Style Of Realism Research Articles

Labyrinth of Hybridities: Avatars of O'neillian Realism in Multi-ethnic American Drama (1972–2003)

Labyrinth of Hybridities: Avatars of O'neillian Realism in Multi-ethnic American Drama (1972–2003)

Clones for a Queer Nation: George Segal's Gay Liberation and Temporality

This essay accounts for the shifting historical frames that infl ect the meaning of George Segal’s Gay Liberation (1980–92) over time. Public art is suited for temporal exegesis to the extent that it is made to endure even as the population that encounters it changes, and it demonstrates the inability of the artist or commissioning body to control art’s reception. Read temporally, Gay Liberation marks three defi ning moments in the complex, dynamic articulation of gay and lesbian, and later queer, politics: the Stonewall riots and the political organizations that mobilized immediately afterwards; the claiming of public gay and lesbian identities and the active articulation of gay and lesbian cultures in the decade post-Stonewall; and the AIDS epidemic and the related emergence of queer politics. Despite its restrained realist style, Gay Liberation, with its sedimented meanings, is a reminder that a radical rethinking of gender and sexuality has been and can be imagined.

Introduction: Contesting China’s New “National” Music

Introduction: Contesting China’s New “National” Music Joshua H. Howard Despite widespread recognition that music both constitutes and reflects culture, the study of Chinese music and its development has been marginalized from mainstream topics of historical inquiry. In most English-language Chinese history textbooks, for instance, the subject of music in twentieth-century China is conspicuous only by its absence. Twentieth-Century China seeks to redress this historiographical lacuna by devoting a special issue to music, especially the development of “New Music,” defined by one of its leading scholars as, “music composed by Chinese using European compositional techniques and musical idioms.”1 Given that the new music was largely a product of semi-colonial, cosmopolitan Shanghai, it is appropriate that all four articles consider musicians and musical developments in Shanghai, where Chinese-foreign interaction and experimentation in modern art forms were most visible and audible. Each author examines how members of China’s music community struggled for national transformation in a highly contested process of defining the new “national” music, whether that meant defending elements of pre-existing Chinese music, adopting European stylistic elements, composing Chinese-Western fusion works, or creating a socialist realist style directed towards a new mass audience. In “The Shanghai Conservatory, Chinese Musical Life, and the Russian Diaspora, 1927–1949,” Hon-Lun Yang brings to life a forgotten chapter in the development of China’s “new music.” Although Russian pedagogues constituted almost half of all full-time faculty at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music and influenced an entire generation of Chinese musicians that came to the fore during the Maoist era, such as composer He Luting, pianist Ding Shande, and conductor Li Delun, the question of how Western musicians, and Russian musicians in particular, contributed to the development of Chinese music was largely avoided during the Maoist era for its sensitive political implications. Yang suggests that Russian musicians, because of their own marginalized status in Shanghai’s expatriate community, may have been uniquely positioned to influence their Chinese counterparts. Yang’s use of memoirs reveals that Chinese graduates from the Shanghai Conservatory remember a time of intense musical exchange with their Russian teachers, during which a transculturation of the nation’s musical practices occurred that facilitated China’s musical modernity. John Winzenburg’s “Aaron Avshalomov and New Chinese Music in Shanghai, 1931–1947” reveals how this Russian-Jewish immigrant’s hybrid identity as a [End Page 2] Chinese acculturated foreigner facilitated his experimental work as conductor, composer, and pedagogue that defied rigid traditional-modern, Chinese-Western dichotomies and contributed to the development of a new “national” Chinese music. Analyzing Avshalomov’s compositional style and influence on musicians, the author demonstrates how Avshalomov inspired burgeoning composers to experiment with Chinese stylistic elements while using Western musical techniques. Moreover, Avshalomov’s compositions have contemporary relevance as they have foreshadowed an important genre of Chinese-Western fusion compositions during the ongoing reform era. Contestation over participation in China’s musical modernity is the subject of Joys Cheung’s article, “Divide and Connections in Chinese Musical Modernity: Cases of Musical Networks Emerging in Colonial Shanghai, 1919–1937.” Cheung argues that previous interpretations of Chinese musical modernity have privileged the reform-oriented Shanghai Conservatory over the nativist Great Unity Music Society. Whereas the former advocated Western classical music as the foundation for a new Chinese music, the latter sought to defend preexisting Chinese music practices while incorporating them into modern developments. By the early 1930s these two organizations had developed an antagonistic relationship with each other. Prominent reformers, for instance, criticized Chinese musical instruments for being technologically obsolete and lacking expressive power. Perhaps as a consequence of accepting these criticisms at face value, musicologists have often treated the Great Unity Music Society as peripheral to China’s musical modernity, or, at best, an organization “on the verge” of musical modernity. By contrast, Cheung reveals that musicians from the two organizations overlapped in significant ways. Employing the concept of “weak ties,” derived from social network theory, Cheung argues that the two organizations shared a commitment to the nation-building project and that both “reformers” and “defenders” “embraced a greater openness to a bi-musical—albeit loosely defined—approach in pursuing Chinese modernity...

"Our Ancestors that We Carry on Our Backs": Restaging Hawaii's History in the Plays of Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl

During the past twenty years, Hawaiian dramatist and museum educator Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl has become established as one of the foremost playwrights working in the contemporary Pacific. Since the mid-1980s, a dominant strand of Kneubuhl's oeuvre has involved a critical examination of Hawai'i's colonial history, using various forms of theatrical performance to interrogate historical injustices and characterizations of Hawaiian culture that erase or overwrite indigenous epistemologies, offering restorative models and, in some instances, stimulating efforts that bring about material social change. This paper surveys six of Kneubuhl's historiographic works produced during the 1980s and 1990s, highlighting varied dramaturgical strategies employed to engage the cultural past in order to address contemporary concerns. The discussion distinguishes two broad theatrical genres arising from Kneubuhl's training and work experience: historical "plays for the theatre," which incorporate fictional or fantastic elements and are designed for repeated performance within the aesthetic and commercial frame of amateur or professional theatre production; and her "living history programs," site- and occasion-specific performances based more directly on documentary sources and developed in consultation with historians, with a stricter pedagogical purview and a tendency toward a more realist style of presentation. This overview of Kneubuhl's plays and programs foregrounds the important cultural interventions effected by her work during the last two decades, and contributes to an investigation of the various uses of performance in helping to construct indigenous histories in Oceania, while engaging in a broader dialogue about the ways in which theatre functions actively within the postcolonial Pacific.

Character-driven Theme Analysis in Pride and Prejudice

This paper aims to reveal Jane Austen’s creative style of realism through an analysis of the major characters in Pride and Prejudice, which develops as the clue to the theme of a love story. Its essence as an entanglement of rationality and emotionality embodies the author’s view of love and the voice of women’s liberation.

BLURRING THE LINES: THE INTERPRETATION, DISCOURSE AND APPLICATION OF THE LAW OF ARMED CONFLICT

AbstractDespite the high density and sheer volume of the Law of Armed Conflict (LOAC), there is considerable indeterminacy within its structure. Understanding the interpretive space generated through the rules/standards dichotomy as well as through the policy/law interface resident within this indeterminacy permits greater appreciation of how LOAC is used to advance strategic goals. The purpose of this article is to examine various interpretive approaches to LOAC and to reveal the significance of such approaches to questions of both legal validity and broader considerations of legitimacy. Positivism remains the dominant interpretive idiom, but it contains vulnerabilities in its assumptions, not least is the wide malleability of language. In the current operating environment, within the counter-insurgency (COIN) context in particular, it is becoming evident that standard canons of LOAC interpretation may not be sufficient to achieve the desired military and political goals sought. Indeed recent COIN guidance concerning interpretation of LOAC reflects an approach reminiscent of the US legal realist style of the early to mid 20th century. This results in a more overt demand for greater social and political appreciation of the use of law to modulate violence.

New era writers: aesthetic choices and the generation gap

从20世纪90年代开始，“代际差别”越来越突出地体现在新时期50、60和70年代 出生的三个重要作家群中。他们不仅在叙事内容上表现为宏大叙事和使命意识的不断 弱化、个人化意愿的不断增强；还在叙事形式上体现为或崇尚写实风格，或追求现代 手法，或迷恋于碎片化细节等不同的审美特质，同时也折射了各自不同的审美观念。 从文化人类学的角度看，这种代际差别实际隐含了不同历史文化语境和成长记忆对人 类精神的潜在规约。代际差别虽然是多元文学格局的一种表现，但是，如何加强代际 间的精神交流，有效克服代际内部各自的局限性，同样是促进中国当代文学健康发展 的一个不可忽略的重要方面。 关键词: 代际差别 宏大叙事 个人化 文化记忆 代际交流 Since the 1990s, the generation gap among three important groups of writers born in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s has become ever more evident. Not only do they show a tendency toward the weakening of grand narrative and sense of responsibility and the strengthening of individual aspirations, they also show different aesthetic traits in terms of narrative form. Some advocate a realist style, while others pursue modernist techniques or are enamored of fragmentary details. At the same time, each generation projects its own aesthetic ideas. From the viewpoint of cultural anthropology, this kind of generation gap essentially implies the effect of the latent protocols of different historical‐cultural contexts and memories of growing up on the human spirit. Although the generation gap is an expression of a plural cultural scene, the question of how to strengthen intellectual interaction between different generations of writers and effectively overcome the limitations of each generation remains an important aspect of the promotion of the healthy development of modern Chinese literature.

Cinema of Disillusionment: Chen Guofu, Cai Mingliang, and Taiwan's Second New Wave

This essay is a study of Chen Guofu and Cai Mingliang, two prominent Taiwan directors whose work in the 1980s helped shape the Second New Wave movement. More recently, Chen's 1998 The Personals and Cai's 2002 What Time Is It There? broke new ground by developing controlled realist styles into an aesthetics of “disillusioned cinema”: a postmodern urban genre that simultaneously derides personal fantasies of sexual love and political fantasies of nation building. Both films use the formulas of romance to highlight the illusions and alienations of contemporary love, of individual pleasures disintegrating communal bonds. On a more symbolic level, they banish male authority into the netherworld and deconstruct patriarchal structures, some of which can be associated with the oppression of “first-world” cultural imperialism. Such thematic and allegorical topics are presented through a variety of styles—including play-within-the-play, repetitions of plot and motif, and symbolic mise-en-scène—with Cai, in particular, testing the possibilities of antinarrative. Both directors also use a gendered filmic language to illustrate Taiwan's “third-world” deconstruction of the classical Hollywood narrative and to echo the crises of a new democracy.

People Portraits and Cartoon Algorithm Study

This paper is to use the positive face to automatically generate a photo realist style, or has the effect of exaggerated cartoons. It includes two aspects: First, face the portrait photos automatically into production; Second, face deformed to generate cartoon effect. AAM model is a statistical model, can be well applied to the facial characteristics of location. In this paper, by improving the traditional AAM ways to overcome its lack of color information processing, design a more effective figure portraits Generation System. Then, take the initiative to shape a model feature extraction and characteristics of the method of combining the human face of the main features of automatic deformation, the cartoon characters generated portrait.

Dailė kaip propaganda 1939-1941 metais

This article analyzes various aspects of the Sovietization of Lithuanian art in 1940 and 1941. The author poses three principal questions: (1) How broadly and deeply were Lithuanian creators of fine art involved in the creation of Soviet art?; (2) How successful were they in adopting the iconography and expressive means of socialist realism?; and (3) For what reasons did they collaborate with the occupation regime? The first part of the article deals with the activities of those artists who were favorably disposed to the Soviet regime. It reviews organizational changes in the artists‘ activities and art commissions that encouraged Lithuanian visual artists to absorb principles of socialist realist style and to learn that style‘s iconographic language. Separate attention is paid to the activities of Agitprop and preparations for the representation of Lithuanian art (the so-called Art Decade) in Moscow. It is shown that there was no shortage of people wishing to serve the new master, the Soviet state, which skillfully exploited the artists‘ human weakness: their ever-present need to compete with each other, to stand out, and to be noticed and admired. An analysis of instances of art criticism shows how gradually the question of artistic merit was devalued and instead emphasis was increasingly placed on the significance and value of a creative work‘s content, its ideological effectiveness. The publication in the Lithuanian press of descriptions of the work of recognized Soviet artists, masters of socialist realism, also promoted new criteria in evaluating visual art. The presentation of socialist realism‘s highest achievements helped Lithuanian readers to understand what the Soviet system deemed to be a persuasive art work and how much its creator was valued. In this way Lithuania‘s artists were allowed to see what prospects opened up to them and what eternal glory they could earn. The second part of the article is devoted to the difficulties artists encountered in trying to learn the new language of art. With the help of specific examples it is shown how attempts to adjust one‘s individual style to socialist realism most often ended in too primitive a picture: distorted body proportions, unnatural facial expressions, a pallid and inexpressive coloration, and so on. Lithuania‘s visual artists were prevented from achieving artistic forcefulness not only by an alien or incomprehensible social realist style but also by inadequate acquaintance with socialist reality and an inability to get used to Soviet propaganda clichés. In the third part the article discusses the reasons why Lithuanian artists rather actively participated in creating socialist realist art for the purpose of propagating Soviet ideology. An attempt is made to answer the question of how much their collaboration with the Soviet government was influenced by their political naiveté, or by an artist‘s psychology (his or her efforts to please the client on whom the artist depends for the satisfaction of his wish to become rich or famous), or by opposition to the cultural policy pursued by the government of the formerly independent Republic of Lithuania.

Vorlesungen über Enzyklopädie (1803). (Kritische Ausgabe der Vorlesungen, 3) by August Wilhelm Schlegel, Frank Jolles, Edith Höltenschmidt

MLR, 104.3, 2009 905 rather than using ittopreach amoral (contrary to themisleading expectation some times aroused by hisMannheim essay, best known under the title 'Die Schaub?hne als einemoralische Anstalt betrachtet'). Under theheadings 'Zuschauer, 'Schauspie ler', and 'Inszenierung' the study surveys changing theatrical tastes and conditions: the creation of court and 'national' theatres, the process of Literarisierung, the turn away from theHaupt- und Staatsaktion to sentimental drama of the private sphere, the consequent cultivation of a realistic style of acting reflective of psychological states, the rise in status and professionalization of the actor.Against thebackground of these changes Pikulik positions Schiller's distinctive combination of heroic tra gedy and private emotion. He expounds the playwright's views on the stage, from the early Stuttgart and Mannheim essays to his aesthetic writings of the 1790s, and sketches his involvement with theWeimar Court Theatre from 1799 up to his death.While acknowledging how far the eighteenth-century theatre was from modern Regiekunst, Pikulik examines the Weimar theatre experiment as an attempt to realize a vision of theatre as an ?sthetische Anstalt' that rejected the dominant realist style. This account of Schiller's ideas on theatre and of their place within his aesthetic theory is clear and fluent. If,however, the title raises expectations of learning how Schiller related to the actual theatreworld of his day, rather than to the stage as a concept, then the reader will be disappointed. Pikulik acknowledges the gulf be tween literaryand theatre history, but his own narrative is still strongly literary. In fact there ismuch essential research thatwould have given Pikulik's account greater theatrical context and conveyed to the reader something of the specific dynamics of the theatreworld in the later eighteenth century. Examples of sources published in the later nineteenth century would be the protocols of theMannheim theatre's Ausschuss, of which Schiller was for a year a member, and the repertoires of the Mannheim and Weimar theatres.More recently, J?rgKr?mers Deutschsprachiges Musiktheater im 18. Jahrhundert (T?bingen: Niemeyer, 1997) helps us understand how the rise of musical theatre affected the construction of repertoires and di minished the time available for serious drama, even at the Weimar Court Theatre. Pikulik does not, admittedly, claim that this is a research book, but his readers might have benefited from an appraisal that took greater account of the breadth of available published sources. University of Exeter Lesley Sharpe Vorlesungen ?ber Enzyklop?die (1803). By August Wilhelm Schlegel. Ed. by Frank Jolles and Edith H?ltenschmidt. (Kritische Ausgabe der Vorlesun gen, 3) Paderborn: Sch?ningh. 2006. xliii+58opp. ISBN 978-3-506-77853 6. This third volume of the critical edition of A. W. Schlegel's lectures is especially to be welcomed. For it has succeeded in encapsulating within its covers a sig nificant and hitherto unpublished text, plus an introduction and over 150 pages 9 6 Reviews of commentary. By contrast, the first volume in the series (1989) contains only text,while the second, planned in two parts (first 2007), has not yet delivered the critical apparatus. One cannot therefore stress too much the usefulness and general excellence of Frank Jolles's and especially Edith Holtenschmidt's editorial work. Both Schlegel brothers operated with thephilosophical notions of 'Ganzheit' and 'Vielfalt' and both wished to give these a practical, demonstrable form.Only August Wilhelm succeeded in doing this, first in Berlin in 1803 (this edition) and later in Bonn (Vorlesungen ?ber das akademische Studium, 1818). Schlegel's various lectures on literature and art,whether given in Jena,Berlin, Vienna, or Bonn, all however relate in some degree to the 'Enzyklop?die' project. Now we have the 'Urtext' itself. Schlegel delivered the lectures inMay 1803, conceiving them as an integral part of his wider Berlin cycle that encompassed classical and modern (Roman tic) literature, and aesthetics. Earlier lectures given in Jena and major articles in Athenaeum (1798-1800) and Europa (1803) also relate essentially to this corpus. The 'Enzyclop?die' lectures have as their first and primary function a systematic account of themain areas of human intellectual endeavour. They are marshalled and interconnected so as toproduce both the sum ofknowledge and theprogressive forces that lead to its...

Schiller und das Theater: Über die Entwicklung der Schaubühne zur theatralen Kunstform. (Medien und Theater, Neue Folge, 9) by Lothar Pikulik

904 Reviews thatoffering, surely accounts inpart for the theological preoccupations of Lessing's last years and for their highly ambivalent stance in relation to Lutheran ortho doxy. (It seems to be generally agreed that in publishing the Reimarus fragments, Lessing was trying to pick one quarrel?with the neologians?but got another? with the orthodox; but could or should he not have foreseen this?And had the man who had written to his father in 1749 that 'Die Xstliche Religion ist kein Werk, das man von seinen Eltern auf Treue und Glaube annehmen soll' really reverted to that very position, as in Nathan's defence of his Judaic loyalties to Saladin?) The?forgiving or unforgiving??father also plays a significant part in Lessing's plays, even inMi? Sara Sampson, the 'least autobiographical' of them (p. 275). Indeed, as Nisbet points out, though Lessing s plays can be seen to some extent as experiments in dramatic forms and techniques, they are never totally removed from real lifeand itsproblems?paternal authority,war and peace, patriotism and politics, and of course ultimately religious truth and toleration. Nisbet argues?on this theremay be furtherdissension?that philosophically Lessing remained funda mentally a Leibnizian, and that in the famous 'Spinoza' conversations Jacobi quite failed to appreciate Lessing's irony and Lessing, quickly perceiving this, promptly took his usual pleasure inplaying Devil's (or in this case Spinoza's) advocate. (A pity that on page 391?one of a very few slips?the essay Durch Spinoza istLeibniz nur auf die Spur der vorherbestimmtenHarmonie gekommen has lost its all-important nur.) Lessing's faith in Providence was sorely tested by the loss of Eva and their son, but he clung to it to the end, even if in the last greatworks, Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts, Ernst und Falk, and Nathan derWeise, the best of all possible worlds seems a vision foran increasingly remote, perhaps in real termsunattainable, future. After a brief but welcome tribute toKarl Lessing forhis irreplaceable services to his brother's memory, Nisbet concludes with a concise survey of the reception of Lessing's work down to the present, and a substantial bibliography. Drawing on an encyclopedic knowledge of both primary and secondary literature, of the circum stances of Lessing's life,and of all those who played significant parts in it, this is a trulyremarkable work of scholarship. Worcester College, Oxford F. J. Lamport Schiller und das Theater: ?ber die Entwicklung der Schaub?hne zur theatralen Kunstform. By Lothar Pikulik. (Medien und Theater, Neue Folge, 9) Hildesheim and Zurich: Olms. 2007. 160 pp. 22. ISBN 978-3-487-13502 1. This compact study, aimed primarily at undergraduates, positions Schiller within some of themajor theatrical developments of the eighteenth century. Lothar Pikulik stresses Schillers concern with transforming the stage into an aesthetic institution MLR, 104.3, 2009 905 rather than using ittopreach amoral (contrary to themisleading expectation some times aroused by hisMannheim essay, best known under the title 'Die Schaub?hne als einemoralische Anstalt betrachtet'). Under theheadings 'Zuschauer, 'Schauspie ler', and 'Inszenierung' the study surveys changing theatrical tastes and conditions: the creation of court and 'national' theatres, the process of Literarisierung, the turn away from theHaupt- und Staatsaktion to sentimental drama of the private sphere, the consequent cultivation of a realistic style of acting reflective of psychological states, the rise in status and professionalization of the actor.Against thebackground of these changes Pikulik positions Schiller's distinctive combination of heroic tra gedy and private emotion. He expounds the playwright's views on the stage, from the early Stuttgart and Mannheim essays to his aesthetic writings of the 1790s, and sketches his involvement with theWeimar Court Theatre from 1799 up to his death.While acknowledging how far the eighteenth-century theatre was from modern Regiekunst, Pikulik examines the Weimar theatre experiment as an attempt to realize a vision of theatre as an ?sthetische Anstalt' that rejected the dominant realist style. This account of Schiller's ideas on theatre and of their place within his aesthetic theory is clear and fluent. If,however, the title raises expectations of learning how Schiller related to the actual theatreworld of his day, rather than to the stage as a concept, then...

Baseball, Apple Pie, and Burlesque Queens: Nationalism in Walt Kuhn's Portraits of Showgirls

During the nationalistic decades of the 1930s and 1940s, there was much concern over what constituted an art. Artists, historians, and critics wrote paragraphs, pages, even entire articles and books calling for a true national art and trying to define a national artistic character. One 1930 New York Times book review entitled Riddle of What is American Art set this out to be a troublesome task: question of nationalism in art is much more difficult in a young country of diverse racial origins like ours ... The result is necessarily an art that is hybrid when it is not chaotic. Still, many critics and artists felt it was necessary to mark a definitive set of traits that characterized Americanness in art, and frequently created lists that paralleled the country's long-held conception of itself as authentic, masculine, democratic, practical, and direct. In contrast to this concept of an authentic and masculine American art self, modern abstraction, with its European origins, stood as the other, an infiltrator of native culture. Abstraction was seen as something against which artists painting in a realist style had to be wary, and was demonized as decorative, artificial, foreign, intellectual, elitist, and effeminate. These associations became so pervasive during the period that voicing anti-modernism alone often was sufficient to mark an artist, artwork or movement American. Walt Kuhn (1877-1949) was one artist lauded by interwar critics for successfully producing an art. Best known for his portraits of circus and burlesque performers and his role as secretary of the 1913 Armory Show, Kuhn was not part of a specific artistic circle, though he was active in the New York artworld, exhibited at major museums and galleries, and fetched high sums for his artwork.1 Painting in a realist style for much of his career, he was very deliberate in his attempt to designate himself and his art American, and chose the intentionally buckeye* or vulgar subject of showgirls as part of this aim. Though he employed modernist elements in his own art, Kuhn tied this nationalism to a outspoken stance against modern abstract art, and used his subject matter and figurative style as a means of voicing an antiEuropean, anti-modernist sentiment. In essence, Kuhn's down-to-earth, lowbrow showgirls were much like that of Regionalist Grant Wood's Midwestern farmers or Thomas Hart Benton's Southern rural blacks; in an era preoccupied with Americana and national character in art, they appealed to artists because they were a ready, recognizable stock of subject matter that automatically carried a ring of authenticity and national identity. This article explores the interwar debate over nationality and modernism via the writing and art of Kuhn. Recently, scholars of American art have aimed to dismantle this time-worn divide of interwar modernists and realists, seeing it as a binary hangover from modern historians, and are more concerned with pointing to the many similarities between the two camps rather than their differences. Citing such commonalities as a fascination with folk culture and a quest for authenticity, scholars now acknowledge that most artists working in the United States between the wars, regardless of painting style, vied for the label. By introducing the art of Walt Kuhn to this discussion, I hope to expand our focus beyond the few canonical artists such as Thomas Hart Benton and Alfred Stieglitz who have been the center of this conversation, and to show that this divide was primarily a result of artists' selfpromotion. Because meant good in the public and critical eye during these years, to promote oneself and one's work as was to campaign for critics' favor. Especially in the 1940s, with the looming presence of Abstract Expressionism and the widening public and institutional acceptance of a European-inspired abstraction, Kuhn would have had additional motivation to mark himself and his figurative art via an anti-modernist stance. …

Opening the Windshield: Death of a Salesman and Theatrical Liberalism

“Opening the Windshield” argues that Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman is best understood as a work of American popular culture, with a close relationship not only to realism but also to vaudeville and musical theatre. The essay identifies a core tension between the character of Willy Loman and the psychological realist style for which the play is famous. Through his indomitable theatricality, Willy resists the pressure to conform to a realist model and ends up winning the audience even as he loses his life. Reading the play in this way sheds light on the long-standing popularity of the play, its avowed Jewishness, and its place in the American literary canon.

Poetic Jansenism: Religious and Political Representation in Denis Devlin's Poetry

Poetic Jansensim:Religious and Political Representation in Denis Devlin's Poetry James Matthew Wilson (bio) Although the epithet "Jansenist" once served as a fashionable means of condemning Ireland's struggle between Catholic and national consciousness, no contemporary historian would—in the interest of describing Irish culture after the famine or in the years following the Civil War—fasten on the term. In his cultural history of Ireland, Terence Brown felt obliged to explain away its use as misapplied to the "strange marital abstemiousness" of Irish society in the half-century and more after the famine.1 One could martial forth many reasons for these and other strict moral, marital, and religious practices, Brown admits, but the theology of Cornelius Jansen (1585–1638) or his great disciple, Saint Cyran (1581–1643) is not among them. What might be set aside as a curious historical misapprehension of Irish cultural historians actually provides a lexical entryway by which to explore the struggle of Irish intellectuals with the problems of early twentieth-century modernity. For Irish realist writers in the 1940s, "Jansenism" denoted a sense of Irish inferiority in the face of other European cultures that had entered with far less trauma onto the cosmopolitan riches of modernity. Ireland was the provincial, backward, and wounded state that refused to recover from its sutured legacy of military defeat and Catholic piety. Within this framework of a politically quietist [End Page 35] "Jansenism," the term also indicated shame at a supposedly rigorous private morality. Political energies were suppressed in the interest of a tightly orchestrated moral code imposed upon an obedient and voiceless laity. Because those voicing this word were writers, such political and moral dissatisfactions were linked with an embarrassment that art in Ireland had not attained the institutional autonomy it had through the rest of Europe. Jansenism signified Irish cultural as well as political failure. During the period of these shots in a cultural civil war, however, Denis Devlin deployed the word "Jansenism" in the same Irish context but for properly theological ends. A poet resistant to what he saw as antiquated realist styles, Devlin embraced Jansenism as a rubric under which to practice an autonomous art that delivered on the frequent modernist promises to merge the aesthetic with the sacred. His Jansenism recognized the solitude of art in modernity as derived from widespread political injustice, but of singular and generally overlooked importance, it also viewed art as an expression of prayer and contemplation. As such, modern art could serve as a recuperative form defying the fragmentation of modernity. Although art did not compensate for a modern loss of faith by substituting itself for God, in Devlin's poetic Jansenism, art becomes the vehicle for critique of a fragmented, half-secular modernity; it takes as its end a renewed experience of religious faith in defiance of the apparent disenchantment and rationalization of twentieth-century European society. Other scholars have elucidated the political implications of Devlin's Jansenism, but as Peggy O'Brien recently observed, Devlin's "goal" is not merely political or secular; it is also to release "a fountain of faith by means of a religious morphology."2 His "morphology," a repertoire of Roman Catholic tropes, therefore serves primarily a religious end. This essay seeks to restore the Catholic theological core of Devlin's poetic practice, but without merely shifting scholarly focus from the poet's politics to his religion. On the contrary, it argues that Devlin's Jansenism made explicit the theological dimension always present, but not always [End Page 36] recognized, in the common literary modernist complaints of historical rupture and modern chaos. Not incidentally, Devlin's theological vision serves as the condition of possibility for his compelling political critique of Ireland's failed sovereignty during the recession of British colonialism and rise of bureaucratic hegemony in the postwar international order. Scholars have already acknowledged the importance of Devlin's poetry for an understanding of Ireland's postcolonial plight in an era of world wars, Cold War, and partition, but they have failed to address the religious language and thematic that saturates his writing as more than a metaphor for that plight. In what follows, I reinstate some of the theological...

The Melodramatic Nation: Integration and Polarization in the Argentine Cinema of the 1930s

The Melodramatic Nation: Integration and Polarization in the Argentine Cinema of the 1930s

Frank Norris: A Life by Joseph R. McElrath Jr., Jesse S. Crisler

B o o k r e v ie w s 3 1 3 eloquence” critic William Bevis writes in Ten Tough Tips (1990) characterizes much Montana literature. The epilogue recapitulates, in reverse order, those two momentous trips on horseback from Rossie’s youth, and the novel ends back at the Neversweat. One-room schoolhouses still exist in the rural West, though they decline in number, and, for most, they connote the past rather than the present; epic horse drives belong to the past. Both writers fondly glance back to the recent (or not so recent) past, and depending upon one’s taste for such fond glances, one will variably savor these fictions. For the most part, I respect and enjoy these evocations of a mostly vanished Nevada and Montana. Fran k N orris: A Life. By Joseph R. McElrath Jr. and Jesse S. Crisler. C h icago : U n iversity o f Illin ois Press, 2006. 492 pages, $38.00. Reviewed by Harriet Rafter San Francisco State U niversity A new biography should draw fresh attention to its subject, and Frank Norris (1870-1902) certainly deserves to be better known. A t his death, this impor­ tant western American novelist left six novels, including the lurid McTeague: A Story of San Francisco (1899), which delights and absorbs even reluctant student readers. John Steinbeck adapted some of his best scenes—Jody’s antici­ pated mouse hunt in “The Leader of the People” and the tractor scene from The Grapes of Wrath (1939)— from Norris’s The Octopus: A Story of California (1901), arguably the great California novel. Norris was a journalist as well; he covered the Boer and Spanish-American wars and in many short essays consid­ ered the role of the writer, specifically the western American writer, in the age of Frederic Turner. The writer’s responsibilities are as central to Norris’s think­ ing as to that other philosopher of western writing, Wallace Stegner. Frank Norris: A Life, which took thirty years to write, surely will be the definitive biography for decades. Is it worth the writers’ and readers’ invest­ ment? As my favorite Norris character in The Octopus would say, “In some ways, it is, and then, again, in some ways, it isn’t.” It is aimed at the academic scholar, thus its flaws. McElrath and Crisler so constantly refer to Franklin Walker’s 1932 biography that Walker seems a third author of this one. Sometimes downright dreary is their pursuit of subjects of dubious importance, such as Norris’s distant antecedents or Norris senior’s attitude toward sex. While trying to date exactly when Norris first wrote the sketches that became McTeague and Vandover and the Brute (1914)— which the reader really might like to know— McElrath and Crisler apologize, “Not to try anyone’s patience here ...” In fact, anyone still reading by page 161 has long since surrendered in exchange for the genuinely welcome and reward­ ing explorations of intellectual history and Norris’s writing with which the biography opens and which constitute most of this story of a dedicated and interesting man. 3 1 4 W e s t e r n A m e r ic a n l it e r a t u r e F a l l 2 0 0 7 Frank Norris lived but thirty-two years and took some time finding himself. He studied painting in Paris and literature at the University of California at Berkeley and at Harvard, though, like later California writers John Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts, he took only those courses he felt necessary to become a writer and so graduated from neither university. He was influenced by some of the major forces of his era and their prominent exponents: he studied medievalism and painting in Paris with William Bouguereau, admired the realist style of his mentor, William Dean Howells, and was influenced by Joseph Le Conte’s Berkeley lectures reconciling evolution and religion. He followed the SpanishAmerican War from Key West with fellow reporters Stephen Crane, Richard Harding Davis, and Frederic Remington. He idolized and met Theodore Roosevelt and Cecil Rhodes and parodied but revered Rudyard Kipling. Norris was more at ease than his...

In search of common ground

The article explores conceptualizations of multicultural programming by commissioning editors and programme-makers working for public broadcasters in five west European countries. It discusses current ideas concerning multicultural programming as well as resulting programme formats. The article shows how makers of multicultural programmes have developed several strategies to address both minority and mainstream audiences. These vary from creating common points of reference and concentrating on so-called universal experiences such as death, birth, love and friendship to making use of lighthearted formulas. It also shows how, especially in the Netherlands and the UK, multicultural programming has developed into a broad range of formats, labelled ‘cross-cultural’. Factual entertainment or infotainment formats, addressing urban and young audiences, are favoured at the cost of social realist styles and programmes addressing older audiences or first-generation immigrants.

The Paradox of Structure and Freedom: An Experiment in Writing Poetry

I n discussing with an art teacher friend how gifted writers and artists are made, I explained to her my belief that, although students need freedom to develop their voices as writers, they also need structure, a foundation, even boundaries. My friend agreed. All the great painters, she said, began their careers as realists, even though the art for which they became famous was in most cases not in the realist style. School playgrounds provide another example. Several decades ago a belief became fashionable that school playgrounds should not have fences because they would inhibit children's creative play and sense of freedom. The opposite proved true: With no boundaries, no safe edges, the students felt insecure and huddled in the playground's center. When the fences were reinstalled, the students used every inch of the space; they were secure, knowing that they would not accidentally run into the street or be snatched by a stranger. In the teaching of writing, as in no other field, we are wary of providing too much structure and perhaps rightly so. Many of my colleagues in the Puget Sound Writing Project (PSWP) are choosing to resist the excesses of the five-paragraph-theme models in spite of the pressures of the current highstakes testing environment. We oppose the inflexibility of the do it this way and only this way every time no matter what approach. We know from experience that a rigidity of structure and formulas to approach writing tasks often results in wooden, predictable, dull student writing. So we try to remove the constraints for students, hoping they will find their voices.

A Voice Unknown: Undercurrents in Mussorgsky's Sunless

Mussorgsky's Sunless cycle is aesthetically and stylistically an anomalous member of his oeuvre. Its notably effaced, pared-down, and withdrawn qualities present challenges to critical interpretation. Its uniqueness, however, renders it a crucial work for furnishing the fullest possible picture of Mussorgsky as a creative artist. The author of its texts, Golenishchev-Kutuzov (whose relationship with Mussorgsky at the time of its writing possibly extended beyond the platonic) has been identified by recent scholarship as an essential "eye-witness" for those to whom Stasov's populist characterization of the composer does not ring entirely true. Golenishchev-Kutuzov believed that in Sunless Mussorgsky first revealed his authentic artistic self. According to Golenishchev-Kutuvoz, Mussorgsky regarded his signal achievement in Sunless to have been the eradication of all elements other than "feeling." In other words, he had thrown off the stylistic shackles imposed by the aesthetics of realism and relied entirely on intuitive harmonic invention as the sole conveyor of a purely subjective, "affective" meaning in the cycle. This hypothesis forms the point of departure for an investigation of select numbers of the cycle. Analysis reveals that the affective aspect is not the only significant element operative. Alongside remnants of the realist style, there is evidence, of varying degrees of subtlety, for a knowing use of symmetrical pitch organization. Mussorgsky not only adapted the usual referential attachments of symmetrically based chromaticism--typically found in Russian operas of the second half of the nineteenth century--he also, through extremely simple but effective means, synthesized the "intuitive" harmonic and "rational" symmetrical elements of the cycle's pitch organization so that the latter emerges seamlessly out of the former. This remarkable synthesis ensures the cycle's uniformity of tone while also allowing for a reading that extends beyond the generally affective to the symbolically more specific. This symbolic level of reading offers several interpretative possibilities, one of which may refer even to the relationship of the poet and the composer. Irrespective of such potentials for interpretation, the most significant achievement in the cycle remains the synthesis of the intuitive/affective and rational/symbolic elements of its organization. Songs 1, 2, 3, and 6 of the cycle are considered in detail.