Salvage

2015 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 845-859
Author(s):  
EVAN CALDER WILLIAMS
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Human Body ◽  
Insurance Law ◽  
Future Possibility ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Personal Risk ◽  
Critical Approaches ◽  
History Of

This essay develops a history of salvage both as particular activity and as concept, arguing that it has quietly become one of the fundamental structures of thought that shape how we envision future possibility. However, the contemporary sense of the word, which designates the recuperation or search for value in what has already been destroyed, is a recent one and represents a significant transformation from the notion of salvage in early modern European maritime and insurance law. In that earlier iteration, salvage denoted payment received for helping to avert a disaster, such as keeping the ship and its goods from sinking in the first place. Passing through the dislocation of this concept into private salvage firms, firefighting companies, military usage, avant-garde art, and onto the human body itself in the guise of “personal risk,” the essay argues that the twentieth century becomes indelibly marked by a sense of the disaster that has already occurred. The second half of the essay passes into speculative culture, including fiction, video games, and film, to suggest that the most critical approaches to salvage have often come under the sign of science fiction but that the last decade in particular has shown how recent quotidian patterns of gentrification and defused antagonism have articulated stranger shifts in the figure of salvage than any speculative imaginary can currently manage.

EPISTEMOLOGY OF TONE: AN OBITUARY FOR JULIEN JALÂL ED-DINE WEISS

Tempo ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 71 (281) ◽  
pp. 71-79
Author(s):  
Stefan Pohlit
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Just Intonation ◽  
Modal System ◽  
Helpful Tool ◽  
Near Eastern ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
History Of ◽  
Major Discrepancy

AbstractDuring the 1980s, Julien Jalâl Ed-Dine Weiss, founder of the Al-Kindi ensemble of Aleppo, invented a qānūn in just intonation with which he attempted to solve a major discrepancy between the theory and practice of maqām-scales. Weiss objected to the introduction of Western standards, observing that they distort the significance of interval ratios and prevent a comparative understanding of the modal system as a transnational phenomenon. In the twentieth century, the implementation of equal-semitone temperament emerged simultaneously with a notable invasion of sociological criteria into musical inquiry. The polarity observed between westernisation and tradition can be seen most visibly in the present search for identity amongst Middle- and Near-Eastern musicians, but this schismogenic process can also be observed in the history of the Western avant-garde, where microtonal explorations have been halted in favour of extra-musical conceptuality. While cross-cultural musicians are faced with a new climate of distrust, it seems most likely that the principles that draw us apart may originate in the very patterns of thought in which our notion of culture operates. Weiss's tuning system may serve as a helpful tool to foster a new and universal epistemology of tone, bridging and transcending the apparent contradictions between the two spheres.

Unexpected Subversions: Modern Colonialism, Globalization, and Commodity Culture

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy Burke
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Large Class ◽  
Consumer Culture ◽  
Global Culture ◽  
Middle Classes ◽  
Commodity Culture ◽  
Consumer Agency ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
History Of

Scholars studying the history of modern colonialism have been more reluctant to make strongly contrarian claims about consumerism and commodification similar to those made by early modern Europeanists because they are more unsettled by some of the implications of their own studies. Modern consumer culture is strongly mapped to ‘Westernization’ and globalization. There is a very large class of scholarly studies that in some respect or another discuss the association between colonialism and consumption in nineteenth- and twentieth-century global culture. Even constrained to the Western European states that created or extended formal empires in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific after 1860, studies such as Anne McClintock's intricate reading of British commodity culture indicate the extent to which colonial meanings and images were circulating within metropolitan societies. This article discusses modern colonialism, globalization, and commodity culture. It first examines the middle classes, nations, and modernity, and then considers consumer agency in the context of globalization.

Introduction

Last Acts ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 1-30
Author(s):  
Maggie Vinter
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Early Modern Drama ◽  
Modern Drama ◽  
Ars Moriendi ◽  
Critical Approaches ◽  
The Common ◽  
Critical Perspectives

The introduction outlines a theoretical framework for the book. Through a brief survey of critical approaches to Hamlet, it considers the common alignment of early modern drama with mourning and argues that new critical perspectives emerge if we focus on the experience of the dying subject instead. William Perkins’s 1595 tract, A Salve for a Sick Man, illustrates how death was understood around Shakespeare’s time. By situating Perkins’s text in relation to ancient Stoicism and twentieth-century phenomenology, the introduction explicates what is distinctive about the understanding of dying found in the ars moriendi tradition and argues for the theoretical sophistication and continuing influence of the genre.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Laura Harris
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
The United States ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Aesthetic Theory ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
History Of ◽  
Visual Artist

In Experiments in Exile, I explore and compare projects undertaken by two twentieth-century American intellectuals while they lived in voluntary exiles in the United States: the Trinidadian writer and revolutionary C. L. R. James and the Brazilian visual artist and counterculturalist Hélio Oiticica. James and Oiticica never met. They lived and worked in the United States at different moments. My focus is on James’s stay during the 1940s and on Oiticica’s stay during the 1970s. Given the significant differences between them—not just at the level of nationality but at the level of race (James was black, Oiticica was white), class (James was situated within a precarious middle class, Oiticica was firmly established within an upper middle class), sexuality (James was straight, Oiticica was gay), and disciplinary locations (James is generally situated in the history of radical social theory and practice, and Oiticica is generally situated in the history of avant-garde aesthetic theory and practice)—this is surely an unlikely combination. This study is itself an experiment, one that goes beyond the usual parameters of comparativist or transnational research, to identify, in the surprising resonances between the projects pursued by these two very disparate figures, a common project I believe they, together, bring into relief....

Cut and paste

2018 ◽  
pp. 25-65
Author(s):  
Anna Dahlgren
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Visual Culture ◽  
Historical Perspective ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
Art Form ◽  
Close Study ◽  
History Of ◽  
Illustrated Press

Chapter 1 considers the mechanisms of breaks and continuities in the history of photocollage with regard to gender, genre and locations of display. Collage is commonly celebrated as a twentieth-century art form invented by Dada artists in the 1910s. Yet there was already a vibrant culture of making photocollages in Victorian Britain. From an art historical perspective this can be interpreted as an expression of typical modernist amnesia. The default stance of the early twentieth century’s avant-garde was to be radically, ground-breakingly new and different from any historical precursors. However, there is, when turning to the illustrated press, also a trajectory of continuity and withholding of traditions in the history of photocollage. This chapter has two parts. The first includes a critical investigation of the writings on the history of photocollage between the 1970s and 2010s, focusing on the arguments and rationales of forgetting and retrieving those nineteenth-century forerunners. It includes examples of amnesia and recognition and revaluation. The second is a close study of a number of images that appear in Victorian albums produced between 1870 and 1900 and their contemporary counterparts in the visual culture of illustrated journals and books.

The Erotics of Urbanity

2021 ◽  
pp. 196-206
Author(s):  
Kathryn Babayan
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
Early Emergence ◽  
Discrete Moment ◽  
History Of

In the Conclusion, I draw on the analytical purchase of eroticism to provide a distinct vantage point onto the connections between urbanity, friendship, and spirituality. Adopting a different way of doing history in the field of early modern Persianate studies, I focus on a discrete moment in the story of Isfahan to think more broadly with historians of sexuality about the valences of erotic desires that bound together networks of friends living in previous centuries. Thinking sex with the early moderns compels me to see erasures that today silence passionate friendships and obscures the entangled history that love shared with eros and beauty. My history of Isfahan presents an early emergence of heteroerotic anxieties, provoked by the adab of urban love and Sufi homoerotic desire, that in the twentieth century were recuperated to make Iran modern.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-147
Author(s):  
Stephen Menn ◽  
Justin E. H. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Detailed Analysis ◽  
The Political ◽  
Medical Philosophy ◽  
Archival Documents ◽  
History Of ◽  
Intellectual Context ◽  
Academic Dissertations

The life of Anton Wilhelm Amo is summarized, with close attention to the archival documents that establish key moments in his biography. Next the history of Amo’s reception is considered, from the first summaries of his work in German periodicals during his lifetime, through his legacy in African nationalist thought in the twentieth century. Then the political and intellectual context at Halle is addressed, considering the likely influence on Amo’s work of Halle Pietism, of the local currents of medical philosophy as represented by Friedrich Hoffmann, and of legal thought as represented by Christian Thomasius. The legacy of major early modern philosophers, such as René Descartes and G. W. Leibniz, is also considered, in the aim of understanding how Amo himself might have understood them and how they might have shaped his work. Next a detailed analysis of the conventions of academic dissertations and disputations in early eighteenth-century Germany is provided, in order to better understand how these conventions give shape to Amo’s published works. Finally, ancient and modern debates on action and passion and on sensation are investigated, providing key context for the summary of the principal arguments of Amo’s two treatises, which are summarized in the final section of the introduction.

Boulez, Pierre (1925-2016)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Goldman
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Personal Development ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
Going Public ◽  
Concert Music ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Central Concern ◽  
Pierre Boulez ◽  
History Of ◽  
Listening Habits

French composer Pierre Boulez was one of the most influential composers of the second half of the twentieth century. His personal development mirrored the history of Western concert music. An essential figure in the history of artistic modernism, he was perceived as a leader of the musical avant-garde since 1945. In addition, through his international career as a conductor, he sought to change the listening habits of the concert-going public by initiating them, through concerts and recordings, into the classics of modernism from the first half of the twentieth century (Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Webern, Bartók, Berg, etc.). From serialism, open forms, the interface between instrument and machine, the concern with perceptibility, Boulez’s catalog forms a rich and varied corpus. Although Boulez dispensed with total serialism after a brief but decisive period, his concern with the formal unity of a work of art remained a central concern throughout his career.

A brief history of endocrinology

2011 ◽  
pp. 3-7
Author(s):  
Robert Arnott
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Endocrine Disease ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
History Of

This chapter traces the history of endocrinology, principally through the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, but also looks further back to antiquity and the early modern period when the function of the glandular system was beginning to be recognized and partly understood. It also takes us through to later in the twentieth century, when therapeutics were developed that could tackle endocrine disease, and at the significant discoveries and those scientists and clinicians who made them, placing them in context of what appears later in this volume.

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