Romantic Faith Research Articles

Expanding the World of the Private Eye: Walter Mosley Becomes a Grand Master

32 WLT MAY–AUGUST 2016 M exican crime novelist Paco Ignacio Taibo II frequently says that the North American crime novel is unthinkable in the context of Mexico , and his words are a reminder of how crime fiction, like all good fiction, is rooted in the cultural assumptions of a particular people and time. Mystery writing arose out of Enlightenment rationalization and the principle of empirical observation (the scientific sensibility) contrasted against the gothic and Romantic faith in the reliability of sensation. Science , in these stories, was contrasted with intense feeling and conquered it with rational explanations. This could only happen in a culture engaged with these opposing theses, as we still are. Along with this metaphysical conflict at the core of the mystery, many patriarchal and ethnocentric values were attached to the genre, as they were with other forms of entertainment. The great detective of early mysteries was often an odd person and occupied a place somewhere along a spectrum from passionate to passionless, but he imposed powerful skills of logic and observation to defend society against those who would undermine it. In the context of the time, for one example, the prejudice prevailed that women were not crime & mystery Expanding the World of the Private Eye Walter Mosley Becomes a Grand Master by J. Madison Davis above A promotional still from the 1995 film adaptation of Walter Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress, starring Denzel Washington as private eye Ezekiel “Easy”Rawlins. WORLDLITERATURETODAY.ORG 33 by nature as rational as men. Novels that resorted to women’s intuition or “playing a hunch” were regarded as cheating on the basic premises, ignoring the confirmable order of reality, never mind that the “logic” in many mysteries is ludicrous. Poe’s Chevalier Dupin, Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, and Leroux’s Joseph Rouletabille are the whitest of white men, and demonstrated along with many other fictional detectives a set of values that protect Western civilization against the evil schemes of the “yellow peril” and an assortment of swarthy villains. Should we be shocked by the racial prejudice we see in Poe’s “The Gold Bug”? For us, it ruins a good kids’ adventure about lost treasure, but in that time? Though we now know such stereotyping generates a wrongheaded pattern of thinking that justifies discrimination and even violence, by their standards it was goodnatured comedy. If African Americans appeared in mysteries, they were similar to the servant Jupiter in Poe’s story, usually decorative. That is to say, they were not there as simulations of real people. They were there for setting, novelty, or Stepin Fetchit–style comic relief. If the butler was a black man, he didn’t do the crime. He wouldn’t have any more logical motivation than the furniture in the conservatory. He may have witnessed something minor to report it, but as to having a relationship in the story to the other characters or the crime, not really. In 1918 the Ebony Company produced a one-reeler called A Black Sherlock Holmes, a broad parody for African American audiences with characters named Rheuma Tism, I. Wanta Sneeze, and Cheza Sneeze. As to the realistic portrayal of African American family, or community, there was little of that even in “race films,” movies made specifically for black audiences. The same complaint can be made about the other “outsider” identities in such movies and stories—inscrutable Asians and deceptive Arabs, or even Cockney gardeners. Exotic detectives had a vogue—Charlie Chan, Mr. Moto—but blacks were evidently not exotic enough to participate in this and were generally ignored. I once had the misfortune of being on a conference panel discussing “political correctness” and vividly remember a writer declaiming that she saw no reason to put Pakistanis and Vietnamese in books simply to be politically correct. To which I said, “No, you put them in the book because they are here. Leaving them out is lying.” This is the importance of Walter Mosley , who was recently announced as the Mystery Writers of America’s newest Grand Master. It is only recently that African Americans consistently became more than one-dimensional characters in crime novels, and Mosley’s writing is often...

Oskar Kolberg (1814–1890) the Founder of Musical Ethnography in Poland

Abstract The article presents the greatest Polish ethnographer, who was also a professionally educated musician. He concentrated his activities on the oral musical culture, still vital in the 19th century but liable to changes. Culture studies by Kolberg concerned mainly rural communities, statistically dominating in those times. He planned to edit 60 volumes geographically covering the first Polish State from before 1772; he managed to print 33 of them in his lifetime and prepare many further anthologies for editing. Up till now, the editorial work is still in progress. The already edited 80 volumes show us an old social culture, folk ceremonies, musical repertoire including ritual singing, songs and instrumental pieces. Kolberg’s printed monument is a source of reflection on the past and can inspire social studies, ethnomusicological research as well as musical ensembles performing traditional ethnic music of peasant origin. The size of Kolberg’s documentation means that a special Institute of Oskar Kolberg had to be established to continue editorial and research work. In spite of his positivistic and empirical attitude, Kolberg still kept a romantic faith in the significance of folk songs and singing for the preservation of national components in cultural consciousness. Simultaneously, he developed a model for structural analysis of popular/folk culture and intended to build a cultural atlas of the country, building on the work of his father, professor of the University of Warsaw, an outstanding cartographer. But the core of Kolberg’s programme, its “planetary centre”, was always music. It was music that gave him the stimulus to interpret the culture of Central-Eastern Europe. To preserve regional diversity, he wrote down more than 20 thousand vocal melodies, song texts and instrumental pieces, paying special attention to variants and ornamentation. For the contemporary composer, Kolberg’s volumes are a useful musical reader. These huge anthologies of elementary but highly integrated musical concepts demonstrate the collective creativity and a fascinating prefiguration of mass culture, still open to symbols and to poetry. Kolberg’s music transcriptions, catching music in the process of performance, should not be treated as unchangeable patterns for copying, but rather as a source that helps understand creativity in traditional oral culture.

Confronting the Past

Confronting the Past

The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race

The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race. By John Stauffer. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002. Pp. 367. Illustrations. Cloth, $29.95.) Black Identity and Black Protest in the Antebellum North. By Patrick Rael. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Pp. xii, 421. Cloth, $55.00; paper, $19.95.) The proof that many roads lead to the past lies in reading these two books one after the other. Both concern the construction of race in the early nineteenth century, but their approaches could not be more different. Both write from postmodern perspectives, but while John Stauffer impressionistically braids the lives of four abolitionists, two white and two black, to understand their special brand of friendship in a racist world, Patrick Rael offers a carefully argued reinterpretation of the entirety of elite protest thought before the Civil War. Both reach pessimistic conclusions. Race may be a constructed concept, but it is woefully difficult to escape its bonds. The black hearts in Stauffer's title refers to the idea, enunciated by James McCune Smith, the Edinburgh educated African-American physician, that whites must shed their sense of whiteness as a form of superiority and share a heart for racial equality to be achieved. According to Stauffer, Smith shared this sort of heart-to-heart friendship, at least for a time, with Gerrit Smith, Frederick Douglass, and John Brown. Stauffer explores what these men had in common to be able to overcome the barriers of race, and arrives at the understanding that it was a romantic faith in perfectibility: the belief that neither race nor sex nor character was immutable or could stand in the way of perfect oneness. Hoping for perfection, these friends endorsed bible as a strategy to spread their sense of unity and human possibility. But while John Brown found in such politics a justification for a violent assault on slavery, Gerrit Smith ultimately quailed at making violence the route to spiritual union. His breakdown after John Brown's Raid was no act. He came to doubt himself, not only as a politician and do-gooder but even as a father. As he drifted away from his former friends, their shared framework for achieving common racial understanding collapsed. Like his subjects, Stauffer understands the importance of the heart. His focus on life stories involves readers emotionally in the dilemma of race. The two Smiths in particular, less familiar to non-specialists, become flesh and blood. Gerrit Smith is the lynchpin of the study. His papers are a key biographical source for all four. Through his extraordinary philanthropy, he acted like a modern foundation, granting money to worthy projects suggested by his correspondents, including the other men in this study. Stauffer intrigues the reader by writing of these men jointly and topically. He examines how they presented themselves to the public in photographs, how they spent their childhoods, how they weathered the Panic of 1837, what they thought of politics, of Indians, of women, and of achieving independence from a still-tainted society. This is a work that can appeal to an audience broader than historians while at the same time adding scholarly insights on romantic perfectionism and illuminating the considerable but less known activities of the two Smiths. …

The Last Word in Lyric: Mallarme's Silent Siren

POSTROMANTic era in France, which lasted roughly from Louis-Napol?on Bonaparte's brutal dismissal of the Second Republic in December 1851 to the start of the First World War, is most often evoked as a prelude to modernism. Yet the unique force and ambition of its greatest poetry reflects the persistence of romantic faith in the privileged language of lyric to reveal the foundations of human desire. In the social order that emerged from the economic and political revolutions of the eighteenth century, the marketplace replaced the Old Regime's central redistribution system as the dominant social institu tion. foregrounding of secular exchange over ritual-based systems of interaction inspired Marx's words in the Communist Manifesto: The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. ... It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation.1 This was a Copernican revolution more profound than the astronomical one that had dislocated humanity from its anthropocentric universe. lesson of both these revolutions has been described in terms of human growth, whether as a Comtean passage from childhood to maturity or a Rousseauian fall from the generosity of youth into the cynical greed of age. But bourgeois society is neither a growing body nor a falling soul; it comprises a system of physical interactions (an economy) inextricably bound up with a system of representations (a culture) through which the significance of the first set is mediated. Unlike members of ritual-based societies, participants in the exchange-based social order can assume their role as agents only under the protection of a sense of individual significance, a personal sacred that guards the self against the shifting mimetic flows of the marketplace.

Three stories, two visions: the West and the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway in Canadian culture

Many now think the Canadian nation-state is entering a phase in its development that can be described as “postmodern” ( Porter, 1995, pp. 91–106). Throughout the 1990s we have heard much talk of “asymmetrical federalism,” “bilateral federalism,” “successor states” and Quebec/ROC (Rest of Canada) polarities ( Watts, 1991, pp. 1–7). In this time of constitutional and political ferment, commentators postulated the existence of as many as “seven incipient nations” within the borders of the present Canadian polity ( Mahler and March, 1991, p. 16). There are resonances here within the field of literary criticism. Linda Hutcheon and Marion Richmond’s Other Solitudes: Canadian Multicultural Fictions (1990) highlight factors of paradox, contradiction, and extreme irony in the Canadian situation, factors they see as central to the postmodern world view. This paper examines two works of Canadian popular culture analyzed against E. J. Pratt’s Towards the Last Spike (1952) in an effort to suggest that a postmodern style may have something to offer our sociopolitical debate. The television dramatization of Pierre Berton’s two-volume work on the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway, The National Dream (1974), and the Canada Day Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) special “Murray McLauchlan’s Floating Over Canada” represent, with Pratt, two differing visions of Canada. The McLauchlan effort, I hope to show, when set against Berton and Pratt, represents an implied postmodern critique of modernism’s romantic faith in technological efficiency and cultural tradition. McLaughlan’s antiintentionalism and playfulness, I argue, offer a useful way to represent some of our present dilemmas and may even provide reasons for optimism about problems that have plagued Canadians for years.

Romantic Self-Creations: Mailer and Gilmore in "The Executioner's Song"

Romantic writers are, for better and worse, obsessed with originality. In practice this means that each one who aspires to matter has to initiate his life as an artist with a story about what originality is, and that story must itself strike readers as being a new one. To compound the difficulty, the romantic writer is compelled, even as he recounts his version of originality, to be exemplifying it. Emerson sets out to do this much in his most celebrated essay, Self-Reliance. The formula for originality he puts forward there is a simple one: you become original by listening to yourself. Genius derives from trusting the inner voice, abiding by one's spontaneous impression ... then most when the whole cry of voices is on the other side (259). Originality is not, as Wordsworth believed it to be, the product of a favored childhood, where one is Fostered alike by beauty and by fear (1850 Prelude, bk. 1, line 302). Nor is it mysteriously inborn, a celestial gift, as the German romantics tended to think. Moses and Plato and Milton became what they did in Emerson's view by observing the gleam of light which flashes across [the] mind from within and speaking not what men but what they thought (259). Yet the Emersonian philosophy of is also a philosophy of self-ruin. In time, every rhetorical pearl evolves back to sand; every hard-won identity tends to solidify and hem in the life. Romantic self-invention frequently begins in a sort of potlatch, a ritual in which the subject is compelled to destroy his full accumulation and return to poverty, and to ignorance, that state on which, according to Thoreau, all growth depends. The American romantic faith is a faith in crisis: without ruin, no renovation. And no renovation, it's assumed, is final: always, as Emerson says, there must be abandonment.

Further Letters of Blanco White to Robert Southey

Further Letters of Blanco White to Robert Southey

Marxist Educational Theory: Reflections on Cambodia

Marxist educational thinkers have produced, in recent years, a powerful humanist critique of educational practice and theory. Yet, the Cambodian Government's assault upon its own people, the obliteration of those deemed to have ‘higher knowledge’, and the sack of Cambodia's educational establishment belies the humanism of the Marxism in general and the Marxist educational critique in particular. It is intellectually disingenuous to argue that the unsavoury actions of Marxist governments is unrelated to Marxism; that it is an unfortunate consequence of activism; or that it is unrelated to Marxism as an intellectual enterprise. It is argued that the grammar of the Marxist Weltanschauung bifurcates into two interacting grammars. The domain of these two grammars constitutes the language of Marxism. And within this domain we find the intellectual threads that suggest the ‘thinkability’ of Marxist humanism and the contemptuous anti-humanism evident in the recent events of Cambodia's history. Marxist educational theory is interesting in so far as it implies a means for realizing the humanism of Marxist thought without mortgaging political and social evolution to a 19th century romantic faith in the purifying effects of social violence. It is argued that Marxist educational theory fails because it offers no plausible method of transcending capitalist ideology. All Marxist educational theories, despite all the rhetoric about ‘theories of reproduction’, ‘hegemonic-state reproduction models’, and ‘theories of resistance’, leave those who toil precisely where they began - enmeshed within ideology from which there is no means of escape. Technically speaking, Marxist theories of education fail because they are based upon a general failure of knowledge demonstrated in Marx's theory of ideology. The theory of ideology fails because, as Wittgenstein demonstrates, there is no such project. It is argued that the appeal of Marx's theory of ideology and Marxist educational theory is mostly attributable to its ad hominem attack upon liberal versions of knowledge.

Southey in the Tropics: "A Tale of Paraguay" and the Problem of Romantic Faith

Previous articleNext article No AccessSouthey in the Tropics: "A Tale of Paraguay" and the Problem of Romantic FaithErnest Bernhardt-KabischErnest Bernhardt-Kabisch Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Wordsworth Circle Volume 5, Number 2Spring 1974 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/TWC24039397 Views: 2Total views on this site © 1974 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

The Frontier Thesis and the Great Depression

There was a crisis in America at the end of the 1920's. The Crash was only part of it, though the Depression played a major r1le in its reinforcement. It was a cultural crisis, and the economic crisis served only to confirm its existence. Basically, the idea was that the American way of life had reached the end of its road, that America's uniqueness was fast disappearing. World War I not only killed progressivism as a political and social movement, it destroyed the whole notion of the inevitable progress of mankind towards a better life. The effect was delayed in America by the shaky prosperity of the 1920's, which kept alive the hope that the old order of capitalism and free enterprise were leading America towards a utopian existence free from poverty and want. There were those who saw beneath the surface, however, and many of them left the country to establish colonies in societies that were more openly decadent. Parrington, at the height of the speculative boom, characterized the modern age as one of mechanistic pessimism. Emersonian optimism, .. . fullest expression of the romantic faith, is giving way to Dreiserian pessimism, and the traditional doctrine of progress is being subjected to analysis by a growing skepticism.... [We] are in the way of repeating here the familiar history of Europe, with its coercive regimentations reproduced on a larger scale and in a more mechanical fashion. Once more a gloomy philosophy stands on the threshold of the American mind. 1 It was a basic and far-reaching change of mood, and coming at a time of great surface flamboyance it foreboded ill for the future. Once the Depression was in full swing, the forebodings bore fruit. The twenties had proved that the end of the XIXth century was not the era of absolute plenitude; they showed that more could be expected. But now that image, too, was definitely shattered, and there was a general fear that the old way of life had outlived its usefulness. This new economic crisis was unlike its predecessors, for it seemed that not just one sector, but the whole structure, was breaking down. Despite Marx and Turner and a host of others, most people saw that American capitalism had continued to expand beyond 1900. People came to expect better conditions, higher wages, greater productivity, and more leisure. But now there were doubts. They began to wonder

The Human Shakespeare and Troilus and Cressida

HE year ig3o saw the publication of two very influential books on Shakespeare which suggest polar interpretations of Troilus -6 64 and Cressida. G. Wilson Knight's The Wheel of Fire (Oxford) explains the play as an elaborate set of contrasts erected upon a basic antithesis between the Greeks as representative of the intellect and resultant cynicism, and the Trojans as representative of intuition and romantic faith. Such an analysis naturally glorifies the conduct of Troilus, whose constant love is hallowed, and of the Trojans collectively, who stand for beauty and worth. The other book is Lily B. Campbell's Shakespeare's Tragic Heroes: Slaves of Passion (Cambridge). Although Miss Campbell does not herself discuss Troilus and Cressida, the ideas which she expresses form a frame of reference in which I think she would be willing to examine any Elizabethan play. She presents an extended explication of Elizabethan moral philosophy in terms of the eternal warfare between the appetitive and the rational parts of the soul-the passion and the reason. To the critic who is committed to the view that when human conduct is determined by anything but reason, the results are inevitably catastrophic, the behavior of Troilus, Hector, and the Trojans collectively must appear faulty (whether evil or merely ridiculous) because they are ruled by emotion, by a idealism, by instinct, by anything else but reason. Such a critic may find Troilus, for example, personally sympathetic but morally and intellectually to be pitied; or he may, seeking to make his sympathies and his philosophy agree, find nothing admirable at all in Troilus, Hector, and the Trojans. Since 1930, the interpretations deriving from Miss Campbell's work have had the better of it. John Russell Brown, discussing in Shakespeare Survey the interpretation of Shakespeare's comedies during the first half of this century, comments that Knight's analysis has not been generally accepted, and cites several scholars who have taken the opposite point of view.1 In the same volume of Shakespeare Survey, a few pages later, Kenneth Muir, though he finds both Troilus and Hector sympathetic characters, writes, Certainly the play is meant to expose the false glamour of sex and war, and later he speaks of the play as an exposure of 'idealism'.2 The dominance of the philosophy of reason over passion (or of intellect over

Religious Trends in English Poetry. Volume III: 1780-1830: Romantic Faith.

Religious Trends in English Poetry. Volume III: 1780-1830: Romantic Faith.

Newspaper and Radio Coverage of Criminal Trials: A Modern Dilemma

Is the trial of an important criminal case before a jury in an average American city fair game for the city desk of the local newspaper, the manner and extent of coverage depending upon various elements of estimated reader interest like any exciting sports event? The question a leading one, of course, suggesting a negative answer. But, as a newspaperman moderately grounded in legal principles and one who confesses to a perhaps romantic faith in our ancient jury system, I have been getting the impression lately that some of us nowadays really do think of a big trial as little more than a legitimate news story; the newsplay and value of the story being chiefly affected by the seriousness of the offense, its vicious or unusual nature, and the appeal of the defendant's wife's figure. We would all deny it in court, of course, but isn't the truth demonstrated in the way we act and talk and write about the cases we cover? And, what worse, are we not encouraged in this error sometimes by the attitudes of judges and lawyers themselves? I think every reporter engaged in covering the courts has had, on frequent occasions, the experience of being tipped off in advance by attorneys or even judges to the fact that a certain case upcoming is going to be a corker-it ought to make a good Page One story ! You may argue that ethical lawyers don't do such things, or that patriotic and high-minded newspapermen would not lend themselves to sensationalizing a man's trial for life and liberty. And you would be right, undoubtedly. I'm merely saying that it happens, and few of us are innocent.

Religious Trends in English Poetry. Volume III: 1780–1830: Romantic Faith by Hoxie Neale Fairchild

Religious Trends in English Poetry. Volume III: 1780–1830: Romantic Faith by Hoxie Neale Fairchild

Religious Trends in English Poetry, Vol. III: 1780-1830, Romantic Faith. Hoxie Neale Fairchild

Previous articleNext article No AccessCritical ReviewsReligious Trends in English Poetry, Vol. III: 1780-1830, Romantic Faith. Hoxie Neale Fairchild Douglas KnightDouglas Knight Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Religion Volume 30, Number 1Jan., 1950 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/483949 Views: 1Total views on this site PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Religious Trends in English Poetry, Volume III. 1780-1830, Romantic Faith by Hoxie Neale Fairchild

Book Review| October 01 1949 Religious Trends in English Poetry, Volume III. 1780-1830, Romantic Faith by Hoxie Neale Fairchild Religious Trends in English Poetry, Volume III. 1780-1830, Romantic Faith. By Fairchild, Hoxie Neale. New York: Columbia University Press, 1949. Pp. ix, 549. $6.75. Newton P. Stallknecht Newton P. Stallknecht Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google South Atlantic Quarterly (1949) 48 (4): 602–605. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-48-4-602 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Newton P. Stallknecht; Religious Trends in English Poetry, Volume III. 1780-1830, Romantic Faith by Hoxie Neale Fairchild. South Atlantic Quarterly 1 October 1949; 48 (4): 602–605. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-48-4-602 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsSouth Atlantic Quarterly Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 1949 by Duke University Press1949 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.