Reimagining the Buddhist Universe: Pilgrimage and Cosmography in the Court of the Thirteenth Dalai Lama (1876–1933)

2014 ◽  
Vol 73 (2) ◽  
pp. 419-445 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wen-shing Chou

During his exiles from Lhasa in the 1910s, the Thirteenth Dalai Lama visited the holy places of Wutai Shan in China and Bodh Gaya in India. After his return, he commissioned paintings of these two places in cosmological mural programs of his palaces. While conforming to earlier iconographic traditions, these paintings employed empirical modes of representation unprecedented in Tibetan Buddhist paintings, revealing a close connection to the Dalai Lama's prior travels. This essay traces how these “modernized” renditions were incorporated into an existing pictorial template, and examines the deft rearticulation of a Buddhist cosmology in light of the Dalai Lama's own encounter with the shifting geopolitical terrains of the early twentieth century. I show that painting served as a powerful medium through which the Dalai Lama asserted his spiritual sovereignty and temporal authority over modernity's work of boundary making. The study elucidates a sphere of agency and creativity in the court of the Thirteenth Dalai Lama that has evaded historical inquiries to date.

2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 261-277 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexandra Ksenofontova

This article poses a question previously overlooked in the tremendous body of research on Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari: why does the cabinet take such a prominent place in the title alongside the protagonist? The question is approached through a reading of the Caligari screenplay, which reveals that its narrative can be fruitfully conceived as a struggle of ‘evil spaces’. Pursuing the origins of this original spatial structure, the article uncovers a close connection between the script and the popular fantasy novels of the early twentieth century, in particular the only novel by the Austrian graphic artist Alfred Kubin. It is finally argued that acknowledging this connection to fantasy novels as well as the importance of the spatial structure in the Caligari script allows us to reconsider the crude opposition between the script’s narrative and the film’s set design that is prevalent in the existing research on the film.


2008 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 325-352
Author(s):  
David Sehat

Clyde Fitch was the most famous playwright of the early twentieth century, but today no one studies him. The disconnect between his fame in his lifetime and his obscurity after death points to a major historiographical problem, a problem that began in Fitch's own day. Fitch's numerous contemporary critics, many of whom were early proponents of theatrical realism, criticized his plays as effeminate, bound by the narrow conventions of the legitimate theater that relied on women as its predominant patrons. By contrast, realism, as the critics under-stood it, was masculine, bringing the gritty reality of what contemporary commentators regarded as the real world to the stage. Criticizing Fitch's feminine dramatic sensibilities became a way of prodding him toward a strained realism in his own plays. Fitch's story illustrates the close connection of realism to the gendered hierarchy that became an unconscious element in the determination of literary value. In dismissing Fitch as worthy of scholarly attention, current theatrical historians have followed Fitch's contemporary critics. Even as they have eviscerated the gendered standards of the early twentieth century, present-day scholars have retained the critical judgments and the generic categories that the gendered standards produced.


2017 ◽  
Vol 59 (2) ◽  
pp. 310-345
Author(s):  
Simeon Koole

AbstractThis article rethinks the nature of power and its relation to territory in the photographic event. Focusing on thousands of photographs taken during the British Younghusband Expedition to Lhasa between 1903 and 1904, it reorients understandings of photography as either reproducing or enabling the “negotiation” or contestation of power inequalities between participants. It shows how, in the transitory relations between Tibetans, Chinese, and Britons during and after photographic events, photography acted as a means by which participants constituted themselves as responsible agents—as capable of responding and as “accountable”—in relation to one another and to Tibet as a political entity. Whether in photographs of Tibetans protesting British looting or of their “reading” periodicals containing photographs of themselves, photography, especially Kodak photography, proposed potential new ways of being politically “Tibetan” at a time when the meaning of Tibet as a territory was especially indeterminate. This article therefore examines how the shifting territorial meaning of Tibet, transformed by an ascendant Dalai Lama, weakening Qing empire, and Anglo-Russian competition, converged with transformations in the means of visually reflecting upon it. If photography entailed always-indeterminate power relations through which participants constituted themselves in relation to Tibet, then it also compels our own rethinking of Tibet itself as an event contingent on every event of photography, rather than pre-existing or “constructed” by it.


2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 172-192
Author(s):  
Victoria Stewart

Despite their different aesthetics both modernism and detective fiction engage with, refashion and, at times, critique realism, and the description of objects is central to this. Tracing how certain types of object and relationships with objects feature in works by Virginia Woolf and Agatha Christie in the 1920s reveals that for each author, descriptions of interiors, and particularly the stuff that individuals accumulate in their homes, is central, and the presence of belongings vies with the absence of their owners. Considering the valences of furniture, scrap paper and curios shows how possessions continue to speak of the real even in writing that challenges realist modes of representation.


Tempo ◽  
1948 ◽  
pp. 25-28
Author(s):  
Andrzej Panufnik

It is ten years since KAROL SZYMANOWSKI died at fifty-four. He was the most prominent representative of the “radical progressive” group of early twentieth century composers, which we call “Young Poland.” In their manysided and pioneering efforts they prepared the fertile soil on which Poland's present day's music thrives.


2004 ◽  
Vol 171 (4S) ◽  
pp. 320-320
Author(s):  
Peter J. Stahl ◽  
E. Darracott Vaughan ◽  
Edward S. Belt ◽  
David A. Bloom ◽  
Ann Arbor

2015 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 165-170
Author(s):  
P. G. Moore

Three letters from the Sheina Marshall archive at the former University Marine Biological Station Millport (UMBSM) reveal the pivotal significance of Sheina Marshall's father, Dr John Nairn Marshall, behind the scheme planned by Glasgow University's Regius Professor of Zoology, John Graham Kerr. He proposed to build an alternative marine station facility on Cumbrae's adjacent island of Bute in the Firth of Clyde in the early years of the twentieth century to cater predominantly for marine researchers.


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