as Omagh (2004; first screened on Channel 4, May 27, 2004) and Holy Cross (BBC.NI, screened 2003). In conclusion, the essay suggests that in contemporary Northern Ireland visual representations of the conflict are drawing upon post-feminist discourse.

Decolonizing the Imagination in the Early Works of Valerio Evangelisti

TWENTY or so years ago, an Italian science-fiction writer would have assumed an Anglo-Saxon-sounding pseudonym in order to become popular at home. Valerio Evangelisti is one of the first such authors to have attained success using his real name. (1) As winner of the Premio Urania for science fiction in 1994 with Nicolas Eymerich, Inquisitore, he launched a prolific career during which he has since published sixteen novels. Although frequently characterized as an author of science fiction, Evangelistas works actually resist generic classification. Indeed, he is committed to a type of paraliterature characterized above all by genre mixing. (2) So any of his fictional works might include elements of the detective and/or the historical novel, fantasy, horror, science fiction and the fantastic. These latter two offer an effective approach to the opus of an author whom some consider to be the most famous Bolognese since Umberto Eco, for it is by means of science fiction and the fantastic that Evangelisti intends to liberate his reader's imagination in order to create a heightened awareness of the colonizing forces that shape our thoughts and beliefs systems. The decolonizzazione dell'imaginario is one of his primary goals. (3) How then might one arrive at an acceptable definition of the fantastic and of science fiction as far as the works of Evangelisti are concerned? According to such theorists as Pierre-Georges Castex (5-8), Louis Vax (53-4), or Tzvetan Todorov (29), the fantastic is always inextricably intertwined with known reality, which it thoroughly defies by recounting events irreducible to human logic and reason. Situated in the present with respect to the narrator, the fantastic erupts when a phenomenon impossible according to known scientific and rational knowledge occurs, thereby unleashing a mystery that is never solved. The disturbance provokes fear, insecurity and alienation; the moorings of stable reality are lost; our colonized imaginations are in a state of crisis. Clearly, the fantastic is different from science fiction therefore in the sense that the latter, futuristic, concerns scientific and especially technological discoveries and inventions possible within the realm of the narration. Evangelisti seems to concur with these views when commenting on lo sfondo [...] totalmente onirico of Maurizio Cometto's fantastic, for example, described as a bizarro che emergeva, poco alla volta, dalla quotidianita, (4) or in Prima della rivoluzione, Introduction to Antologia del Fantastico Italiano Underground, where he qualifies the fantastic as il preannuncio di una rivoluzione. Da sempre cio che e underground, se si aggrega, puo emergere. Prepariamoci a dubitare della realta che ci circonda (10). In contrast, Evangelisti notes that science fiction is quel filone [...] che situa le proprie storie nel contesto dei e degli incubi generati dallo sviluppo scientifico, tecnologico e socioeconomico di un'epoca data (Alphaville, Su Lovecraft, 143). Accordingly, the appearance of the fantastic in Evangelisti's novels exists in opposition to widely accepted truths and may therefore disappear once that view of contemporary reality changes owing to scientific discovery. In fact, many of Evangelisti's novels secrete their own scientific explanations. In this way, one set of sogni replaces another and contributes to the overall intention to decolonize the imagination. A second fundamental element of the definition of the fantastic pertains to the nature of the phenomenon of the uncanny itself. More precisely, need it be outside consciousness and in a sense concrete, a weird event experienced by more than one person? Can it also be exclusively inside consciousness, and as such personal, subjective, hidden from the outside world within the depths of someone's dreams, nightmares, or hallucinations? According to such theorists as Joel Malrieu, it can be both or either. He in fact insists that the fantastic can be an outward visible event as well as a uniquely personal phenomenon (49). …

"The Innocent Victim: A Franco-American Civil War Novel." ed. by Adélard Lambert (review)

Book Reviews207 Reformation, covering such diverse topics as Egyptian justice, Constantine, Arianism, Germanic invasions, the Crusades and Martin Luther. Its discursive form (a dialogue between the interlocutors Primus and Secundus) and its mixed genre place it in classical and humanistic traditions, recalling such authors as Thucydides, Horace and Erasmus. A compelling argument is made for the poem as both a clarification ofHobbes's ecclesiology and a literary undertaking. The questions which are brought to fore include Hobbes's place in the humanist and Latin poetic traditions, his fear of the charge of heresy, his connections with Continental thinkers such as Gassendi and Lorenzo Valla and his critique ofthe Nicene Creed. This edition offers a multitude of significant information; all told, the support material amounts to over 400 pages. The introductory chapters help to elucidate a complicated context, and the index ofproper names serves as a guide to a multifaceted text. A first appendix provides a survey of the manuscripts and printed editions while a second offers the entries in the Hardwick Hall Library, a collection which Hobbes himself helped to collect and document. The material is rounded out by extensive bibliographical references and a glossary of pertinent proper names. The remainder of the volume contains the Latin text with a facing English translation, extensive footnotes, manuscript variants and the 1 688 glossary and preface. The translation is meticulously researched and, although there might be the occasional disagreement as to the use of a term, this does not detract from an excellent presentation of Hobbes's expression. Scholars might disagree on such questions as Hobbes's sources, his reaction to Platonism or his historical intentions, but the particulars presented in this edition provide ample proof of the importance of this text and its archeology and also serve to illustrate the necessity for further research. Given the complexity of the text and its context, one could wish for a slightly more approachable style in the introductory materials, and those unfamiliar with such elements as Hobbes's Epicureanism and Erastianism would do well to begin with more general readings on the religious and political situation in Europe over the course of his life. However, this density and the occasional typographical error do not take away from the importance of the scholarship. A monumental effort, the volume serves as a remedy to a regrettable omission and is an essential addition to Hobbesian scholarship. Dorothy StegmanBall State University Lambert, Adélard. "The Innocent Victim: A Franco-American Civil War Novel." Ed. and trans. Margaret S. Langford in collaboration with Claire Quintal. Bennington, VT: Images from the Past, 2008. Pp [i]-xxviii; 116. ISBN 1-884592-50-3 (Paper). ISBN 978-1-884592-50-8. $15.95 (Paper). L 'Innocente victime is Adélard Lambert's (1867-1946) melodramatic tale of French Canadian immigration to the United States. Originally serialized in Le 208Women in French Studies Droit (an Ottawa daily) in 1936, Lambert's text is steeped in the ideology of French Canadian cultural conservation, known as la survivance. Set in 1 864, the story begins in the small village St. Pauvret, Quebec and follows one family's emigration to Manchester, NH and Lowell, MA. Lambert's account of trickery, forced enlistment into the Union Army, abduction, and murder reveals the dangers of easy money enticements just across the border. Margaret Langford's translation of this roman à thèse stays close to the original language, capturing its journalistic prose. In his foreword, Robert Perreault, a historian of Manchester, NH's Franco-American community, describes the unsolved murder case that provided the inspiration for Lambert's story. Langford's introduction offers a brief biographical sketch of Lambert, who, like many French Canadians moved back and forth across the border many times. She also outlines his development into a well-known expert of French Canadian folklore and collaboration with Marius Barbeau, a pioneer in French Canadian ethnography. The well-researched footnotes annotating the text clarify historical allusions and situate the cultural references. The two appendices describe French Canadian working life and French Canadian folksongs. Langford ends her text with a thorough bibliography ofworks on Franco Americans. Margaret Langford's volume offers a welcome addition to the growing collection...

Historia Ecclesiastica by Thomas Hobbes (review)

206Women in French Studies thematic and aesthetic complexity, and this despite the upsurge of scientific theories insisting on the biological and intellectual inferiority of women, and attendant backlash against creative women, discussed by Catherine Perry in her richly textured introduction to the period. Both Shapiro's bio-bibliographical notices and texts selected for the poets included in this section flesh out the stunning array of poetic works by women in modern France. For expert readers, however, the absence of Malvina Blanchecotte, Louisa Siefert and Marie Krysinska from the nineteenth century is glaring and the treatment of Louise Ackermann not sufficiently robust to transmit for posterity her strikingly poetic engagement with science. Readers may challenge for various reasons Shapiro's inclusion or exclusion ofparticular poets to represent women's poetic achievements in a given century. One may also question why, in a collection aiming to redress women's poetic history, their accomplishments are often, though not exclusively, situated in relation to their male counterparts, eclipsing resonant poetic developments by women across the centuries. Whether expert or amateur, readers will recognize without question the breadth and depth of Shapiro's superb volume, which offers stirring proof of the exceptional legacy of nearly sixty women whose poetic influence shall continue to shape the way we read and write French literary history. Adrianna M. PaliyenkoColby College Hobbes, Thomas. Historia Ecclesiastica. Ed. and Trans. Patricia Springborg, Patricia Stablein and Paul Wilson. Paris: Honoré Champion, 2008. Pp 729. ISBN 978-2-7453-1577-9. 130€ (Cloth). Thomas Hobbes's ecclesiology has been eclipsed by the magnitude of his political philosophy in his Leviathan and by censorship of his criticism of papal and episcopal power. Published posthumously, his elegiac Latin poem Historia Ecclesiastica has been given little critical attention. An Italian translation of the work was published in 1988 and a French translation is currently in progress, but this edition is the first English translation of an essential part of the Hobbesian corpus. It contributes to Hobbes's principal concerns of the state and civil order. An understanding of this poem and its political, poetical and religious contexts illuminates heretofore unexamined areas of Hobbes's thought. An extensive task with acknowledged contributions from several scholars, the edition gives an excellent account of the poem's composition and publication as well as its reception and historical context. What comes through is Hobbes's preoccupation with heresy and historiography. The ambiguous poem serves as a connection between several other works and can be seen as a summary of the philosopher's thoughts on the history of Christianity and the struggle between ecclesiastical and political authority. The poem details the relationship between Christianity and the rise of European states up to the Book Reviews207 Reformation, covering such diverse topics as Egyptian justice, Constantine, Arianism, Germanic invasions, the Crusades and Martin Luther. Its discursive form (a dialogue between the interlocutors Primus and Secundus) and its mixed genre place it in classical and humanistic traditions, recalling such authors as Thucydides, Horace and Erasmus. A compelling argument is made for the poem as both a clarification ofHobbes's ecclesiology and a literary undertaking. The questions which are brought to fore include Hobbes's place in the humanist and Latin poetic traditions, his fear of the charge of heresy, his connections with Continental thinkers such as Gassendi and Lorenzo Valla and his critique ofthe Nicene Creed. This edition offers a multitude of significant information; all told, the support material amounts to over 400 pages. The introductory chapters help to elucidate a complicated context, and the index ofproper names serves as a guide to a multifaceted text. A first appendix provides a survey of the manuscripts and printed editions while a second offers the entries in the Hardwick Hall Library, a collection which Hobbes himself helped to collect and document. The material is rounded out by extensive bibliographical references and a glossary of pertinent proper names. The remainder of the volume contains the Latin text with a facing English translation, extensive footnotes, manuscript variants and the 1 688 glossary and preface. The translation is meticulously researched and, although there might be the occasional disagreement as to the use of a term, this does not detract...

El lugar de la sátira en la poética: los tratados españoles del siglo XIX

This article aims to analyse the satirical genre and its connections with Poetics in the Spanish Poetry and Rhetoric precept treatises of the nineteenth century. Throughout that century, literary theory was subject to major changes, such as the success of Hegel’s postulates on literary genres. Satire faces these changes and its own evolution: it was first identified with the Roman satura and afterwards through its various forms, it became a mixed or transitional genre. Its fragile nature seems to confront directly the normative perpetuity of treatises that, in spite of their rupture with romanticism, may be considered inheritors of the classicist principles.

Un douteux rapport

A Dubious ReportIn 1966, The French version of Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem : A Report on the Banality of Evil was published by Gallimard. Immediately upon its release, the book provoked very serious controversies around it which aroused the curiosity of Avner Lahav – then a young Israeli soldier – about how an author of the magnitude of Arendt, whose analyses of totalitarianism were authoritative, could be so widely criticized. Was it possible that her book contained to a great degree what could be defined as a counter-analysis ? Was there not some kind of dispute among scholars, personalities or about prestige ?It was from these issues that Lahav undertook a systematic reading of Arendt’s works. While doing so he became aware of the fact that what he held in his hands was a “report” that was more than dubious especially in terms of the methodology applied, and also on many points regarding the contents. He undertook the task of writing a critical, reasoned analysis of Arendt’s book along four well defined axis : the personality of Adolph Eichmann, the society (comprising Nazis versus Jews), the problematic jurisdiction over the issue of crime against humanity, and finally the work and personality of Arendt. In these four chapters it emerged that this book was not only one of the most highly criticized of Arend’ts works, but also one of the most criticisable.Over the years that followed Lahav progressively updated his text by means of in-depth reading, and viewing of documentary films broadcast on French and Israeli television. Each re-examination of Arendt’s book in light of the new information only confirmed to which extent she ultimately had been misled, too often mixing genres and not less often bending the historical facts (to the point of simply ignoring them) to suit the purposes of her case. No, it was decidedly not a simple “report”, but indeed a “thesis”, highly personal and definitely questionable.

Tom and Vivien Eliot Do Narrative in Different Voices: Mixing Genres in The Waste Land's Pub

Tom and Vivien Eliot Do Narrative in Different Voices:Mixing Genres in The Waste Land's Pub Jennifer Sorensen Emery-Peck (bio) "He do the police in different voices," T.S. Eliot's original title for the poem that became The Waste Land, announces the poem's interest in voices and in the types of readerly performance made possible by narrative fiction.1 Borrowed from Dickens's Our Mutual Friend (1865), the phrase is taken from the mouth of "old Betty Higden, a poor widow," who describes the reading practices of Sloppy, a foundling who reads Betty the newspaper out loud: "You mightn't think it, but Sloppy is a beautiful reader of a newspaper. He do the Police in different voices" (198).2 Eliot's allusive gesture thus describes a specific type of reader—a working-class reader who surprises expectations and who plays with the possibilities of story-telling. Focusing on the aborted title's reference to Dickens allows us to glimpse The Waste Land's multiple links to the cluster of associations surrounding nineteenth-century novels and nineteenth century popular reading practices; the allusion points to a realm bristling with story-telling, with the voices of women and of working-class figures, with popular culture, with narrative techniques, and with the desires and demands of a mass reading audience. Historically, the poem's significant connections to the cultural province of the nineteenth-century novel and to narrative technique have been obscured by the ways in which the poem has been canonized as the emblematic modern lyric, sculpted by [End Page 331] Eliot and Pound to reject and exclude just those elements suggested by the cancelled title. Critics like Lawrence Rainey and David Chinitz have importantly revised the tendency of critical history to cast The Waste Land as a neoclassical poem that must be read according to the dictates of "Tradition and the Individual Talent," as an "impersonal" poem un-tethered to popular culture and to Eliot's local and personal history.3 For example, Rainey argues that the poem is importantly connected to aesthetic models like the music hall and the popular genre of typist fiction. Building on the recent body of scholarship on a more "popular" version of Eliot, I argue that The Waste Land is crucially linked to the narrative modes, the female and working-class voices, and the readerly practices and desires associated by many modernist writers with nineteenth-century novelistic print culture. I read The Waste Land's initial invocation of Dickens's novel in conjunction with the poem's later pub scene in "A Game of Chess," in which the speaker's narrative performance echoes the many-voiced story-telling sensibilities of Sloppy, Dickens's working-class figure who transforms newspapers into polyvocal narratives. This essay contends that The Waste Land's composition, content, pre-circulation, and development through drafts demonstrate Eliot's pervasive engagement with mixing genres, genders, classes, and cultures in the production of his poem.4 By revisiting the drafted version of the poem and by focusing on the pub sequence in particular, I recover the mostly obscured collaboration of Vivien Eliot in the making of the poem: I show that Vivien played a crucial role as co-author of the "A Game of Chess" pub sequence and that her revisions helped to develop the poem's interest in narrative performance and in the cluster of concerns often associated with the nineteenth century novel. My reading of The Waste Land repositions Vivien at the center of the poem's labor and interprets the pub sequence from "A Game of Chess"—the moment in the published poem that Vivien most heavily annotated and most effectively helped to shape—as a narrative performance crisscrossed by class, gender, and intensified readerly desires. Crucially, the pub sequence is the site of the poem's most substantial experimentation with narrative form and the moment when Vivien's voice as collaborator is most transformative. By focusing on the narrative moment in the pub and by recovering the role of Vivien's voice in shaping the poem, I argue that narrative elements and female voices are central to the making and meaning of The Waste Land...

Guest Editorial: Genre Mixing

Guest Editorial: Genre Mixing

Deconstructing the Text and (Re)Constructing the Past: History and Identity in Geraldine Brooks’ People of the Book

This paper examines Geraldine Brooks’ latest novel People of the Book (2008) in light of postmodern critiques of history and the desire to explore and signify the past through processes of deconstructing male-centered dominance and (re)constructing histories. The paper highlights ethno-spatial representation that involves intercultural dynamics behind the fate and importance of the manuscript. Drawing on discussions of postmodern views of history and identity construction, I engage the novel against the background of these and other postmodern and postcolonial concerns, also considering intertextual effects stemming from the mixing of genres and sub-genres. Lastly, I offer a reflection about the potential of this fictional account, based on the real-life fate of a prayer book that has testified to the spirit of interfaith tolerance and mutual enrichment of diverse cultures, to provide a context for understanding contemporary preoccupations with heritage, history, memory and identity in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

A Spoken Genre Gets Written

Many recent studies on computer-mediated communication (CMC) have addressed the question of orality and literacy. This article examines a relatively recent subgenre of CMC, that of written online sports commentary, that provides us with written CMC that is clearly based on firmly established oral genres, those of radio and television sports commentary. The examples analyzed are from two English, two French, and two Spanish online football (soccer) commentaries. The purpose of the study is to examine oral traits and genre mixing in online football commentaries in the three languages and carryover from the spoken genres of radio and television commentaries to this developing genre, following Ferguson. Special attention is paid to Web page design. The study reveals that form and content of online football commentaries are strongly affected by the style of the online newspaper.

The individual and the mixing of genres: Cultural dissonance and self-distinction

By considering cultural practices and preferences in terms of intra-individual behavioural variation we arrive at a model of the social world which does not neglect individual singularities and avoids the cultural caricaturing of social groups. It then becomes clear that the boundary between “cultural legitimacy” and “cultural illegitimacy” does not only separate different social classes, but divides up the different cultural practices and preferences of individuals across all classes. Without calling into question the existence of social inequalities before the most legitimate forms of culture, such a scientific point of view allows us to establish the marked statistical frequency of individual cultural profiles composed of heterogeneous or dissonant elements. Having considered the socio-historical conditions that produce heterogeneous cultural profiles, these frequent cultural dissonances allow us to reinterpret the social functions of culture and to highlight the importance of the study of intra-individual behavioural variations within the framework of a sociology of dispositional and contextual plurality.

Catullus' libellus, the Mixing of Genres, and the Evidence of Carm. 1, 50, and 46

Catullus' libellus, the Mixing of Genres, and the Evidence of Carm. 1, 50, and 46

Cultural Collateral Damage: The Cancellation of Jordan’s Jerash Festival 2006

Fall 2008 93 Katherine (Kate) Wilson spent a dozen years as playwright and theatre artist before returning to the City University of New York Graduate Center, where she is writing a dissertation on the playscript in the industrial U.S.; her secondary research areas are Arabic theatre and peformance and communitybased theatre. Cultural Collateral Damage: The Cancellation of Jordan’s Jerash Festival 2006 Kate Wilson Jerash Festival of Arts and Culture ran twenty-five times between 1981 and 2007. The festival had been suspended twice, both times because Israel invaded Lebanon, first in 1982 (the festival’s second year), and again in 2006, which would have been the festival’s quarter-century anniversary—an event I had traveled to Jordan to witness and research.1 This essay contextualizes the nonevent of Jerash Festival. I read the absence of this cultural event as revealing a presence of another kind, that is, of looming forces of international politics, especially Israeli and U.S. military operations, which render powerful repercussions on live entertainment performance, especially in the elaborate setting of festivals, and especially festivals in theArab world. Borrowing a military euphemism, these effects can be considered “cultural collateral damage,” indirect repercussions of military violence on the cultural sphere. En route to those ideas, I consider Jerash in the context of festivals generally and describe the geopolitical landscape of Jordan, in which festivals, alongside other modes of public expression, do or do not happen. What Jerash Festival Was “Festival” is not a monolithic phenomenon, so a brief taxonomy helps to position Jerash amid the variety of types. First is the question of scale, in which Jerash would be considered one of the larger, state sponsored affairs in contrast to smaller, local events, as in neighborhood religious celebrations. Another broad distinction lies in the content, in what a festival offers. One class of content irrelevant to this paper is the noncultural (for instance, Dubai’s Shopping Festival). Festivals that do present culture can be split broadly into mixed genre or single genre (e.g., music, dance, film, or theatre). Both Jordan’s Jerash and Lebanon’s Baalbakk [or Baalbeck or Baalbek] offer an array of music, dance, and theatre, including traditional or folk performances. Several Arab world festivals are dedicated solely to theatre, and like festivals elsewhere, these further refine their focus by geography or subgenre. At least two specialize in theatre from the Arab or African regions: Syria and Tunisia alternate years presenting the former’s Damascus Theatre Festival and the latter’s Carthage Theatre Days (Journées Théâtrales de Carthage). Israel’s 94 Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism Acco Festival ofAlternative Israeli Theatre, which purports to include Palestinians, frames itself by both place (nation) and sub-genre (alternative theatre).2 Two Arab-world theatre festivals limit themselves to contemporary, avant-garde, or experimental work. In Jordan, an independent theatre company, Al-Fawanees (“Lanterns”), hosts theAmman Festival (the most government-independent festival of the region),3 and Egypt has the Cairo Experimental (Tajribi) Festival, which has drawn the most English-language coverage.4 Other Arab world festivals focus on children’s theatre, music, or dance. Marvin Carlson’s survey names many of these Arab-world varieties.5 Athird variable involves the setting. Such festivals call attention to one specific location. Jerash Festival thus promoted a particular space, a compound of Roman ruins, for reasons I return to below. Lebanon’s Baalbakk and Tunisia’s Carthage Theatre Days are also set amid ruins. Festivals set in and named for large cities (e.g., Damascus) often aim for urban rejuvenation.6 Jordan’s recent subsuming of Jerash into a nationwide Jordan Festival marks a shift in the symbolic strategy of setting, with hopes to spread tourism across multiple sites and perhaps to highlight the nation in the map of world culture.Afourth variable speaks to festivals’orientation to audience, as in connoisseur or general public. In geographic terms, a festival can target foreigners, its own country, or its region (a taxonomy Al-Hamarneh and Steiner use to compare the effects of Arab tourism after September 11).7 Jerash Festival targeted a mixture of Jordanians,Arabs across the region, and also cultural tourists...

Improvisation and Variation: Post-Communist Bulgaria Challenges National Folklore Tradition

The paper discusses the tension in post-totalitarian Bulgaria be- tween the national folklore tradition of Communist times with government- sanctioned state ensembles and festivals and age-old Balkan multiculturalism now represented in a westernized free-market consumer society, where sponta- neity and improvisation bridge the urban and the rural, the local and the global. Folk pop, folk jazz or other mixed genres reverberate with humor, parody and, above all, freedom and love of improvisation.

On Divided Lines: Instrumentation for Bass Parts in Corelli-era Sonatas

There has been considerable debate in recent years about the appropriate treatment of bass lines in Corelli Op. 5 and other duo and ensemble sonatas of the era. This article examines the relationship between continuo parts and separate bass parts in publications that include both. It argues that the case for accepting publication formats as a guide to performance practice is weaker than has often been claimed. The inadequacy of the standard terminology (particularly ‘trio sonata’) for Italian chamber-music ensembles in this period has been much commented on. Italian practice in the 17th century was to designate pieces a 2, a 3 etc. by the number of melodic lines disregarding any basso continuo part. Recent thinking about the implications of this for bass lines tends towards the general rule that if the description (a 2 etc.) does not specify a bass-register part then there is no call for more than one instrument to supply the continuo line. But this descriptive system does not work consistently. This article concentrates on sonata collections that include separate basso and basso continuo partbooks demonstrating that alongside sonatas that belong to clearly differentiated genres, we find examples of mixed genre. Even within individual sonatas the essential musical character may change from voce sola to a 2, or from a 2 to a 3.As the 17th century progressed such changes were less likely to be reflected in the provision made for instrumentalists in the part books. In other words, part books tended to reflect the maximum instrumentation required but would continue to supply what are essentially redundant melodic bass parts for sonatas that reduce to basso continuo. Such a situation argues against applying too rigidly a rule about banning a second bass line instrument from sonatas where the bass clearly has a (limited) continuo function.

Exchange Theories in Disco, New Wave, and Album-Oriented Rock

Exchange Theories in Disco, New Wave, and Album-Oriented Rock Charles Kronengold Disco had a purpose: making you move on the dance floor. But it also sold millions of records, revived careers, provoked debates about the effects of music, got cross-marketed with congas, made songs go through people’s heads, pushed the record industry to introduce the twelve-inch single, gave rock artists the chance to write pop songs, threatened friendships, turned session musicians into auteurs, served as a platform for foreign singers trying to enter the North American market, and changed the way songs were constructed. So beyond fulfilling its primary function as dance music, what else did disco have to give? The answer lies partly in its multiple modes of address—its commitment to the dance floor, participation in the soul tradition, and success on the pop charts. Pursuit of these distinct ambitions meant that disco’s materials and conventions circulated widely, making them available to other genres. Indeed its conventions appeared in many contemporary genres that didn’t have dancing on the agenda. But, I’ll argue, disco’s legacy has also to do with the way it made its materials available, allowed them to circulate, and put them into a system of exchange. The exchanges I’m discussing happened around the time of the record industry’s commercial peak, and sudden crash, at the end of 1979. The musical-historical context is important as well: talking about disco demands an acknowledgment of its precursors in African American music of the seventies, like funk, soul, Philadelphia soul, and the black-action-film soundtrack. When you study these genres you can’t entirely abandon the notion of a genre as a set of rules and constitutive features; but these and other genres of the seventies can often be better defined with reference to their internal variety and proliferation of subgenres, their modes of revision and transformation, and their movement toward other genres. They constantly remind us that genres are in works as much as works are in genres. This essay considers three late-seventies genres—disco, new wave, and album-oriented rock—that overlap in varying degrees with [End Page 43] respect to their historical moment, modes of dissemination, institutional frames (like record labels), musical materials, personnel, and audiences. Songs in each of these genres contain musical hooks and sometimes succeed on the pop charts. They also borrow from the same genres and from one another. I will be particularly concerned with this kind of cross-borrowing in what follows. Marcel Mauss makes the crucial point that when different cultures engage in trade, they trade not only goods, but methods and concepts of exchange.1 To give a quick example of the sort I’ll discuss further: when a new-wave song borrows disco’s conventions like four-on-the-floor and processed percussion sounds, it often acquires at the same time disco’s tendency toward stratified textures that allow other types of material to ease into the mix. A new-wave song may thus incorporate material from some third genre—material, that is, that derives neither from disco nor new wave. Every party to an exchange operates within a set of understandings about what can and can’t, will or won’t be traded, and why. This greatly interested Mauss. Thinking about exchange as a metaphor for genre mixing, however, I’ll want to emphasize that each such exchange shows something about these concepts of exchange; I’m seeking to bring out the latent theory revealed in acts and channels of exchange. My analysis will pay close attention to specific musical conventions, so let me quickly say why: (1) Conventions are sedimented with history. (2) They also possess a materiality on records that can’t be written off: four-on-the-floor is simply there regardless of authorial intent or audience response. (3) Expressive conventions remind us that when a musician communicates something, she does so in a language only partly her own. (4) I want to make a space for talking about metaconventions—conventions governing the use of other conventions—like irony in new wave, and the idea of rock as an art form...

Locating and Constructing the Self in Han Suyin’s The Crippled Tree

While much critical attention has been devoted to Han Suyin’s novels and historical writings, her autobiographical writings have received relatively less critical examination. This article explores Han Suyin’s transgressions of autobiographical conventions in her construction of the autobiographical subject in the first volume of her five-volume autobiographical series, namely The Crippled Tree (1965). Writing in the 1960s, Han has weaved together the very different and at times incompatible disciplines of fictions, histories, and ethnographies. The Crippled Tree also deviates from autobiographical traditions by an eclectic mix of literary genres and by a blend of narrative voices as the text constructs the national, racial and ethnic identity(ies) of the autobiographer and the autobiographical subject.

Cinema and the edgy city: Johannesburg, carjacking, and the postmetropolis

Oliver Schmitz's Hijack Stories (2000) is a story of cross‐over cultures and mixed genres set in Johannesburg. In this blurring of boundaries, he presents us an interplay between the dangerous city of both fact and fiction. Schmitz's cinematic depiction of the city, weaves in and out, as well as to and from yuppie neighbourhoods and Soweto. Thus, we see how post‐apartheid Johannesburg is a place of hybrid identities not only in the different spaces of the city, but through the influence of global hip‐hop cultures, as well as the real and imagined perceptions of the city's ‘citizens’. This paper examines the way in which Schmitz's film intersects these relationships in this edgy city.

Why Poetry?

Why Poetry? Jennifer Keith (bio) In a cultural climate and scholarly marketplace that increasingly marginalize poetry, especially eighteenth-century poetry, relatively few critics are willing to assert its value. Among the few are Suvir Kaul and Linda Zionkowski who, in Poems of Nation, Anthems of Empire: English Verse in the Long Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville, 2000) and Men's Work: Gender, Class, and the Professionalization of Poetry, 1660-1784 (Houndsmill, 2001), describe new agendas for the poetry of the Restoration and eighteenth century arising precisely from poets' sense that their work was in danger of being marginalized. Kaul's attention to the specificity of poetry vis-à-vis nation and empire fills a long-standing omission in studies of imperialism in eighteenth-century literature that have largely ignored poetry in favor of prose narratives and drama. For Kaul, writers such as Dyer, Thomson, and Young use verse in particular to promote or critique nationalism and imperialism because on the one hand they "imagined poetry to be a unique and privileged literary form for the enunciation of a puissant (and plastic) vocabulary of nation" (5), and on the other they "wrote more defensively, with a sense of the diminishing prestige of the form" in the second half of the eighteenth century (42). For Zionkowski, writers such as Pope and Johnson participate in the eighteenth-century professionalization of poetry to establish authority and assert their value in the emerging bourgeois culture, especially its tendency to condemn them as frivolous and effeminate. Despite their different foci, both critics invite us to consider not only how eighteenth-century poets tried to make poetry matter but also to question how we as critics may expand our questions about the ways poetry matters. Both critics assert the importance of poetry by linking it to public and commercial themes as they emphasize poets' participation in the market, whether global or domestic. In his nuanced study of nationalism and empire in poetry of the long eighteenth century, Kaul questions why poetry, especially long poems of mixed genre, mattered so much to writers dealing with themes of [End Page 87] nation and empire. "Why should poetry," he asks, "become so manifestly the literary and imaginative space for such cultural and ideological work?" (10). In Kaul's account, James Thomson's "Rule Britannia" figures prominently, as do poems of mercantilism (e.g., Edward Young's Imperium Pelagi and Henry Needler's "A Sea-Piece") and those critiquing the market in slaves (e.g., Cowper's antislavery poems and More's "The Slave-Trade"). Kaul raises the question—Why poetry?—to make an irrefutable case for the significance of poetic form to literary study. Poetic form helps promote or critique nationalist and imperialist projects, "the plastic, expansive dynamic of each poem providing a formal structure for the expression of, and the reconciliation or sublimation" of the ideological contradictions of nationalism and imperialism (10). The "internal movement, particularly the dynamic of the long (or even ambitious) poem in this period . . . reminds us about the halting, uncertain, but always willful and aggressive craft of those who imagined Britain as a power dominant in the world" (34). Zionkowski's focus on the professionalization of poetry from 1660 to 1784 traces the role of shifting masculine ideals in making poetry "men's" as opposed to "women's" work. Analyzing the work of Rochester, Oldham, Dryden, Pope, Gray, and Johnson, she provides a compelling account of the function of class and gender in the changing valuations of the poet's role. Replacing the ideal of poet as aristocrat with poet as professional laborer, "male poets of the Restoration and the eighteenth century employed the discourses of class and gender to determine a stable character for themselves in the culture of commercial print" (20). Zionkowski effectively distinguishes the major shift in masculine cultural authority from the class-based to the occupation-based. Her analysis of Oldham in relation to Rochester establishes this metamorphosis: Oldham's "experimentation with libertine personae, his ambivalence toward publication, his equation of the pen with the sword—are a testament to the social influence of aristocratic writers," but "his repeated criticism of coterie practices reveal an expanding confidence on the part of writers like himself...