The Confusion of Diverse Voices: Musical and Social Polyphony in Seventeenth-Century French Opera

2020 ◽  
Vol 73 (2) ◽  
pp. 567-594
Author(s):  
Ellen R. Welch
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Choral Music ◽  
Real World ◽  
Pierre Corneille ◽  
Aesthetic Value ◽  
The Real ◽  
French Opera ◽  
The Aesthetic

This essay explores how two early modern French writers considered choral music in opera as a figure for society. Pierre Corneille, in his musical tragedy “Andromède,” and scientist and critic Claude Perrault, in several texts about music and acoustics, made subtle apologies for the polyphonic choral song condemned by many contemporaries as unintelligible. Beyond defending the aesthetic value of choral music, Corneille and Perrault associated multi-part song with collective vocalizations offstage, in the real world. Their instructions on how to appreciate choral interludes in opera also served, therefore, to train listeners to attend to the polyphony of society.

Literary Approaches to Medieval and Early Modern Arabic Biography

2010 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 237-253 ◽  
Author(s):  
JULIA BRAY
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
Historical Source ◽  
Cultural Importance ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Modern Arabic ◽  
Literary Composition

AbstractArabic biographical writing is much used as a historical source, and scholars agree that its textuality must be taken into account in evaluating its content. There is less agreement, though, on the importance of thoroughly understanding the range of processes of literary composition used by biographers. This article approaches three sets of biographies from a purely literary viewpoint: two medieval sketches of women, a Sufi and a songstress respectively; three seventeenth-century hagiographies of the physician and theosopher Dāwud al-Anṭākī; and a thirteenth-century portrait of one man of letters, al-Qifṭī, by another, Yāqūt. It concludes that the art and care devoted to shaping such commemorations of individuals is evidence of the aesthetic and cultural importance of biography as an Arabic literary genre.

scholarly journals Measuring the Aesthetic Success of Books: Can User-driven Databases Fill the Gap?

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 322-332 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sven Form
Keyword(s):  
Real World ◽  
General Public ◽  
Outcome Variable ◽  
Actual Number ◽  
The Real ◽  
Public Data ◽  
Literary Prizes ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Uk

Abstract Researchers that wish to evaluate the aesthetic success or functional creativity of books in the real world need a method to measure the outcome variable. However, sales figures are rarely published. Bestseller lists and expert judgments may not adequately reflect the aesthetic success among the general public. Data available on the platform Goodreads may serve as an alternative for measuring the popularity of books. In the present study, the ratings and number of ratings from Goodreads, as well as the number of literary prizes awarded are compared with the actual number of copies sold for a significant sample, the 98 most bestselling books in the UK from 1998 to 2012. Results indicated that literary prizes cannot serve as a gauge for the popularity of a book. While ratings were associated with copies sold, the number of ratings was a significantly better indicator of the sales figures of a book.

Madame Butterfly: The story

1991 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 125-158 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arthur Groos
Keyword(s):  
Performance Practice ◽  
Real World ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Implicit Assumption ◽  
The Real ◽  
Madame Butterfly ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Scholarly Attention

One of the tasks of opera scholarship, broadly defined as an interdisciplinary enterprise, should be to include within its purview areas of investigation that have received little attention in purely musicological research. While it is obvious that libretto studies might form one such focus, there is a broader area that should not be ignored. This is the historical and cultural situation of opera and its reception, a subject usually excluded in formalist analyses and studies of musical sources or performance practice, often with the implicit assumption that the ‘aesthetic world’ of opera is self-contained or has nothing to do with the ‘real world’. Even if one does not subscribe to contemporary theory's penchant for subsuming art and history into textuality, the interactions between opera and its cultural context are many-sided and complex, and deserve full scholarly attention.

The Land in Pure Land

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melissa Anne-Marie Curley
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Real World ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Warring States Period ◽  
Pure Land ◽  
Community Based ◽  
The Real ◽  
Warring States ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
A Site

Polemical accounts suggest that the Western Paradise has traditionally been imagined as a strictly transcendent pocket universe, having no relation to this world. But medieval Pure Land believers sought the Pure Land in this world in a variety of ways, mapping it onto the landscape around them in order to rehearse the event of birth. Hōnen’s understanding of the Pure Land amplifies its supernatural character as a site within which the laws governing the real world do not apply. Shinran’s identification of himself as neither monk nor layman further knits together estrangement from the real world and birth in the Pure Land. Rennyo takes Shinran’s self-identification seriously, attempting to build a community based on the principle of mutual equality and organized according to seniority, reflecting the utopian values of the Warring States period. “Traditional” Pure Land does not begin to emerge until the early modern period.

Le refuge par l’écriture : les utopies protestantes à l’époque de la Révocation de l’Édit de Nantes

Moreana ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 44 (Number 171- (3-4) ◽  
pp. 146-163
Author(s):  
Laetitia Cherdon
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Real World ◽  
The Real ◽  
Edict Of Nantes ◽  
Made In ◽  
The Ideal

During the second half of the seventeenth century the repression against Huguenots in France increased and led to the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685), definitively prohibiting Protestantism. Most of the Huguenots stayed in France and abjured their religion, but a certain number of them fled abroad. The utopias written by French Protestants during this period represent “another exile”. First the recourse to the utopian genre reveals a flight from reality and present. Then, if original propositions are made in the ideal societies imagined by the authors – for example to avoid the evils Protestants are subjected to – they hardly seem to be feasible in the real world. This reinforces the impression of refuge in writing. Finally, these utopias also constitute a place of compensation and expression for authors who actually exploit the notion of pleasure in writing. It’s very explicit when writers integrate autobiographic elements, digressions or descriptions.

Divine Poetry? Early Modern European Orientalists on the Beauty of the Koran

2009 ◽  
Vol 89 (4) ◽  
pp. 455-488 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Loop
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Aesthetic Value ◽  
Islamic Theology ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Divine Origin ◽  
Islamic Belief

AbstractThis article discusses Western attitudes to the style of the Koran from the sixteenth to the late eighteenth century. The subject is of particular interest because the question of the Koran's aesthetic value is ultimately linked with the Islamic belief that the inimitable beauty of Muhammad's revelation is the very proof of its divine origin (i'jāz al-Qur'ān). Given the apologetic function of this doctrine in Islamic theology, many early modern European orientalists, from Theodor Bibliander to Ludovico Marracci, criticised the style. Some of the arguments presented were remarkably persistent and can be followed up to the present day. This article also shows, however, that since the end of the seventeenth century scholars such as Andreas Acoluthus, George Sale and Claude-Etienne Savary had developed a more favourable attitude to the Koranic style, while, at the end of the eighteenth century, the Prophet Muhammad was seen as an inspired genius and the Koran as an example of 'divine poetry'.

scholarly journals The Aesthetic Features and Significance of the Veritism in Garland’s Short Stories - A Study on Main-Travelled Roads

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 20
Author(s):  
Neng-wei Fan
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Literary Theory ◽  
Rural Areas ◽  
Aesthetic Value ◽  
Real Situation ◽  
The Real ◽  
American Writer ◽  
Hamlin Garland ◽  
Urban And Rural Areas ◽  
The Aesthetic

Hamlin Garland, an influential American writer, puts forward his literary theory—Veritism. His collection of short stories-Main-Travelled Roads insists on describing the real situation of Midwest and West rural areas by using “Veritism”, as well as expresses the great humanistic concern and deep thinking about the changes that had taken place between urban and rural areas. By analyzing the figures and plots of Main-Travelled Roads, this paper will reveal humanism and classical sensibility, happy endings, and aesthetic value in it, and let readers understand the theme of the short stories thoroughly, and appreciate the Veritism comprehensively.

Forging nobility: the construction of a civic elite in early modern Madrid

Urban History ◽  
2000 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 165-188
Author(s):  
Mauro Hernández
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
City Council ◽  
The Real ◽  
Urban Elites ◽  
The City

Based on notarial and municipal sources in Madrid from the late sixteenth century to 1808, this article challenges current views of Castilian urban elites as mere reflections of noble hegemony. It assesses the implications of widespread venality of offices, as well as the real meaning of the estatuto of 1603, which formally excluded non-nobles from the city council. Ultimately, it argues that the system of preferment contributed in part to the long-term backwardness of seventeenth-century Castile.

Fiction cosmos as an object of interpretation

2021 ◽  
pp. 49-55
Author(s):  
Leonid Yu. Fukson ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Real World ◽  
Symbolic Representation ◽  
Semantic Structure ◽  
Art World ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
The Real ◽  
Greek Philosopher ◽  
Different Types ◽  
The Aesthetic

The degree of comprehensibility of any art creation depends on its perception as a coherent whole. It is one of the axioms of hermeneutics. Nonetheless, the internal links of a fictional text can be divided into two different types by similarity and by contrast. This fact allows for an analogy that is due to the fiction world being somewhat similar to the real world, i.e., arranged quite in line with the doctrine of the ancient Greek philosopher Empedocles. This philosopher thought the complex unity of the cosmos to be organized by two opposite powers - Love (φιλία) and Feud (νέικος). A modern physicist would call them the forces of attraction and repulsion. The analogs of “love” attraction and “hostile” repulsion are a symbolic representation and a tension of opposite values in a fiction world. When drawing the above analogy, one should take into account the fact that the art world, unlike the real one, has a purely intentional character, that is, all its objects and the connections between them are mediated by the consciousness and value-based intention of the author, the protagonist, and the reader. These opposing powers of “Love” and “Feud” may also be called the integral and differential axes of the value-semantic structure coordinates of the fiction cosmos. It is in these coordinates that the aesthetic event and the comprehensive participation of the reader take place. The paper provides a number of analyses of various works and fragments of fiction to substantiate the above-formulated thesis.

Violent Readings

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Hofreiter
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
North America ◽  
Real World ◽  
New World ◽  
Holy War ◽  
Violent Behaviour ◽  
Spanish Conquest ◽  
The Real ◽  
Ex Post ◽  
Ex Post Facto

The chapter addresses the question in how far herem texts have inspired and shaped war and violent behaviour in the real world. It briefly reviews passages in Ambrose and Augustine that arguably constitute patristic antecedents to later violent readings. This review is followed by a detailed treatment of the reception of herem texts during the medieval crusades, which draws on crusading chronicles, songs, poems, epics, and sermons; then by briefer sections on the medieval inquisition, the Spanish conquest of the New World, the ‘Christian holy war’ in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century authors, and colonial wars in North America. The chapter demonstrates that the OT generally and herem texts specifically provided narratives, categories, and labels by which Christians understood themselves and their ‘enemies’. Herem texts were sometimes used to justify massacres ex post facto; at the same time, it cannot be demonstrated that they shaped the planning or execution of mass slaughters.

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