THE CASE OF “JENNY”: DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI AND THE CENSORSHIP DIALECTIC

2005 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 557-584 ◽  
Author(s):  
Celia Marshik

DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTIand his artistic circle are emerging as privileged sites of modernist genesis. Studies by Jessica Feldman (Victorian Modernism: Pragmatism and the Varieties of Aesthetic Experience) and Allison Pease (Modernism, Mass Culture, and the Aesthetics of Obscenity) include Rossetti and Algernon Swinburne, respectively, in their reassessments of modernism. In a complementary move, Jerome McGann argues inDante Gabriel Rossetti and the Game That Must Be Lostthat Rossetti's art anticipates Imagism (44) and is characterized by a “hyper-realism that anticipates certain Postmodern styles” (32). Such work implicitly questions, in Feldman's words, the narratives of “strife, loss, [and] rupture” (4) that have been told about modernism's relationship with its predecessors. By linking nineteenth- and twentieth-century artists in a historical trajectory of aesthetic change, as Pease does, or by effacing the historical through a “web” of Victorian modernism, as Feldman does, it becomes possible to see new relations among authors previously separated by critical practice. Rossetti and associates enjoy a new spotlight as they become modern through their aesthetic productions and domestic arrangements.

Author(s):  
Tobias Berger

This chapter embeds contemporary translations of ‘the rule of law’ in their historical trajectory. It reveals how the introduction of village courts by the colonial administration at the dawn of the twentieth century and current efforts by international donor agencies to activate these village courts follow strikingly similar logics. The village courts are therefore neither an exclusively global imposition nor an ostensibly local institution; instead, they have emerged in complex processes of translation in which the global and the local have become inseparably intertwined. Having reconstructed this historical trajectory, the chapter also provides a brief overview of Bangladesh’s recent political history and maps the country’s contemporary legal landscape.


Tempo ◽  
1966 ◽  
pp. 2-11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aurelio de la Vega

For a long time now—long when we consider the quick, changing time-scale of our days—electronic music has been with us. The public at large usually remains cold, confused or merely dazed when faced with any new aesthetic experience. Critics, musicologists and the like still seem, as usual, to be unable to predict what will happen to this peculiar, mysterious and often anathematized way of handling musical composition, while many traditionally-minded composers consider it a degrading destruction of the art of music. On the other hand, the electronic medium seems to attract a long, motley caravan of young, inexperienced and often unprepared ‘beatnik type’ self-titled composers, who believe that the world began yesterday and that you only have to push buttons and prepare IBM cards to obtain magical results. Probably not since Schoenberg proclaimed the equal value of the twelve semitones of our sacred but by now obsolete tempered scale has twentieth-century music been faced with such a bewilderment.


2021 ◽  
Vol 95 (3) ◽  
pp. 423-446
Author(s):  
Samuel E. Backer

In the early twentieth century, vaudeville was the most popular theatrical form in the United States. Operating before the rise of mechanically reproduced entertainment, its centralized booking offices moved tens of thousands of performers across hundreds of stages to an audience of millions. Designed to gather and analyze data about both audiences and performers, these offices created a complex informational economy that defined the genre—an internal market that sought to transform culture into a commodity. By reconstructing the concrete details of these business practices, it is possible to develop a new understanding of both the success of the vaudeville industry and its influence on the evolution of American mass culture.


2020 ◽  
pp. 89-138
Author(s):  
Kamilla Elliott

Chapter 3 discusses how, just as new copyright laws were legitimizing intermedial adaptations, modernist theories drastically diminished the theoretical fortunes of adaptation with their rejection of the past and celebration of the new. Modernism shattered adaptation into allusions: studying allusions as adaptations would indubitably help to restore the theoretical fortunes of adaptation under modernism. Modernism’s hostility to mass culture was often aimed at adaptation: even theorists valorizing other popular cultural forms opposed it. Requiring film to dissociate from other art forms in order to emerge as an art in its own right, rather than as a craft or a recording device for other arts, medium specificity theory undermined adaptation in literature-and-film studies. Affecting all kinds of adaptation, the formalist turn diminished the theoretical fortunes of adaptation by rejecting the cultural theories that had valorized adaptation in prior centuries. Joined to medium specificity theories and structuralist semiotics, intermedial adaptation became not only aesthetically undesirable but also theoretically impossible under theories that content cannot separate from form to appear in another medium. With the advent of the theoretical turn in the humanities, adaptation became a battleground upon which theoretical wars were fought, battles that, paradoxically, foregrounded it. By the 1990s, adaptation was becoming an established, if divided, diasporic field, engaging a panoply of theories.


2020 ◽  
pp. 96-110
Author(s):  
Erin S. Finzer

The publications of Ediciones Vigía have intense emotional lives that provoke surprise and enchantment among reader-viewers. This chapter explores how and why Vigía books have become such prized possessions by highlighting their circulation through both the market economy of collectors, consumers, and tourists and the affective economy of gift exchange. It theorizes that the emotional intimacy and aesthetic experience engendered by the handcrafted books draw reader-viewers into the press’s community of writers, artists, artisans, and admirers. This investment, in turn, provides a symbolic antidote to the spiritual deprivation of a utilitarian state and re-inspires the liberating idealism once promised by twentieth-century Latin American revolutionary movements.


Slavic Review ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 67 (3) ◽  
pp. 551-566 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ilya Kliger

Ilya Kliger addresses the question of Mikhail Bakhtin's intervention in modernist discourse by taking a step back from Bakhtin's views on modernist literature and outlining instead a more general Bakhtinian conception of the modernist condition as characterized by what Kliger calls “a crisis of authorship.” The article focuses on Bakhtin's early work in narratological aesthetics and situates it within the longue durée context of debates about the status of the subject of aesthetic experience and, more generally, of knowledge, debates that can provisionally be seen as originating at the end of the eighteenth century and coming to a head within the intellectual and creative milieu of twentieth-century modernism. Early Bakhtin helps us formulate a specifically modernist—by contrast with what will be called “transcendental” and “realist“—critique, a critique not limited to the field of literary analysis alone but applying to all forms of thinking that either presuppose abstract subject-object division or rely on modes of synthetic reconciliation.


2014 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 205-228
Author(s):  
Mathijs Sanders

Abstract Claiming or Proving. Models in Dutch Literary Criticism around 1917The first two decades of the twentieth century saw a rapid expansion of literary criticism in the Dutch literary field. Models played an important role in contemporary debates about the nature and function of criticism. In search for new modes of critical writing after the Movement of 1880, critics (consciously or not) made use of discursive conventions, textual genres and exemplary predecessors in order to determine their own critical practice. This article develops a model for studying the specific features and functions of models in literary criticism by analyzing a questionnaire in the Dutch weekly magazine De Groene Amsterdammer in 1917.


2004 ◽  
Vol 65 ◽  
pp. 157-160
Author(s):  
Mark Hendrickson

Between February 28 and March 1, 2003, an interdisciplinary group of scholars gathered at the University of California, Santa Barbara to consider the evolution of Americans' thinking about capitalism in the last half of the twentieth century. The conference, organized by Nelson Lichtenstein (University of California, Santa Barbara) and entitled “Capitalism and Its Culture: Rethinking Twentieth-Century American Social Thought,” focused on the years between 1938 and 1973, when capitalism as an idea and a system moved from a term of some contestation to an almost naturalized phenomenon that equated the market with progress, democracy, and civil society. In these mid-century decades, intellectuals increasingly substituted a discourse involving bureaucracy, modernization, and mass culture for earlier concerns over class conflict, social inequality, and the place of the large corporation in the democratic polity. The conference provided an opportunity for scholars of the family, academia, radicalism, feminism, and conservatism to explore the development of and challenges to capitalism and its culture.


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