Twentieth-century Theory Research Articles

The Density of Symbol Systems – A Critique of Nelson Goodman’s Notion

Nelson Goodman’s theory of symbol systems expounded in his Languages of Art has been frequently criticized on many counts (cf. list of secondary literature in the entry “Goodman’s Aesthetics” of Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and Sect. 3 below). Yet it exerts a strong influence and is treated as one of the major twentieth-century theories on the subject.While many of Goodman’s controversial theses are criticized, the technical notions he used to formulate them seem to have been treated as neutral tools. One such technical notion is that of the density of symbol systems. This serves to distinguish linguistic symbols from pictorial representations (after Goodman entirely rejected resemblance in that role) and is a crucial part of Goodman’s explanation of what constitutes aesthetic experience (and so indirectly what is art). Thus its significance for Goodman’s theory is fundamental.The aim of this paper is a detailed, logical analysis of this notion. It turns out that Goodman’s definition is highly problematic and cannot be applied to symbol systems in the way Goodman envisaged. To conclude, Goodman’s theory is problematic not just because of its controversial theses but also because of logical problems with the technical notions used at its very core. Hence the controversial claims are not simply contestable, but inaccurately expressed.

Authorship, Authenticity, Authority: Evaluating Aristotle’s Rhetoric and Poetics

This essay explores a nexus of related concepts—authorship, authenticity, and authority—as they impinge upon one another and on the experience of reading, particularly in the case of “canonical" authors such as Aristotle. Aristotle’s own Rhetoric and Poetics are considered together in light of these concepts, as well as in terms of seven constraints that operated upon Aristotle as a thinker and writer. Twentieth-century theories of reading are adduced in an examination of the rhetorical dimensions of Aristotle’s own notion of authorship. The essay also examines the rhetorical forces entailed in the editing and publication of authors known only from ancient manuscripts, and in the reading of legal and sacred texts.

Hans Blumenberg and Leonardo

Hans Blumenberg’s, frequently oblique, reflections on art rank among the most erudite in twentieth-century theories of art. The following investigations focus especially on his views on the visual arts as they unfold from his critical reception of Leonardo da Vinci’s art and science. At the center of such a reception stands a preeminent image concept of the Renaissance, the “window image,” and its epistemological implications, which Blumenberg counters with a skeptical attitude toward the mimetic aesthetics of images. In doing so, he contradicts Paul Valéry’s influential interpretation of Leonardo’s “method,” which Blumenberg discusses at great length, just to cut short the ambiguities of Renaissance perspective as a “symbolic form.”

M. E. Braddon’s Literary Apprenticeship: Heroism, Madness and Sensation in “Garibaldi” and Three Times Dead

ABSTRACT This article focuses on M. E. Braddon’s epic poem “Garibaldi” and her first published novel Three Times Dead. While they are different in topic and genre, they contain thematic and stylistic parallels that demonstrate Braddon’s literary experimentation at the onset of her publishing career in 1860. Both works reveal Braddon’s responses to contemporary issues, her literary tastes and her market-oriented attitude. This article first examines Braddon’s contribution to the “Garibaldimania” that gripped England in the 1860s, discussing how Braddon’s heroicization of Garibaldi bears evidence of a widespread tendency to use the Southern fighter as a trigger of self-criticism and as a valorous alternative to Victorian sceptic materialism. Attention is then paid to the unconventional villains featured in both texts, which represent deviance and power relations in ways that would go on to define sensation fiction as a genre. This article also scrutinizes the particular idea of madness around which the two works pivot. The links they establish between insanity and freedom anticipate late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century theories, such as those developed by Nietzsche, Bataille and Foucault. On a metaliterary plane, finally, these 1860 works bear witness to Braddon’s contribution to the mid-Victorian aesthetic debate on what constituted proper literature.

Looking Together: Desiring Relations in James Baldwin

Abstract: This essay argues that Baldwin’s Another Country evinces his search for a connective principle (of the self to self and others) beyond what the representatives of Western tradition, from the Oracle of Delphos to twentieth-century theorists of ideology, have called “knowledge” ( gnosis ). Baldwin’s novel seemingly promotes the redemptive role of knowledge in inter- and intrapersonal relations, both by having such privileged characters as Ida Scott announce its importance as an ethical principle and by structuring the narrative so that it concludes in a moment where the barriers to the novel’s heterosexual, interracial couple are swept aside in an epiphanic moment of mutual “understanding.” To highlight the problems with knowledge, the essay turns to passages in Proust, Conrad, and Wright that are echoing in Another Country ; and points to a moment in the novel and in one of Baldwin’s interviews where an alternative connective principle—one of “looking together”—is elaborated.

"Had I been a painter": Lolita and the Perversity of Interart Relations

Abstract: Discussions of interart relations have often relied on a rhetoric of sexual perversion to reaffirm artistic borders, from G. E. Lessing's Laocoön (1766) to twentieth-century theories of medium specificity. This article considers the "perversity" of interart relations embedded in Lolita , Nabokov's novel of pedophilia. While the commingling of the arts is a key aspect of Nabokov's visual poetics, the logic of this principle is interrogated in Lolita . Whether perceiving Lolita as a visual image or imagining a mural of their sexual union, Humbert repeatedly attempts to transfigure his temporal narrative into the spatial realm of the visual as a means of preserving his "nymphet" from the corruption of time. This, I suggest, is analogous to Nabokov's own artistic efforts to escape the temporal progression imposed by sequential narrative form by appealing to the visual arts. By examining Lolita within the context of a long-standing discourse that sees relations between the sister arts as perverse, I argue that the novel's overt transgression of sexual taboos discloses an underlying aesthetic anxiety about the transgression of interart boundaries, in particular the novel's aspiration towards spatial form. Central to this is the novel's reworking of the Pygmalion myth, one of the foundational myths not only about artistic creation, but about the artist as a transgressive figure who violates aesthetic as well as erotic laws. The article ultimately concludes that, in Lolita , Nabokov revalorizes the sequential aspect of narrative (and the temporality of re-reading) as a positive attribute of novelistic form, not as something to be overcome in imitation of painting.

The Gothic Representations of the City through the Fl?neur in Victorian Literature

The Victorian Gothic moved away from old and conventional themes and spaces of early Gothic novels such as ruined castles and evil villains into more realistic spaces and characters that went hand in hand with the issues of the era. While the conventional Gothic space centered on the castle or other forms of old buildings, the city was an important component in Victorian Gothic imagery. In an era of growing mediation between the city and the urban dwellers, the gothic representations of the urban space in Victorian literature highly depended on the 'eye' of the its fl?neurs, or walkers who see, interpret, and produce the city. The fascination with modes of perceiving and seeing the mystery of the puzzling visual experience are evident in a wide variety of the nineteenth and twentieth-century theories and researches on the urban space. The focus of this paper is to graft some insights into debate on urban visuality and other related tropes that provide a range of perspectives on the field of the visual and perception of the city. Then, drawing from Victorian novels, this paper examines Dickens’s portrayals of urban subjects such as Gothic fl?neurs who produce the city as a Gothic place.

Specifics of interpretation of traditional eastern practices in European acting training

The purpose of the article is to identify the features of adaptation of oriental theatrical, physical, and spiritual practices by representatives of the European theater in the process of developing methods of actor training based on the analysis of acting training of leading directors of the twentieth century. - K. Stanislavsky, E. Grotovsky, E. Barba. Methodology. A typological method was used (to determine the specifics of acting training methods by K. Stanislavsky, E. Grotovsky, and E. Barba; interpretive method and method of comparative analysis (to identify common and different aspects of interpretation of Eastern practices by European directors); phenomenological method (to identify features of Eastern and spiritual practices and their adaptation to acting training), etc. Scientific novelty The specifics of borrowing and interpretation of traditional in East, Southeast, and Central Asia elements of actor training by Russian and European theater directors of the twentieth century are considered. K. Stanislavsky, E. Grotovsky, and E. Barba and revealed the peculiarities of adaptation by theater directors and teachers of elements of hatha yoga and Raja Yoga in accordance with their own understanding of the purpose of training in the art of acting. Conclusions. Various elements of traditional Western and Eastern cultural practices have been the focus of twentieth-century theater directors. in the process of developing innovative methods and techniques of educating the actor. Their research of local theatrical cultures contributed to the search for universal laws of stage conventionality, new acting methods of self-knowledge, and the disclosure of their own creative potential. In their own search for methods of educating the actor theater directors of the twentieth century. turn to the Eastern worldview, because the extraordinary method and a special view of the nature of consciousness and its functioning in the world contributes to the creation of training to solve a number of applied problems in the context of the specifics of acting. Translating material (Eastern practices) into a Western conceptual structure or any kind of synthesis of Eastern and Western concepts, simplifying, does not reveal the full depth of Eastern practices and religious orientations, but contributes to the actor's mastery of innovative methodological approaches, including intuitive insights, contemplation, contemplation. etc.

Literature in Culture & Culture in Literature: Explain 21ST century

Abstract: As the cultural environment of the twenty first century comes into clear focus, Cambridge Studies in Twenty-First Century. Literature and culture presents a series of monographs that undertakes the most penetrating and religious analysis of contemporary culture and thoughts. The series is driven by perception that critical thinking today is in a state of transition. The global forces that produce cultural forms are entering into powerful new alignments, which demand new analytical vocabularies in the wake of later twentieth century theory. The series will demonstrate that theory is not simply availed revolutionary gesture that we need to move beyond, but rather brings us to the thresh hold of a new episteme, which will host work that explores the most important emerging critical contours of the 21st century, marrying inventive and imaginative criticism with theoretical and philosophical rigor. The aim of the series will be to produce an enduring account of the 21st century intellectual landscape that will not only stand as a record of the critical nature of our time, but that will also forge new critical language and vocabularies with which to navigate an unfolding age. Keyword: cultural environment, perception, revolutionary, episteme, transition, vocabularies

Tort Theory, Private Attorneys General, and State Action: From Mass Torts to Texas S.B. 8

Abstract Late twentieth-century tort theory was dominated by scholars who regarded tort law as primarily a means employed by government to deter anti-social conduct. On this model, tort plaintiffs are cast as private attorneys general whose lawsuits promote safety. Tort theorists today better appreciate that this approach obscures crucial respects in which tort law is private law–law that empowers persons who have been wronged to redress the wrongs done to them. But in practice there is a continued failure to perceive the ways in which the deterrence model has shaped and distorted views of tort law, as evidenced by the terms on which both the ‘right’ and the ‘left’ critique modern mass tort litigation. More troublingly, the problem extends beyond the field of torts. Indeed, we contend that the lawyerly loss of feel for distinctions between public law and private law explains the inability of the United States Supreme Court Justices, in Whole Woman’s Health v. Jackson, to capture why S.B. 8–Texas’s radical anti-abortion statute–really is a private attorney general statute and why, as such, it should be subject to preenforcement constitutional review.

Evolving networks of human intelligence

Twentieth century theory formation in human intelligence was dominated by factor theories; network theories will dominate the twenty first. Network theories answer a broad call for formal theories in psychological science, provide a strong approach to an idiographic science, and create an opportunity to study the developmental mechanisms of human's cognitive dynamics. Although the current century already delivered two formal stationary network theories of human intelligence—mutualism and wired intelligence—integrating dynamic mechanisms remains a serious challenge. This challenge translates into clear priorities: the identification of robust developmental phenomena, the study of the biological and cognitive mechanisms that drive these phenomena, the integration of these mechanisms into network theories of growth, the integration of network theories from different explanatory levels, and the empirical characterization of the structure of network theories.

«Come muovermi nel mio corpo da uomo»: il corpo maschile travestito nel teatro inglese, dai ragazzi attori a Caryl Churchill

Among the many traditions of cross-dressing in performing practices, English Renaissance theatre plays a central symbolic role, especially considering the Shakespearean canon; however, only through the disruptive reading of gender and queer studies Shakespeare’s theatre has been studied as a transvestite theatre in which all female parts were played by boy actors. This article intends to show how this transvestite body opens a diachronic perspective on those theatrical practices of the second half of the twentieth century that rediscover the Elizabethan stage as a locus of artifice. Renaissance and twentieth-century theatre thus share the transvestite male body, not following a linear dynamic of model and imitation, but in a much more complex interweaving of echoes and returns. Through an analysis of two works by the playwright Caryl Churchill, Cloud Nine (1979) and A Mouthful of Birds (1986), the essay explores the transvestite male body as a place of dialogue between the Shakespearean and the contemporary scene, which share effeminacy -here understood as the staging of femininity on a male body- as a detonator for a wider crisis of binary categories.

“Directing the Director”

Abstract In 1955, American director Alan Schneider invited Thornton Wilder to attend rehearsals of the production he was preparing of The Skin of Our Teeth, the first important revival of the play since its premiere a decade earlier. Wilder’s rehearsal notes contained in a letter he sent Schneider after attending the rehearsal have not been previously published. Wilder’s interpretive insights into his work and his guidance for Schneider concerning the challenges inherent in The Skin of Our Teeth provide not only new historical information about the journey of this Pulitzer Prize-winning play, but they also offer useful guidance to future directors of the play. Additionally, this letter, the full text of which is transcribed here, reflects the congenial working relationship between these two important twentieth-century theater artists and points to Wilder’s continued influence over the professional career of Schneider who went on to become the foremost American director of the plays of Samuel Beckett and Edward Albee.

Revitalizing the Rhetoric of ‘Sustainability’: A Kenneth Burkean Diagnosis of Symbolic (Dis)Orders

This paper offers a new perspective on the rhetoric of ‘sustainability’ especially within dialogue around ‘design for sustainability’ (DfS) by applying and advancing the work of twentieth-century rhetorical theorist and cultural critic, Kenneth Burke. Burke’s rhetorical theory is presented here for its potential to not only highlight but also transcend the common disjunction between theory and praxis that emerges in the ‘symbol-foolishness’ underpinning various forms of unsustainability. This paper presents Burke’s theory of symbolicity and discusses four key symbolic ‘disorders’ that he identified over the course of his career, namely, hierarchic psychosis, technological psychosis, trained incapacity, and the bureaucratization of the imaginative. In conclusion, this paper suggests how enhanced rhetorical literacy, or greater ‘symbol-wisdom’, could serve an important role in reviving the notion of ‘sustainability’ itself.

Diskurse protestantischer Hebraisten der Frühen Neuzeit über jüdische Kommunikationsformeln

Abstract The study addresses the issue of the Christian scholarly interest in the Hebrew language since the rise of Humanism. Though the main focus of that interest in Hebrew grammar and vocabulary was to get a better understanding of the “Old Testament”, the subsequent reformation fostered the notion that a better knowledge of both the Hebrew language and the Jewish culture, can promote the conversion of Jews to Christianity. The article inspects possible other underlying motives and discourses behind the translation of Hebrew and Old Yiddish blessings into Latin as the most important lingua sacra, taking into account twentieth century theories about power and hegemony by Michel Foucault and Antonio Gramsci. The study examines the chapter about Jewish greetings and blessings in the original dictionary Šemot Devarim – Nomenclatura Hebraica Autore Helia Levita (Isny, 1542) and the revised translation as Nomenclator Eliae Levitae Germani by Johannes Drusius and son (Franeker, 1652). Also included are transliterated editions of both texts, with translations.

A Dentist’s Chair: For Practicality, Comfort, or Spectacle?

Abstract This essay focuses on a thirteen-inch-high reclining chair with a carved walnut frame, brass base, and emerald green velvet upholstery in the Winterthur Museum collection [1 and 2]. Created by Ira Salmon of Boston circa 1866, the chair is a patent model and part of Salmon’s efforts to win a professional reputation as a dentist early in his career. This essay documents the transformation of dentistry in America from an itinerant practice in the early republic to a professionalized career in the mid-nineteenth century. It offers evidence of how the material world of dentists changed when tools of the profession became standardized and mass produced. Developing technologies facilitated reclining chairs suited for newfangled operative techniques. The essay also focuses on a period that anticipates the development of germ theory in the early twentieth century and the sterilization of the dentist’s office. In this mid-nineteenth century moment, the aesthetics of dentist offices, and their chairs’ designs, bridge a divide between the traditional values associated with dentists and those ascribed to dentists today. The patent model demonstrates Salmon’s desire to appeal to his clients’ interest by capturing the dramatic potential of a dentist’s visit while satisfying their desire for comfort and expectation of skilful technique.

The Iceman Cometh

The Iceman Cometh

Decadence and Realism

This essay proposes a new understanding of the widely recognized disdain for realism and the realist novel among decadent writers, a disdain most critics have interpreted as a protomodernist celebration of artifice. Focusing on Oscar Wilde's dialogue “The Decay of Lying,” the essay argues instead that decadent antirealism is antimodern, embodying a repudiation of contemporary society. Decadent writers regard realism not as hidebound and traditional, as twentieth-century theorists would have it, but as terrifyingly modern. Wilde looks back to neoclassical theories of mimesis and classical Republican political theory to imagine a different, older world, one in which art improves upon brute reality and in which the artist stands apart from the social forces that realist novels make central to their literary universes.

Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Representations of the Oberammergau Passion Play: Heredity, Eugenic Theatre, and “Epic Selection”

The Oberammergau Passion Play became internationally famous in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Beginning in the 1840s and 1850s and through the early twentieth century, English-speaking foreign tourists from Ireland and the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, and even Australia published a surprising number and variety of accounts of travel to the village and attendance at the Passion Play. Professional and amateur historians described the production as an evolutionary throwback or curious hybrid of ancient Greek and medieval theatre, regarding it as an object and event of antiquarian interest. Foreign female travelers attended the play in impressive numbers, and their accounts provide insight into contemporary women's readings of theatre, travel, spirituality, gender inequality, gendered spaces, and cultural difference. Protestant writers reflected uneasily on the play's communication of spiritual truth by means of images. And all of these accounts, whether published in the popular periodical press or as monographs, in turn encouraged increasing numbers of travelers to make the same journey—represented sometimes as a religious and sometimes as an artistic pilgrimage—to the isolated Bavarian village.

Mikhail Larionov’s Rayonism and the Scientific Mythologies of the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century

The article investigates the theory of non-figurative painting developed by Mikhail Larionov (Rayonism) and its connection to parascientific theories of the early twentieth century. One of the central scientific and parascientific mythologies of the time regarded the shift in the understanding of the idea of matter. The notion of ‘radiant matter’ had a prominent place in these mythologies. The article analyses a range of frameworks, within which the idea of ‘radiant matter’ was interpreted (from a scientific research of different phenomena provoked by invisible waves to spiritualist and occultist experiments). The iconography of these waves and the theories of the dissociation of matter represent an essential input to understand how abstract art emerged in early-twentieth-century Russian painting.