Cultural Reception Research Articles

NAMING THE ROMAN STARS: CONSTELLATION ETYMOLOGIES IN CICERO'S ARATEA AND DE NATVRA DEORVM

Modern readings of Cicero's reception of Greek culture tend to reflect the way we frame the larger question of Roman reception of Greek culture. In the nineteenth century, and indeed well into the twentieth, when Hellenism was in the ascendant and Latin awarded a decidedly second place, Cicero was often read as a slavish copyist in thrall to the Greek classics. Recent work, however, has emphasized Cicero's sense of control over and entitlement to the cultural capital of this conquered province, and his manipulation of it in ways that position Rome (and himself) as a cultural and intellectual rival to Greece.

Orpheus in Black: Classicism and Cultural Ecology in Marcel Camus, Samuel R. Delany, and Reginald Shepherd

My essay brings cultural ecology together with classical reception studies – two paradigms of cultural theory that have rarely interacted so far, but, as I want to show, fit well together, because both deal with questions of cultural (self-)renewal and the mobility of symbolic forms of meaning making (between culture and nature and between different times and spaces respectively). As analytic examples, I choose three examples of the cultural reception of the myth of Orpheus, since it resonates strongly with cultural ecology and classical reception alike. In order to illustrate the cultural mobility of the myth in modern times, I want to look at African American and African Brazilian contexts in which it has figured prominently as a symbol for black artistic creation. This entails a discussion of the term ‘black classicism’ that has gained prominence in recent times as post-colonial and poststructuralist approaches have re-negotiated the cultural presumptions upon which the classical tradition rests. As the examples show, the myth is both used as a counter discourse against hegemonic readings of the classics that situate them within a Eurocentric and white context as well as a discourse that valorizes musical and bodily performance against textual practice and that celebrates biophilic life energies.

Film's Political Economy and <em>Django Unchained</em>

Never before has a film earned blockbuster status while presenting a formerly enslaved African as a heroic lead, as in Django Unchained . Using a political economy analysis, this commentary addresses Django Unchained ’s complex counterhegemonic media representations and production and distribution system. For the first time, box office revenues indicate the global market appeal of a defiant Black hero with appropriate production and distribution budgets and strategies. Django Unchained ’s 425 percent return on a $100 million investment suggests that audiences are ready to explore high-quality counterhegemonic narratives that challenge conventional media representations of cultural minorities. Such staggering popularity warrants a historical reception study of this film and its context; for analyzing media industries’ texts within their political economy calls attention to the fact that the production, distribution, and reception of culture take place within a specific economic and political system, constituted by relations between the state, the economy, social institutions and practices, culture, and the media.

The Impact of the Poniatowski Gems on Later Gem Engraving

In the first half of the 19th century, the Prince Stanislas Poniatowski (1754–1833) collection of engraved gems was considered to be one of the most outstanding known assemblages. However, its sale at Christie’s in 1839 was a disaster, as the cabinet turned out to include almost only neo-classical specimens and, thus, half of the gems did not go under the hammer. But these intaglios and cameos, and especially the themes they bear, portray in their beauty an effort to re-create a lost neo-classical world as reflected in the texts of Homer, Vergil, and other ancient authors. In contrary to other works on the Poniatowski gems, this paper focuses not on the collection itself, but on its impact on the later gem engraving. It presents two intaglios from the collection of the National Museum in Krakow. The first presents a scene of Hebe pouring out nectar for Jupiter (with an eagle behind him). The second depicts a crowned snake-god with the incorrect Latin inscription: VOT•SOL•CER. They are faithful copies of two Poniatowski gems. In fact, the first gem testifies to the great contribution of the Poniatowski collection to the reception of Classical culture, while the other is a falsification of the original which reflects a later collector’s aim to possess a ‘Poniatowski gem’.

Pontes ad Fontes – Bridges to Sources

The 2015 Colloquium Balticum took place at the University of Tartu from 5 to 7 November. This annual colloquium first held in 2001 at Lund University, has continued to bring together Antiquity scholars from Sweden, Germany, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Finland and Russia. While participants come mainly from classical studies, researchers from a variety of disciplines have also recognised the conference’s merit. Over the years, the programme has addressed disciplines such as philosophy, Greek and Latin literature, as well as, for instance, the Greek and Latin education or the influences of ancient mythology in contemporary literature. The delivered papers are authored by both recognised scholars and by MAand PhD-students presenting their first academic achievements. The subtitle of this year’s Colloquium Balticum XIV Tartuense was Pontes ad fontes (Bridges to Sources), aiming to draw attention to methodological questions in researching Classical Antiquity and reception of ancient culture. As expressed in the conference invitation, a wide variety of activities could be considered Pontes (Bridges) to Antiquity: discovery, interpretation, translation, commentaries and teaching of ancient heritage. This subtitle offered an opportunity to include papers on poetry and poetics, methods and possibilities of textual analysis, themes and forms of ancient poetry in contemporary literature, and so on. We will give a short overview of such papers presented during the eight sessions on the colloquium in Tartu. During the first session on 5 November, Anna Strode from the University of Latvia discussed the themes of 17th century occasional poetry in Riga and their relation to the history of Livonia. Due to the domination of Swedish Empire at the time in Livonia, the level of education improved, and in 1631 the Riga Academic Gymnasium was founded and soon scientific texts started to appear. Hand in hand with the growing importance of Latin and Greek language in education, occasional poetry in these languages began to bloom. In order to graduate from the Gymnasium, students had to take part in various disputations (disputationes) held in school as well as in public. Texts of these disputations were printed before the disputations themselves took place; the printed versions included occasional poems congratulating the respondents (that is, students of the Gymnasium, who were the authors of the disputations), which were added to the end of the texts. Strode described how the main

Travelling Songs: on Popular Music Transfer and Translation

Even though a song is created in a specific national or communitarian context, which determines to various degrees its production and reception processes, once it is recorded, reproduced and disseminated, especially via the global music market, it travels and wanders through time and place, thus becoming a transcultural product. The fruits of these transfers are what I call a “travelling song” and, by extension, “travelling music”. In this article, I will argue that travelling songs are dramatically transformed by their new contexts of reception. Focusing on alterity and diversity over sameness and isomorphism, the main objective of this work is to provide a general typology of music transfers that draws on translation and cultural transfer theories. Such musical transfers can be categorized in four ways: a) cultural reception; b) musical reprise; c) translation and adaptation; d) stylistic emulation. Such as distinction will lead the discussion to insights into how music transfers relate to such concepts as fidelity, authorship and creativity within a polycentric dynamic. http://dx.doi.org/10.5429/2079-3871(2015)v5i2.2en

Baudelaire and Electronica: Strange Voices and Ruth White's 1960s Experimentations

This article examines the under-frequented musical contexts for Baudelaire’s poetry, notably 1960s American experimental electronica (Ruth White, Flowers of Evil, 1969). By focusing on the role of the composer-translator, this article tests the hypothesis that the composer-translator adds further layers of complexity and distancing to the voices of his poetry, in such a way as to create challenging new soundworlds which shatter the already fragile categories of ‘poetry’ and ‘music’ as distinct elements. The alliance between text and sound, it is suggested, becomes increasingly complicated by dislocated voices in a foreign tongue and in an experimental musical genre such that the relationship between poem and music is suffused with heightened levels of strangeness. Moreover, by critiquing the dual (but complicated) role of the composer-translator, it is possible to re-examine accepted tenets of translation theory by pitting the notion of the translator as ‘literary critic’ (Scott: 2000) alongside recent word-music theory that perceives the composer as ‘critical reader’ (Allis: 2005). It is suggested that unusual song settings of Baudelaire (using the composer’s own translation) expand our understanding of Baudelaire’s poetic palette, his use of voice(s), and the cultural reception of his work.

Speaking from the Walls

The Città Universitaria (or University City), built in Rome in the mid-1930s, used the reception of classical culture as a propaganda tool through its architecture, art, urban layout, and use of epigraphy. As Flavia Marcello and Paul Gwynne demonstrate, these elements communicated the broad sociopolitical construct of militarism and education characteristic of the Italian Fascist period. Building inscriptions using the immortal words of classical authors had both didactic and referential functions: they spoke peremptorily of accepted modes of behavior and highlighted the role of educated youth in the destiny of an (ideal) Fascist society within its teleological project of Romanità as past, current, and future glory. Speaking from the Walls: Militarism, Education, and Romanità in Rome’s Città Universitaria (1932–35) weaves together sociopolitical, cultural, and architectural frameworks through the study of epigraphy as a carefully constructed presence within orchestrated urban and interior space. Epigraphy completed the spatial experience of architecture in its urban context to construct the collective memory and identity of past, present, and future citizens of Italy.

Unknown pleasures: Locating desire in Sydney’s lost cinemas

Abstract As a primary site for the transmission and reception of popular visual culture, the cinema theatre occupied a very particular position for much of the twentieth century. Today these buildings maintain a strong hold on the public imagination, existing as models of both collective spectatorship and individual subjectivity that have been largely supplanted by a range of technological and social forces. This article investigates the resonances of these lost sites of spectatorship through a body of films held by the National Film and Sound Archive that document the destruction of Sydney’s cinemas from the 1960s to the 1980s. Drawing on my own recent work with this footage, the article explores the archival function of the moving image. Central to this discussion is the recognition that these filmic documents function not only as records of physical and architectural loss but also point towards a more profound sense of loss tied to the passage of a phase of spectacular consumption and ­individual subjectivity.

Negotiating the meaning of filial piety in The Guasha Treatment

Abstract In the field of contemporary Chinese cinema, the theme of filial piety has served as a key concept for a large number of Chinese-language films, covering various genres from melodrama to martial arts. Through a detailed narrative analysis of the cultural practices and identity politics in the filmic text, this article examines the way in which the traditional value of filial piety finds its powerful and subtle expression in Xiaolong Zheng’s lesser-known film The Guasha Treatment (2001), centring on Chinese family life in the United States. The theme of filial piety is particularly important for this film because it is situated at the centre of cross-cultural encounters and conflict. The film thus can be seen as an attempt to present how Chinese cultural beliefs, practices and products can generate problems when transplanted into an American setting. As such, it not only foregrounds the family and filial piety, but also addresses the issue of the western reception of Chinese culture and the experience of the Chinese diaspora.

Beyond Memory: Italy and the Holocaust

The interview focuses on a number of themes developed in Robert Gordon’s book The Holocaust in Italian Culture. 1944-2010 (Stanford University Press, 2012). In particular, it deals with the history of Holocaust Studies in Italy and its place in the wider field of Holocaust Studies across the world; the relationship between cultural production and existing notions of collective memory in the cultural reception of the Holocaust and the role of the media in its memorialization; it discusses the place of Primo Levi’s work in shaping the interpretation of the Holocaust in Italy; finally, it deals with issues of language and translation in transferring conceptualizations of the Holocaust across cultures. Ultimately, Robert Gordon’s book uses the Italian case to engage in a wider reflection on Holocaust Studies and offers a contribution to a rethinking and redefinition of the field.

“WE WILL MAKE EUROPE THERE”: ITALIAN INTELLECTUALS IN SEARCH OF EUROPE AND AMERICA IN HITLER’S GERMANY

In the early 1940s, Felice Balbo and Giaime Pintor judged and re-envisioned Europe from a shared observation point in Turin with two institutional settings: the publishing house Giulio Einaudi Editore and the Italian Committee for the Armistice with France. Their privileged perspective—so far little known outside Italy—offers interesting clues about forms of opposition to Fascism and National Socialism by a generation that grew up under dictatorship. Drawing on unpublished sources and memoirs, this essay retraces a dialogue among friends, showing how young members of the Italian intelligentsia designed eccentric scenarios to overcome a nazified Europe. An overly enthusiastic reception of American culture, illusions about impending insurrections in Germany, and a general attraction to German culture helped Balbo and Pintor in becoming active antifascists.

‘Transatlantic connection’: K-pop and K-drama fandom in Spain and Latin America

Abstract The global circulation of Asian cultural products has been on a constant rise since the 1990s. However, the arrival to Spanish-speaking audiences is a more recent phenomenon, one that is linked to the consolidation of web-based tools for consumption, distribution and discussion of cultural artefacts. The different stages in which Hallyu, or the ‘Korean Wave’, reached different countries determined the intensity of scholarly interest in the phenomenon. If the research gap between Asia and Europe is wide, the later arrival to Spain and Latin America means that studies on the reception of Korean popular culture, including those dealing with fandom, are quasi-non-existent. This article is a first attempt at mapping the demographics of K-pop and K-drama fans in the Spanish-speaking world, through an analysis of an online survey. Drawing from the uses and gratifications approach in mass communication research, we discuss fans’ appropriation of K-pop, describe their shared iconography and analyse the peculiarities of male fans by studying their self-narratives. We conclude with a discussion on the need for studies of fandom to transcend national boundaries as exemplified by the advent of a ‘transatlantic connection’ linking fans in Spain and in Latin America via South Korea.

Charles Ives in the Mirror: American Histories of an Iconic Composer by David C. Paul (review)

Charles Ives in the Mirror: American Histories of an Iconic Composer. By David C. Paul. (Music in American Life.) Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013. [xi, 288 p. ISBN 9780252037498 (hardcover), $45; ISBN 9780252080517 (paperback), $30; ISBN 9780252094699 (e-book), various.] Illustrations, bibliography, index. Pick up a copy of David Paul's Charles Ives in the Minor: American Histories of an Iconic Composer, and you will find yourself staring back at your own image reflected in the dust jacket. For the prospective reader who is dazzled by the shiny, silvery reflectivity, the initial response is perhaps surprise. The only opaque imprints are the text of the title, author, and a photograph of Ives's favorite fedora hat. This seems to imply that Ives inhabits the perspective of every expectant reader who holds the book in hand and sees the floating hat above his or her head. And as with a mirror, the perspective of each viewer and composition of each reflected image is different. For some, the mirror will inspire the notion that the histories of this iconic composer are ongoing, interactive, and even inclusive of the reader. For others, the title will evoke a breathing composer who gazes consciously at his own reflection in the mirror: responding to his own and perhaps mirroring the public persona that his devotees had created for him (p. 36). Indeed, it is fascinating to consider the degree to which Ives's perception of himself relates to the various legends (e.g., musical pioneer, American maverick, neglected genius, etc.) with which he has been so strongly associated. David Paul's interest lies with how Ives's reflection is colored by the viewpoints of other Americans. He has written the first book-length history of the composer since his relatively recent passing in 1954. His methodology is based on the idea that there exists no single reception or legacy of culture, but rather that its influence and interpretation are relative, fluid, and constantly changing. Paul links this approach to coined by intellectual theorist Stanley Fish (Is There a Text in This Class?: The Authority of Interpretive Communities [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980]). In fact, Fish's are basic to the structure of the book. Over the course of six chapters, Paul suggests six unique yet overlapping communities of discourse, from composers and conductors to scholars of various disciplines. The chapters are constructed roughly chronologically, corresponding to ten- to twenty-year segments of the twentieth century and characterized by broadly changing cultural, social, economic, and political tides. But there are other factors to consider in how the six interpretive communities are distinguished from each other, such as disciplinary approach, methodology, audience, and the setting of the discourse (popular newspaper, academic journal, lecture hall, and concert hall). The book addresses all of these ingredients, as well as the volume, variety, and endurance of voices that populate its various portrayed communities. That said, the communities themselves are nebulous and difficult to define even for Paul, in part because they are characterized by many disparate factors. After all, Paul is making a bid for relativism, plurality, and flexibility, and so his very methodology resists categorical assumptions. As is to be expected, there is also considerable overlap and disjunction within and among the interpretive communities, as Paul's subjects jostle for attention. If each chapter implies a particular community of discourse, then each chapter essentially asks the question: in what ways do its members share a common identity? What is the common thread? In the first chapter, Conservative Transcendentalist or Modernist Firebrand? Ives and His First Publics, 1921-1934, Paul provocatively suggests that Before a represents the first example of Ives (Charles Ives, Essays Before a Sonata [New York: The Knickerbocker Press, 1920]). …

Retranslation in a postcolonial context

This article explores theoretical dimensions of voice in retranslation in postcolonial situations through a contextualized analysis of extra-textual and intratextual voices in the English-Canadian translation and retranslation ofProchain épisode, Hubert Aquin’s 1965 political novel on Québec’s independence from Canada. The three decades between the translations are marked by important social, political and cultural changes in both source and target language communities: from the 1960s turmoil with respect to Québec’s aspirations for independence to a certain political fatigue in both groups in the 2000s, from a focus within Québec letters on a national agenda to other aesthetic and cultural concerns, and from a colonial to a postcolonial editorial context in both Anglophone and Francophone literatures in Canada. What may appear as target culture recuperative strategies in the editorial and translatorial positioning of a retranslation may correspond on closer analysis to parallel changes in the source culture reception of the book.

Praxis beyond the political

The works of György Márkus and Hannah Arendt represent two irreconcilable tendencies of contemporary radical philosophy. Whereas Márkus’s critical theory of culture actively refrains from attributing metaphysical significance to its heuristic concepts and the mutable practices they contingently designate, Arendt’s phenomenological methodology attempts to elucidate the constitution of the modern world in order to evince the ontological significance of the political. Due to the inimical nature of their respective projects, Márkus’s writings largely consign its references to Arendt to marginalia. In this article, I consider the exception by taking as my point of departure Márkus’s only substantive comments about Arendt in ‘Beyond the Dichotomy: Poiesis and Praxis’. From a culturological perspective, I then reconstruct the ambivalent conceptions tacitly inhering in Arendt’s principal accounts of culture. In doing so, I reaffirm that Arendt denigrates poiesis, but also show that she regards culture and cultural reception as derivative to the political and praxis. The purpose of this exposition is not to resolve the dispute in one or the other direction, but to render perspicuous the fundamental choice evident in their opposition.

L'ombra di Roma. La cultura romana e la Cina

In the imminence of the 22nd International Congress of Historical Sciences (ichs) to be held in Jinan, in China, this paper aims to offer some considerations about the link between Chinese and Western cultures starting from the 19th Century, mainly focusing on the reception of ancient Rome’s traditions. Obviously, the main field of this reception is the Roman Law which became, through the filter of the Napoleon Code, the reference point in the development of the Chinese Law; in addition to this, the paper will focus also on the less explored reception of Roman history. Beyond the considerations on the problems of the reception of the Roman culture, the article whishes to enlighten how classical antiquity could be a tool and a language that conveys the relationship between different cultural models, without, however, any unjustified claim of superiority towards otherness.

Tengerek, szigetek, mítosz

The aim of the article is to give a panoramic view about the reception of ancient culture in contemporary Hungarian children’s literature. Because of the almost total disappearance of Latin and Greek instruction from secondary school education, the only way to present Antiquity to this generation is through literature, which carries genuine aesthetic and ethic messages. This analysis focuses on short stories and novels written in the last decade for children aged 8-12, highly influenced by the international trends of films and computer games which adapt Greek mythology for a popular entertaining narration (see the detective stories of F. Lenk or the action thriller series Percy Jackson by R. Riordan). The works analysed (Ida and the Golden Fleece by K. Baráth, Csoda and Kósza by Z. Czigány, the Siren-episode of J. Berg’s Rumini, Diabaz the Thunderbolt-throwing by E. Szakács, The Garden of Malena by K. R. Molnár), on the contrary, offer the up-to-date versions of Greek myths retold in a poetic or humorous register. Making the children acquinted by the most important elements of greco-roman culture, by the transmission of the humaniora, they help as well to create a humanistic attitude.

Invoking Samuel Hirszenberg’s Artistic Legacy—Encountering Exile

Samuel Hirszenberg (1865–1908), the Łódź-born artist, created several signature works of art that would emerge as emblematic of the Jewish historical experience of the twentieth century. Exile (1904) is one of these works that came to evoke the trials and tribulations of Jewish fate in the decades following its creation. After placing Exile in the context of Hirszenberg’s oeuvre, this essay charts its cultural and artistic reception over close to a century in diverse media. Exile evoked instinctive, negative responses alongside a deep sense of identification and appropriation. The essay illuminates the ways in which a seminal work of art can engender intense interaction over decades, allowing a wide range of interpretations, references, and quotations.

On the naming of monsters

Purpose – The pupose of this paper is twofold. First, to consider the cultural reception of recent developments in genetic technology and human reproduction, particularly in relation to the prospect of human cloning and the advent of the “designer human”; and second, to explore the ways in which public discussion of these developments presuppose and recast issues of diversity, difference and (in)equality. Design/methodology/approach – The research draws upon UK print media sources (broadsheet and tabloid newspapers) over the past two decades to examine the ways in which cultural expectations concerning developments in reproductive technology are commonly expressed. It does not aim at a quantitative examination of the content of what was said; rather it seeks to explore how it was said and thus the discursive resources that were employed in doing so. Findings – The paper suggests that images of “technology” function simultaneously as “mirrors of society”, providing a means for articulating and rhetorically rehearsing the various philosophical antinomies and moral conflicts that characterize social organization. Originality/value – The paper adopts a novel approach to the question of diversity, difference and (in)equality by considering the “monsters” discursively associated with recent developments in genetic and reproductive technology as well as the “monstrous” forms of social organization that they foreshadow.