Strangling blondes: nineteenth-century femininity and Korngold's Die tote Stadt

2011 ◽  
Vol 23 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 51-82
Author(s):  
Ben Winters
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Otto Weininger ◽  
Gender Theories ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Do So ◽  
Gender Discourses

AbstractResponses to Korngold's 1920 opera Die tote Stadt have long been filtered through the lens of his later Hollywood career. To do so, however, not only risks misunderstanding the relationship between these two different spheres of the composer's output, but also ignores the opera's complex positioning within the gender discourses of early twentieth-century Vienna. This article offers a corrective to the clichéd view of Korngold the ‘pre-filmic’ opera composer by arguing that, in its treatment of the characters Marie and Marietta, Die tote Stadt draws on a tradition of ‘strangling blonde’ imagery from the nineteenth century in order to critique the gender theories of Otto Weininger (1880–1903), which were still current in the 1920s. As such, in its concern with the nature of femininity, Die tote Stadt also draws our attention to the modern woman who had just entered the composer's life, Luise (Luzi) von Sonnenthal.

A HISTORY OF “RATIONALISM” IN VICTORIAN BRITAIN

2015 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-91 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOSHUA BENNETT
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
Sources Of Knowledge ◽  
Specific Term ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Intense Debate

“Rationalism” became the subject of intense debate in nineteenth-century Britain. This article asks why this was so, by focusing on the usage and implications of the term in contemporary argument. Rationalism was successively defined and redefined in ways that reached to the heart of Victorian epistemological and religious discussion. By treating rationalism as a contextually specific term, and examining how its implications changed between the 1820s and the early twentieth century, the article brings new perspectives to bear on the development of nineteenth-century freethought and countervailing religious apologetic. It underlines the importance of history, and constructions of intellectual lineage, as ways of establishing the relationship between rationality and religion in a progressively wider-ranging Victorian debate about the sources of knowledge and value.

The Rhythm of the Rails: Sound and Locomotion

2017 ◽  
pp. 193-210
Author(s):  
Laura Marcus
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Silent Film ◽  
Twentieth Century Literature ◽  
Endogenous Rhythms ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Century Literature

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw a fascination with the concept of ‘rhythm’ in a range of disciplinary and transdisciplinary contexts, a preoccupation which would later be developed in movements such as Henri Lefebvre’s ‘Rhythmanalysis.’ The experimental psychologists of the turn of the nineteenth century explored rhythm in relation to both the auditory and the visual, and showed a particular concern with the relationship between measures which were externally imposed and endogenous rhythms. This chapter looks at the ways in which locomotion––and in particular the locomotive railway––is used as an exemplum in rhythm studies, and then explores its auditory renditions in nineteenth and early twentieth-century literature and, as ‘implied sound,’ in silent film, in which the question of rhythm as auditory and/or visual becomes particularly charged.

Imaging Extinction: Disclosure and Revision in Photographs of the Thylacine (Tasmanian tiger)

2007 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 241-256 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carol Freeman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Nonhuman Animal ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractThe thylacine was a shy and elusive nonhuman animal who survived in small numbers on the island of Tasmania, Australia, when European settlers arrived in 1803. After a deliberate campaign of eradication, the species disappeared 130 years later. Visual and verbal constructions in the nineteenth century labeled the thylacine a ferocious predator, but photographs of individuals in British and American zoos that were used to illustrate early twentieth-century zoological works presented a very different impression of the animal. The publication of these photographs, however, had little effect on the relentless progress of extermination. This essay focuses on the relationship between photographs of thylacines and the process of extinction, between images and words, and between pictures of dead animals and live ones. The procedures, claims, and limitations of photography are crucial to the messages generated by these images and to the role they played in the representation of the species. This essay explains why the medium of photography and pleas for preservation could not save the thylacine.

James Larkin and the Jew’s Shilling

2017 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 66-84 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colum Kenny
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Trade Union ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Union Leaders ◽  
Jewish Immigrants ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

The relationship of Irish radicals and socialists to Jews in the decades before Irish independence was an ambivalent one. Neither political activists nor trade union leaders were immune to infection by anti-Semitic tropes. An influx of poor Jewish immigrants to Ireland around the end of the nineteenth century threatened the identity of Irish nationalists and workers, at a time when many Irish were forced by economic circumstances to emigrate. The article concludes that statements by James Larkin and other Irish labour activists and reformers about Jews, expressed in print in the early twentieth century, reflected a mixture of attitudes.

scholarly journals Octatonicism and Chromatic Harmony

2013 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-56 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean-Michel Boulay
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Chromatic Harmony ◽  
The Relationship

In this paper, the author looks at the relationship between octatonic structures and chromatic harmony. The discussion concentrates on two major aspects of late-tonal octatonicism: the use of alternative bass tones for the diminished seventh chord and the development of these sonorities into hexachordal and pentachordal combination chords. A number of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century chromatic passages are analyzed. Complex harmonies in chromatic passages are explained by formulating reductive models comprised of simpler, octatonic constructs.

Socialism and the Flow of  Time in Modernity

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julian Wright
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Philosophy Of History ◽  
Historical Writing ◽  
Doctoral Thesis ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Flow Of Time

This chapter asks wider questions about the flow of time as it was explored in this historical writing. It focuses on Jaurès’ philosophy of history, initially through a brief discussion of his doctoral thesis and the essay entitled ‘Le bilan social du XIXème siècle’ that he provided at the end of the Histoire socialiste, then through the work of three of his collaborators, Gabriel Deville, Eugène Fournière, and Georges Renard. One of the most important challenges for socialists in the early twentieth century was to understand the damage and division caused by revolution, while not losing the transformative mission of their socialism. With these elements established, the chapter returns to Jaurès, and in particular the long study of nineteenth-century society in chapter 10 of L’Armée nouvelle. Jaurès advanced an original vision of the nineteenth century and its meaning for the socialist present.

A Reading of Westcott's Gospel of Creation: An Early Venture into Ecological Theology?

2013 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 185-202
Author(s):  
Duncan Reid
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Ecological Theology ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Science And Theology ◽  
Doctrine Of Creation ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

AbstractIn response to the contemporary ecological movement, ecological perspectives have become a significant theme in the theology of creation. This paper asks whether antecedents to this growing significance might predate the concerns of our times and be discernible within the diverse interests of nineteenth-century Anglican thinking. The means used here to examine this possibility is a close reading of B. F. Westcott's ‘Gospel of Creation’. This will be contextualized in two directions: first with reference to the understanding of the natural world in nineteenth-century English popular thought, and secondly with reference to the approach taken to the doctrine of creation by three late twentieth-century Anglican writers, two concerned with the relationship between science and theology in general, and a third concerned more specifically with ecology.

Firearms and Princely Power in Ethiopia in the Nineteenth Century

1972 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 609-630 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. A. Caulk
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Technology ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Imperial Authority ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
National Leadership ◽  
Local Leaders

Several centuries after firearms had been introduced, they were still of little importance in Ethiopia, where cavalry continued to dominate warfare until the second half of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, they were much sought after by local leaders ambitious to secure their autonomy or to grasp supreme authority. The first of these warlords to make himself emperor, Tēwodros (1855–68), owed nothing to firearms. However, his successors, Yohannis IV (1872–89) and Minīlik (d. 1913), did. Both excelled in their mastery of the new technology and acquired large quantities of quick-firing weapons. By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, possession of firearms — principally the breech loading rifle — had become a precondition for successfully contending for national leadership. Yet the wider revolution associated (as in Egypt) with the establishment of a European-style army did not follow. Nor was rearmament restricted to the following of the emperor. Despite the revival of imperial authority effected by Yohannis and Minīlik, rifles and even machine-guns were widely enough spread at the turn of the century to reinforce the fragmentation of power long characteristic of the Ethiopian state. Into the early twentieth century, it remained uncertain if the peculiar advantages of the capital in the import of arms would be made to serve centralization.

Vitalistic Discourses of Violin Pedagogy in the Early Twentieth Century

2014 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 169-190
Author(s):  
Stefan Knapik
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Historical Evidence ◽  
Final Word ◽  
Collaborative Activity ◽  
Violin Pedagogy ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Scientific Approach ◽  
Joseph Joachim ◽  
Violin Playing

Abstract The pedagogical treatise is generally understood to be a manual of singing or instrumental techniques that is largely practical in approach, yet a critique of violin tutor books dating from the early twentieth century, especially those written by the renowned violinists Joseph Joachim (writing in conjunction with Andreas Moser), Leopold Auer, and Carl Flesch, reveals an extensive engagement with a range of wider ideologies. In a bid to trump the supposedly deadening effects of both a historicism resulting from the availability of earlier treatises, as well as the overly scientific approach taken by contemporaneous treatises, these violinist-authors embrace metaphysical ideals of mind or vitality, and the result is a model of violin playing founded on the concept of “singing tone,” an idea developed out of nineteenth-century notions of song/melody as embodying a vital essence. As did Wagner, in his 1869 essay Über das Dirigiren, writers play with the idea that theoretical and performative categories, such as tempo, phrasing, dynamics, vibrato, and types of bow stroke, both conflict with each other and find a deeper unity in a subjectivist ideal of tone. The approach of these texts is not explorative, however, so much as a rather defensive championing of the idea of mind or vitality: ideologies of self, health, and nationalism ultimately prevail over an engagement with historical evidence in Moser's discussion of ornaments, and Auer's intolerance of any mitigating influence that might qualify the artist's final word on aesthetic matters is reminiscent of a reductive, Nietzschean ideal of vitality. Nevertheless, writers struggle to reconcile it with the messier realities of performing, as an embodied and collaborative activity, and subsequently what speaks louder in their texts are anxieties over affronts to notions of self, expressed using pathological notions common to the era. Whereas at times writers encourage students of the violin to share in their lauding of vitalistic ideals, more often than not they try to impose disciplinary measures as a means of inculcating them.

American Legal Thought in Transatlantic Context, 1870-1914

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
David M. Rabban
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
First Generation ◽  
The United States ◽  
Recent Book ◽  
Historical School ◽  
Legal Thought ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Sociological Jurisprudence

Most American legal scholars have described their nineteenth-century predecessors as deductive formalists. In my recent book, Law’s History : American Legal Thought and the Transatlantic Turn to History, I demonstrate instead that the first generation of professional legal scholars in the United States, who wrote during the last three decades of the nineteenth century, viewed law as a historically based inductive science. They constituted a distinctive historical school of American jurisprudence that was superseded by the development of sociological jurisprudence in the early twentieth century. This article focuses on the transatlantic context, involving connections between European and American scholars, in which the historical school of American jurisprudence emerged, flourished, and eventually declined.

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