The Garden in the Machine: Two American Avant-Garde Films and the Nineteenth-Century Visual Arts

Prospects ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 22 ◽  
pp. 239-262
Author(s):  
Scott MacDonald
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Visual Arts ◽  
Film Studies ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Past ◽  
Academic Fields ◽  
The Future ◽  
Historical Periods ◽  
Logical Extension ◽  
As If

One of the primary reasons I became interested in film studies was the seeming open-endedness of the field. Cinema was new, I reasoned, and would continue to be new, unlike other academic fields, and particularly those devoted to historical periods: as a scholar and a teacher, I would face the future, endlessly enthralled and energized by the transformation of the potential into the actual. That my development as a film scholar/teacher increasingly involved me in avant-garde film seemed quite natural — a logical extension of the attraction of film studies in general: Avant-garde film was the newest of the new, the sharpest edge of the present as it sliced into the promise of the future. Scholars in some fields may empathize with the attitude I describe, but scholars in all fields will smile at its self-defeating implications: of course, I can see now how typically American my assumptions were — as if one could maintain the excitement of youth merely by refusing to acknowledge the past! Obviously, film studies, like any other discipline, is only a field once its history takes, or is given, a recognizable shape.

Scotland’s Population

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Anderson ◽  
Corinne Roughley
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Level ◽  
Population History ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Western European ◽  
As If

Scotland’s population history since the middle of the nineteenth century has too often been written either at a national level or as if what happened in a particular area was unique. There has been too much focus on losses, failings, or crises, and too little on successes and improvements in people’s experiences of life. There were multiple demographic Scotlands, linked to the diversity of the country’s economy, geography, and cultures, and many successes as well as failures. The book sets Scottish demography in a wider British and Western European framework and shows how patterns and trends from the past influence the present and the future demography of the country. Scotland’s outstandingly detailed published reports, many hitherto hardly used, are briefly described

CAN JULIEN D’HUY’S COSMOGONIES SAVE US FROM YUVAL NOAH HARARI?

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 5-34
Author(s):  
Prof. Ph.D. Jacques COULARDEAU ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Short Circuit ◽  
Deep Roots ◽  
Intelligent Machines ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Tv Shows ◽  
Present World ◽  
As If

Over the last two decades, we seem to have been confronted with a tremendous number of books, films, TV shows, or series that deal with the past and the present, not to mention the future, as if it were all out of time, timeless, even when it is history. We have to consider our present world as the continuation and the result of the long evolution our species has gone through since we emerged from our ancestors 300,000 years ago. Julien d’Huy is a mythologist who tries to capture the phylogeny of myths, and popular or folkloric stories that have deep roots in our past and have been produced, changed and refined over many millennia. Can he answer the question about how we have become what we are by studying the products of our past and present imagination? But confronted to the prediction of Y.N. Harari that our species will simply disappear as soon as the intelligent machines we are inventing and producing take over our bodies, brains, and minds in just a few decades, Julien d’Huy sure sounds like the antidote because at every turn in our long history we have been able, collectively, to seize the day, and evolve into a new stage in our life, both biological and mental, not to mention spirituality. Let’s enter Julien d’Huy’s book and find out the power and the energy that will enable us to short-circuit and avoid Yuval’s nightmare.

An Incomplete Journey Away from the Past: The Life and Ideas of Antonius Ameuney (1821–1881)

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 318-338
Author(s):  
Anthony Edwards
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
Religious Diversity ◽  
Personal Life ◽  
Linguistic Landscape ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
English Speaking

Abstract This article recovers a dissonant voice from the nineteenth-century nahḍa. Antonius Ameuney (1821–1881) was a fervent Protestant and staunch Anglophile. Unlike his Ottoman Syrian contemporaries, who argued for religious diversity and the formation of a civil society based on a shared Arab past, he believed that the only geopolitical Syria viable in the future was one grounded in Protestant virtues and English values. This article examines Ameuney’s complicated journey to become a Protestant Englishman and his inescapable characterization as a son of Syria. It charts his personal life and intellectual career and explores how he interpreted the religious, cultural, political, and linguistic landscape of his birthplace to British audiences. As an English-speaking Ottoman Syrian intellectual residing permanently in London, the case of Antonius Ameuney illustrates England to have been a constitutive site of the nahḍa and underscores the role played by the British public in shaping nahḍa discourses.

The Historyless Heathen and the Stagnating Pagan: History as Non-Native Category?

2018 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 52-91 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathryn Gin Lum
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Core Component ◽  
Change Over Time ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Religious Perspectives ◽  
Over Time

AbstractThis article asks whether and how J. Z. Smith's contention that religion is a “non-native category” might be applied to the discipline of history. It looks at how nineteenth-century Americans constructed their own understandings of “proper history”—authenticatable, didactic, and progressive—against the supposed historylessness of “heathen” Hawaiians and stagnation of “pagan” Chinese. “True” history, for these nineteenth-century historians, changed in the past and pointed to change in the future. The article asks historians to think about how they might be replicating some of the same assumptions about forward-moving history by focusing on change over time as a core component of historical narration. It urges historians to instead also incorporate the native historical imaginations of our subjects into our own methods, paying attention to when those imaginations are cyclical and reiterative as well as directional, and letting our subjects' assumptions about time and history, often shaped by religious perspectives, orient our own decisions about how to structure the stories we tell.

scholarly journals Decentering the Status Quo : The Rhetorically Sanctioned Political Engagement of Groen van Prinsterer

2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 141-159
Author(s):  
Jan Adriaan Schlebusch
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Political Engagement ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
Political Activity ◽  
Narrative Approach ◽  
Constitutional Democracy ◽  
Strategic Framework ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Status

Abstract In his strategic political positioning and engagement in the nineteenth century, Groen van Prinsterer looked towards both the past and the future. Rhetorically, he appealed to the past as a vindication of the truth and practicality of his anti-revolutionary position. He also expressed optimism for the success of his convictions and political goals in the future. This optimism was reflected in the confidence with which he engaged politically, despite experiencing numerous setbacks in his career. Relying on the phenomenological-narrative approach of David Carr, I highlight the motives and strategies behind Groen’s political activity, and reveal that the past and the future in Groen’s narrative provide the strategic framework for his rhetoric, and the basis for his activism. I accentuate how the emphasis of his narrative shifts away from the status quo and thus enables a type of political engagement that proved historically significant for the early consolidation of the Dutch constitutional democracy.

scholarly journals Other Stories: Experimental Forms of Contemporary Historying at the Crossroads Between Facts and Fictions

2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-15
Author(s):  
Małgorzata Sugiera
Keyword(s):  
New Wave ◽  
Main Argument ◽  
Historical Discourse ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Past ◽  
Academic History ◽  
The Future ◽  
Rhetorical Dimension ◽  
Hayden White ◽  
Experimental History

Summary The process of questioning the authority of academic history—in the form in which it emerged at the turn of the 19th century—began in the 1970s, when Hayden White pointed out the rhetorical dimension of historical discourse. His British colleague Alun Munslow went a step further and argued that the ontological statuses of the past and history are so different that historical discourse cannot by any means be treated as representation of the past. As we have no access to that which happened, both historians and artists can only present the past in accordance with their views and opinions, the available rhetorical conventions, and means of expression. The article revisits two examples of experimental history which Munslow mentioned in his The Future of History (2010): Robert A. Rosenstone’s Mirror in the Shrine (1988) and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s In 1926 (1997). It allows reassessing their literary strategies in the context of a new wave of works written by historians and novelists who go beyond the fictional/factual dichotomy. The article focuses on Polish counterfactual writers of the last two decades, such as Wojciech Orliński, Jacek Dukaj, and Aleksander Głowacki. Their novels corroborate the main argument of the article about a turn which has been taking place in recent experimental historying: the loss of previous interest in formal innovations influenced by modernist avant-garde fiction. Instead, it concentrates on demonstrating the contingency of history to strategically extend the unknowability of the future or the past(s) and, as a result, change historying into speculative thinking.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Gustavo Procopio Furtado
Keyword(s):  
Documentary Film ◽  
Film Studies ◽  
Literal Sense ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Film Archives ◽  
Point Of Departure

The introduction offers an overview of the documentary in contemporary Brazil and discusses the significance of archive concepts for the documentary in general and for Brazilian documentaries in particular. The archive has been undervalued as a heuristic concept in documentary film studies, which have tended to discuss it only in the literal sense of film archives and to speak of repurposed footage. The documentary, however, has an inherent affinity with the concept of the archive that becomes crucial in the work of many filmmakers. Taking Eduardo Coutinho’s Cabra marcado para morrer (Man Marked For Death/Twenty Years Later, 1964–1985) as a point of departure, the introduction argues that the documentary has a Janus-faced relationship with the archive, at once producing lasting records for the future and de-archiving materials from the past, returning what was hidden and stored away to the present.

scholarly journals Ligeti's ‘third way’: ‘Non–atonal’ elements in the Horn Trio

Tempo ◽  
2001 ◽  
pp. 17-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mike Searby
Keyword(s):  
Major Elements ◽  
Musical Language ◽  
Third Way ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Past ◽  
Ternary Form ◽  
Harmonic Language ◽  
As If

It is perhaps curious that only a year after this exchange took place in 1981, Ligeti completed his Horn Trio – which uses traditional ternary form, a passacaglia (although a disguised one), a strong melodic focus, and a harmonic language which contains clear triads and dominant sevenths in abundance. In spite of his assertions above, it does seem as if Ligeti, in addition to rejecting the Avant-garde, is looking to the past for major elements of his musical language.

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