Theoretical Writings Research Articles

Niemieckie inspiracje w historiografii polskiej przełomu XIX i XX wieku (na przykładzie Wacława Sobieskiego i Szymona Askenazego)

This article explores the impact that German models of historical writing had on the development of Polish historiography in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century to 1918. As means of defining this impact, the author analyses the work of two distinguished Polish historians, focusing both on their theoretical enunciations and research practice. These scholars were part of the generation of neoromantics to whom Polish historiography owed its modernisation at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Although representing different historiographical traditions, both scholars sought inspiration in German scholarship. While Sobieski’s thought is indebted to Karl Lamprecht’s historico-cultural method, Askenazy was drawn to Max Lehmann, trying to develop the neoRankean model of practising history. These leading Polish historians of the neoromantic era proved that, regardless of the conflicting interests of national historiographies, it was possible for their respective representatives to inspire each other and build a mutual understanding. This article is based on the historians’ theoretical writings and on the books they published before 1918. The author also analysed Sobieski’s text written in memory of Lehmann and published in the 1930s.

Messiaen the Borrower: Recomposing Debussy through the Deforming Prism

This article shows, through a new reading of Messiaen's Technique de mon langage musical and examples of his composing with elements found in the music of Debussy, that borrowing plays a more central role in his compositional practices than has previously been recognized. Messiaen's conscious reuse of Debussy's music spans his entire career, and primarily involves passages from Pelléas et Mélisande and a handful of piano works. Using his descriptions of Debussy's influence, his analyses of Debussy, and his own theoretical writings, we examine examples of Messiaen's musical borrowing in terms of compositional strategy. Four groups of case studies show how he transforms borrowed harmonic material, creates meaning, borrows gesture, and composes texture and form by combining different types of borrowed material.

Review of Roger Mathew Grant,Beating Time & Measuring Music in the Early Modern Era(Oxford University Press, 2014)

[1] In this addition to the Oxford Studies in Music Theory series, Roger Mathew Grant presents a history of temporal regulation in European music from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries.(1) Written and argued with unfailing finesse, Beating Time & Measuring Music pairs sophisticated readings of music-theoretical texts with lucid summations of historical trends. It offers music theorists valuable information and insight about meter studies, the history of music theory, and the wider history of ideas.(2) At the same time, the whole book stands to interest a broad academic audience, and performers will appreciate its lessons concerning analysis and performance practice.[2] In each of the monograph's three parts, addressing the sixteenth and seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries respectively, Grant examines three facets of meter: its description and conceptualization in theoretical writings, its mediation by techniques and technologies (of human or mechanical action), and its manifestation in notated musical compositions. That three-fold investigation is skewed neither to historically informed analysis nor to history with analytical illustration. Instead, the strands combine to tell of broad changes in how meter was imagined and realized in European music-making over three and a half centuries.[3] "Meter" bears unpacking here. At its core, Grant's subject is meter and its mensural equivalents as construed by American music theorists since 1980.(3) Beat, pulse, accent, measure, time signature, and hypermeter are integral concepts, whereas more complex and irregular aspects of rhythm are excluded (5). But the subject extends to elements of character, affect, and movement that were once wedded to meter. Grouping intervenes, too. The most important inclusion is tempo, which came to be notated and evaluated separately from the signatured meter only late in Grant's historical purview.Changing Times: The Eighteenth Century[4] Two epochal upheavals fascinate Grant, and explicit, eloquent reminders of these large themes recur throughout the book. The first concerns notions of time and motion (that is, physical motion and, more generally, any kind of change). Once the Scholastic tradition had been substantially dispersed by "natural philosophy," the category of motus lost its superior claim as that which conditioned tempus and gave it reality, and time came to be regarded as a universal dimension that extended irrespective of mobile or immobile things (15, 24, 93, 96-99). Insofar as people who made and thought about music saw tactus as a matter of both time and motion, the redrawing of philosophical categories swept music with it. The second upheaval concerns the transmission of knowledge about tempo and is more particular to music, though it has direct parallels in contemporaneous efforts at standardization and measurement in manufacture, trade, and mapping. The 1815 invention and widespread adoption of Maelzel's metronome is the main event, situated in a large patchwork of mechanical innovation, theory, opinion, and notational practice that all marked the messy divorce of tempo from meter. Change came in the form not of philosophical revolution, but of an initiative to communicate music's proper speed precisely in an age when musicians could no longer be expected to infer a suitable tempo from a piece's metrical signature and written rhythmic values (125-27).[5] Pivotal to both these changes, in Grant's estimation, was the demise of tempo giusto after its heyday in the early eighteenth century.(4) Even by mid-century, tempo giusto was on the wane;(5) in response, some concerned citizens mounted preservation efforts while others turned their minds to new, rational methods of transmitting tempo. Chapter 5, at the heart of Grant's book, analyzes these twin responses: the impulse to document the early century's myriad meter-character-tempo types, and the impulse to make musical chronometers. …

Modeste Proposte Metafisiche. Manganelli alle prese con la satira

The article analyses Giorgio Manganelli's conception of «metaphysical satire», both in his theoretical writings (for which the most important model is Jonathan Swift), as in some concrete fictional samples. In particular, among the (posthumous edited) materials of his laboratory (in his poems, as in the draft of a narrative treatise), a theme results pervasive: the satire of divinity. Here the mocking of an unbelieved – yet still feared – deity expresses itself in a specific figure: the cannibal god, whose ferocity, underneath the mask of the grotesque, reveals all the violence the author feels in the unbearable human destiny.

The Postmodern Nineteenth Century: “Sonnet—To Science” and the Case for Poe's Avant-Garde Poetics

Abstract Edgar Allan Poe's poetry has often suffered at the hands of critics. This is due in large part to the complicated relationship between the poems and Poe's theoretical writings. The indeterminate quality of these latter texts—do they map a legitimate poetics, or are they instead further instances of hoaxing?—has led to a body of criticism in the United States that tends to mistake innovation for infelicity and to dismiss the poems merely as scaffolding for Poe's prose writings. In this paper, I argue that Poe's poetry, far from being the dabbling of an exemplary short story writer and magazinist, is as important to the American poetic tradition as that of his near contemporaries, founding figures Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman. His poems, like theirs, not only entice and perplex us with what they have to say but also, as Jerome McGann has pointed out in The Poet Edgar Allan Poe: Alien Angel, with how they say it. Looking at “Sonnet—To Science” as one example, I show how Poe's poetry is able to remain out front of the very literary conventions—and accompanying evaluative criteria—it invokes by routinely teasing at the preferred reading those conventions are meant to authorize. The resulting disarray, calculated if at times vexing, is the hallmark of what I refer to as Poe's avant-gardism, that serious play that anticipates both the European and American avant-garde movements of the twentieth century and those wide-ranging poetries that continue to emerge in the twenty-first in response to the postmodern turn.

The Postmodern Nineteenth Century: “Sonnet—To Science” and the Case for Poe's Avant-Garde Poetics

Abstract Edgar Allan Poe's poetry has often suffered at the hands of critics. This is due in large part to the complicated relationship between the poems and Poe's theoretical writings. The indeterminate quality of these latter texts—do they map a legitimate poetics, or are they instead further instances of hoaxing?—has led to a body of criticism in the United States that tends to mistake innovation for infelicity and to dismiss the poems merely as scaffolding for Poe's prose writings. In this paper, I argue that Poe's poetry, far from being the dabbling of an exemplary short story writer and magazinist, is as important to the American poetic tradition as that of his near contemporaries, founding figures Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman. His poems, like theirs, not only entice and perplex us with what they have to say but also, as Jerome McGann has pointed out in The Poet Edgar Allan Poe: Alien Angel, with how they say it. Looking at “Sonnet—To Science” as one example, I show how Poe's poetry is able to remain out front of the very literary conventions—and accompanying evaluative criteria—it invokes by routinely teasing at the preferred reading those conventions are meant to authorize. The resulting disarray, calculated if at times vexing, is the hallmark of what I refer to as Poe's avant-gardism, that serious play that anticipates both the European and American avant-garde movements of the twentieth century and those wide-ranging poetries that continue to emerge in the twenty-first in response to the postmodern turn.

ВВЕДЕНИЕ В ИЗУЧЕНИЕ ТИБЕТСКИХ ТРАДИЦИОННЫХ МУЗЫКАЛЬНО-ТЕОРЕТИЧЕСКИХ СОЧИНЕНИЙ (XI–XIX ВВ.)

The paper provides a general overview of the main features and characteristics of Tibetan theoretical works on music written in the 11th-19th centuries. It is generally recognized that a written document of any kind is in many respects a product of the culture and epoch of its creation. To understand a document more correctly a researcher should first learn the respective cultural background. Given below is a concise account of the cultural circumstances in which Tibetan traditional works on music theory appeared as well as some preliminary remarks on the contents and peculiarities of the Tibetan theoretical writings on music already known to contemporary researchers. In fact, works on music theory written by learned Tibetan lamas were not in the focus of traditional Buddhist education. Those were often included in voluminous encyclopedias – without being properly studied. Despite this obvious neglect of musical aspects by the Tibetan Buddhist community, the texts represented in the paper contain a lot of valuable information about Tibetan music theory and practice, Tibetan philosophy of music and music education. On studying these traditional Tibetan works on music theory, researchers would be able to draw a realistic historical timeline telling about the development of Tibetan music culture and, eventually, to introduce this local historical narration into the framework of the global history of music. It should be noticed that at present the articles by Russian researchers that deal with Tibetan music are quite few. A hope is expressed that the paper will help attract the attention of scholars engaged in different fields of research to the problem of investigating Tibetan music theory and traditional theoretical works.

Horacio Coppola: Towards an Aesthetic Genealogy

Although a milestone in the history of Latin American photography, the work of Horacio Coppola is little known outside Argentina. His unorthodox angles and tilting frames, his attention to industrial and urban themes, and his experimentation with different lenses in the period between 1927 and 1931 were in absolute synchrony with the precepts of European New Vision and New Objectivity photography, and with American straight photography. That Coppola’s visual idiom was in tune with the latest photographic developments in interwar Europe is obvious. What remains unclear is how exactly he achieved that synchrony. Several scholars have wrestled with this question, which nevertheless remains elusive due to lack of evidence of direct contact with European photography prior to his studies at the Berlin Bauhaus in 1932 and his repeated attempts to downplay the influence contemporary photographers had on his work. The article provides a systematic study of Coppola’s aesthetic genealogy and his photographic borrowings through a critical examination of his early pictures and theoretical writings. It teases out possible direct and indirect channels of dialogue with the New Vision, New Objectivity, and straight photography in the second half of the 1920s, and probes the reasons behind Coppola’s reluctance to admit a connection with contemporary European photography in particular.

Religion and morality: Akedah theology and cumulative revelation as contradictory theologies in Jewish Modern-Orthodox feminism

ABSTRACTThe present article examines the way in which Jewish theology deals with the potential clash between Divine injunctions and moral imperatives. I take Modern-Orthodox feminism (“religious feminism”)1 as my test case, scrutinizing some of the ideas it has developed about dealing with contradictions between religion and moral principles. The decision for religious feminism is based on the fact that its theoretical writings offer a trenchant moral critique of religious patriarchalism and the injustices done in its name, chiefly to women, but also direct this criticism inward, in pursuit of internal revision of the religious system, in a process that tries to preserve the obligation to obey Divine commands rather than challenge them. This leads to the question of whether a religious approach that has accepted certain moral principles (in this case, gender equality) can serve as a privileged model for examining the relationship between religion and morality.

Alys Bentley's Dance Impulse, Embodied Learning, and the Dancing Mind

ABSTRACTThe work and writings of Alys Bentley (1869–1951), an influential educator of dance and music, have been overlooked in dance scholarship. This article seeks to place Bentley in the history of dance in the United States, particularly in the context of early twentieth-century “natural” or expressive movement forms and Dalcrozean eurhythmics. The essay examines Bentley's legacy as a dance educator, her theoretical writings on movement and music education, and her views on dance, technique, and practice as expressed in her work of experimental poetry, The Dance of the Mind.

التأويل والتفكيك عند أمبرتو إيكو بين فعل القراءة وفعالية القارئ

It is known that the theory of reading and reception has been proposed by (Hans Robert Jauss) and (Roman Jacobson) has invested in establishing the rules of the communication process, focusing on the )recipient). And then receiving strategy was developed by (Wolfgang Iser).and although (Umberto Eco) did not devote his theoretical writings for the theory of reading and receiving, However, his contributions in this field have emerged remarkably in his various critical books on the theory of interpretation, including: the reader in the story, open work, the limitations of interpreting, hermeneutics between semiotics and deconstruction, where he talked about the semiotic reading and reader type attributes, and reading mechanisms, conditions of interpretation and deconstruction.

Diffraction as a Method of Critical Policy Analysis

Recent developments in critical policy analysis have occurred alongside the new materialisms in qualitative research. These lines of scholarship have unfolded along two separate, but related, tracks. In particular, the new materialist method of diffraction aligns with many elements of critical policy analysis. Both involve critical theory, complexity and multiple analyses. To examine diffraction as a potential method of critical policy analysis, this paper enacts Karen Barad’s method of diffraction through the theoretical writings of Jane Bennett and Gloria Anzaldúa. Using the example of teacher leaders who are involved in educational policy, Bennett’s vibrant ecologies illustrate ecosystems of teacher leadership and Anzaldúa’s borderlands demonstrate how teacher leaders bridge their roles within multiple layers of community, governance and identity. Through the method of diffraction, critical policy analyses may produce broader perspectives regarding the ways in which differing stakeholders, groups, technologies and even theories collectively shape policy. Significantly, understanding educational policy differently may result in better educational policy-making.

Post-Babel language: a condition of Dante’s cosmopolitan literary vernacular

The Italian writer Dante Alighieri was inevitably located in the center of this radical transition from Latin to Italian vernacular, which occurred as part of the global shift from the Medieval to the modern era. Responding to the demands of his time, he considered such indispensable concerns as salvation, justice, community, and love, and the issue of the vernacular was undoubtedly one of the fundamental questions. He proposed, in both theoretical and creative writings, that the Italian vernacular was the most crucial problem in his contemporary culture and successfully suggested his conception of the “illustrious vernacular (vulgare illustre)”. His choice of the vernacular instead of Latin in his writings was mainly for the purpose of making his language a tool for communication with the world in which he was situated. Dante’s project for the Italian vernacular can be characterized as giving stability to the vernacular without transforming it wholly into a grammatical language. Interestingly Dante’s project starts from his consciousness of the nature of the ‘dead’ language (Latin), which is unalterable and perpetual; ironically, this is possible only through the living, organic cycle of ‘death and rebirth’, which originally belongs to the vernacular rather than Latin. Dante’s vernacular is not so much the mother tongue, if that indicates the language that a human acquires in his or her childhood at home, as a social language that is circulated and reforged as a refined literature through education and learning. The Babelic diaspora is the environment in which the so-called cosmopolitan vernacular appears and degenerates. If translating Latin into the regional vernacular does not end up by returning to the origin-Latin and deconstructing the regional vernacular itself, and if the life of the regional vernacular can last in such way as to maintain its relationship with the origin-Latin horizontally, then this vernacular can be called a cosmopolitan vernacular. Using this term is among the most persuasive ways to explain Dante’s vernacular. My aim is not so much to define Dante’s vernacular in terms of the cosmopolitan as to trace up the symptom of cosmopolitanism in it. Therefore, even if I use the term ‘cosmopolitan vernacular’, I do it only as a point to take further, implying the whole process of vernacularization or bilingual writing, which was predominant in Dante’s theoretical and creative writings.

FROM ANALOGUE TO DIGITAL: AN INTERVIEW WITH GOTTFRIED MICHAEL KOENIG

AbstractGottfried Michael Koenig (b. 1926) is a seminal figure in the history of electronic music. He contributed important technical and musical ideas at WDR studio in Cologne from 1954 to 1964. He was then the director of the Institute of Sonology in Utrecht, Netherlands until 1986. Since 1986, Koenig has continued to compose, to develop complex computer systems, and to edit, translate, and publish his extensive corpus of theoretical writings.1 This conversation, which aims to foster further English-language scholarship on Koenig and his music,2 took place in English in May 2015 at the Institute of Sonology, now located in The Hague, Netherlands.

‘Paint, not the thing, but the effect it produces’: The Power of Impressions in Far from the Madding Crowd

“Impression” is an eminently Hardyesque word which keeps occurring in the author’s fictional texts as well as in his personal and theoretical writings. The term, which suffers from an extensive, almost inflationary use, is related to fields such as phenomenology, psychology, cognitive sciences, art theory or simply printing. The aim of this paper is to emphasize the importance and role of impressions in Far from the Madding Crowd, Hardy’s first major novel, at both the diegetic and narrative levels. For Hardy, impressions are central in man’s perception and interpretation of the world, hence characters whose understanding and actions are often heavily dependent on impressions. Impressions are also crucial in the writer’s technique, in his aesthetics ; they partake of what Hardy himself calls “the author’s idiosyncratic mode of regard”. Impressions in Hardy’s work raise important questions concerning reality, truth, the power and validity of fictional representation, and readers’ response.

Rousseau Among the Moderns: Music, Aesthetics, Politics by Julia Simon (review)

Reviewed by: Rousseau Among the Moderns: Music, Aesthetics, Politics by Julia Simon Mira Morgenstern Julia Simon, Rousseau Among the Moderns: Music, Aesthetics, Politics (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013. Pp. 215. $64.95. Julia Simon’s study presents a new take on Rousseau. Unlike conventional thematic treatments emphasizing his literary or political writings, Simon takes the time to focus on Rousseau’s work in a field that he always claimed as primary to his identity, but that scholars have traditionally overlooked: his writings on music. While there have been collections of essays, even entire conferences, devoted to this theme (few of which receive critical mention in this volume), Simon argues that understanding key concepts in Rousseau’s musical oeuvre yields a new understanding of his political ideas that unifies his intellectual production in new and important ways. Simon embarks on this enterprise with a multifaceted analysis of how musical performance can create a sense of community. She writes from within her experience both as a musical performer and as a deep reader of Rousseau, tackling in a coherent manner his writings on music as a way of reading his theoretical writings and concerns. In so doing, Simon interweaves a complex understanding of how the ever-changing challenges of performance—including issues of tempo, harmony, and measure—inevitably presage the tensions between the individual and the community as highlighted in Rousseau’s political writings. She goes on to analyze the different musical approaches taken by Rousseau and Rameau as functions of relative and absolute value, while exploring the social and political issues implicated in these themes. Simon then treats Rousseau’s approaches to “authentic” or “folk” music, exploring some of the tensions implicit within the hierarchy of music established by its systematization. Finally, she has something to say about Rousseau’s notion of the redemptive power of music, which she links to what she terms its “aesthetic modernity”: that is, music’s perpetual ability to adjust to new challenges and emotions. [End Page 425] While there have been books and articles that analyze Rousseau’s contribution to music, this is one of the first to locate his approach within the controversies regarding music taking place in the eighteenth century. Simon’s book also links Rousseau’s broader aesthetic themes in his writings on music to the questions raised by different approaches to the modernisms of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Simon’s strongest chapter is her second one, on “Singing Democracy.” Here she makes the connection between Rousseau’s dynamic concept of music as a performative art and the more complex notion of the General Will, particularly the challenges of its articulation. Some of these themes are carried over into the fourth chapter, centering on what Simon terms “folk music.” She analyzes the possibility of the management of the audience as they are seduced into thinking that their responses are allowed to develop naturally, when in fact they are being subtly but effectively manipulated. Interestingly, though, it is here that Simon pulls her punches. While she does take note of the implicit hypocrisy of the grape-harvest festival at Clarens, with its self-proclaimed “equality” of all the denizens of that estate, Simon fails to probe the ironic quality of Rousseau’s texts. As it turns out, the author of these letters in La Nouvelle Héloïse is Saint-Preux, who throughout the pages of this novel, is not distinguished for his perspicacity. Simon also fails to consider other texts dealing with the notion of manipulated performativity, perhaps because these texts do not deal directly with music per se. But these texts—including the famous distinction between the Actor and the Orator in Lettre à d’Alembert, and the evocative description of the “matinée à l’Anglaise” at Clarens in La Nouvelle Héloïse—do treat notions of theatricality, a concept Simon does not hesitate to consider in other chapters. In this context, the omission is puzzling. More baffling is the lack of attention to Rousseau’s presentation in Lettre à d’Alembert of his notion of the perfect festival, which includes what might well be considered a manipulative, even sinister, version of a “transparent” celebration at a social dance...

NARCISSISM AND CONCERN: THE RELATIONSHIP OF SELF-OBJECT NEEDS AND NARCISSISTIC SYMPTOMS WITH HEALTHY AND PATHOLOGICAL CONCERN.

While concern and narcissism seem to be contradictory in nature, clinical evidence and theoretical writings on pathological forms of concern--tracing their origin to deficiencies in early relationships with primary caretakers--suggest that the actual relationship between these two characteristics might be much more complicated. We respond to a study aimed to add empirical data to the clinical and theoretical knowledge examined the relationships between self-object functions, types of narcissism and pathological concern. The findings of the study showed that pathological concern was positively associated with self-object needs and that this association was mediated by covert narcissism. Our discussion focuses on the developmental and psychodynamic sources of pathological concern, as well as its significance in the intrapersonal and interpersonal domains.

The “Psyche of the White Man” And the Mass Face on Film: Béla Balázs between Racialist and Marxist Physiognomics

Concerns about the passages on race and physiognomy in Béla Balázs's film theoretical writings often focus on his references to cinema's promotion of a normative “white psyche.” Through comparative analyses of Balázs with the racial physiognomist Ludwig Ferdinand Clauss as well as with Balázs's fellow Marxist Walter Benjamin, this article outlines key aspects of both right-wing and left-wing physiognomics. While Balázs did share with reactionary physiognomists the problematic idealist tendency to view the body as materialized soul, his views on physiognomy evaded racial essentialism, as he promoted cinematic physiognomics as a way to overcome boundaries of race and nation. Furthermore, Balázs and Benjamin used physiognomic perception to reconfigure social hierarchies and the relationship of spectators to technology and the material world, thus converting potentially reactionary concepts into ones that could be made serviceable for Marxism.

Reading the Qurʾān in the poetry of Adonis

ABSTRACTWhat role does the Qur’anic text play in the production of Adonis’s poetics? This fundamental question constitutes the point of departure for this study. The question quickly leads to others. Is it possible to consider the Qur’anic text in Adonis’s poetry in isolation from Sufi, mythical, historical and literary references that enter into the complex mesh of intertextuality? If approaching Adonis’s poetics requires an awareness of how fragments belonging to different texts relate to each other—and what role they play together in the production of poetic signification, since one is not isolated from the other—what about Adonis’s theoretical texts in which he deals with the Qur’an? Can one ignore the ideas Adonis puts forward in his theoretical writings? To what extent can one make use of his theoretical treatment of the Qur’an to understand the presence of the Qur’an in his own poetic texts?

“A tangled web of mindfuck”: Andrea Dworkin and the Truth of Pornography

This essay argues that Andrea Dworkin’s much derided argument against pornography may still prove productive if read in relation to her fiction. Taking note of the fact that Dworkin’s own novels have been accused of being pornographic according to her criteria, the essay explores the possibility that her radical feminist anti-porn stance, inevitably described as something of a moralistic backlash by sex-liberals, could be seen as a continuation of the pornographic imagination it so vehemently protests. Through critical readings of Dworkin’s novels Ice and Fire and Mercy , as well as her autobiographical works and theoretical writings on pornography, the essay demonstrates that the contradictions that beset her writings echo the contradictions inherent in our contemporary understanding of pornography. Much like the pornography she would resist, Dworkin’s writings invite a solipsistic mode of reading, the experiential rewards of which are not so much of an interpretive as of a sensual nature. In so doing, Dworkin’s fiction paradoxically proves an invaluable point of entry into the pornographic imagination, making evident its essentially monologic nature. While this circumstance may be damaging for her status as an agitator, it points to her continued—if as yet largely unacknowledged—importance as a writer.