Debussy's Legacy and the Construction of Reputation

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marianne Wheeldon
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Cultural Politics ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
Concert Music ◽  
Central Figure ◽  
To Come ◽  
State Of Affairs ◽  
Reputation Building

This book examines the vicissitudes of Debussy’s posthumous reception in the 1920s and early 1930s and analyzes the confluence of factors that helped to overturn the initial backlash against his musical aesthetic. In tracing this overarching narrative, this study enters into dialogue with research in the sociology of reputation and commemoration, examining the collective nature of the processes of artistic consecration. Key in this regard is identifying the networks of influence that had to come together and act in several spheres—textual, performative, material—to safeguard the composer’s legacy. Today, Debussy’s position as a central figure in twentieth-century concert music is secure: this book examines how and why this seemingly inevitable state of affairs came about. Although this study focuses on one particular instance of reputation building, its scope is also broader in that it addresses the more general processes by which reputations are constructed, contested, and consolidated. And by analyzing the forces that came to bear on the formation of Debussy's legacy, this book contributes to a greater understanding of the interwar period—the cultural politics, debates, and issues that confronted musicians in 1920s and 1930s Paris.

A war hero or a Hitler soldier?

2019 ◽  
pp. 50-57
Author(s):  
Pavel Gotovetsky
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
Military Service ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
National Committee ◽  
World War ◽  
The Third ◽  
The World ◽  
The Third Reich

The article is devoted to the biography of General Pavlo Shandruk, an Ukrainian officer who served as a Polish contract officer in the interwar period and at the beginning of the World War II, and in 1945 became the organizer and commander of the Ukrainian National Army fighting alongside the Third Reich in the last months of the war. The author focuses on the symbolic event of 1961, which was the decoration of General Shandruk with the highest Polish (émigré) military decoration – the Virtuti Militari order, for his heroic military service in 1939. By describing the controversy and emotions among Poles and Ukrainians, which accompanied the award of the former Hitler's soldier, the author tries to answer the question of how the General Shandruk’s activities should be assessed in the perspective of the uneasy Twentieth-Century Polish-Ukrainian relations. Keywords: Pavlo Shandruk, Władysław Anders, Virtuti Militari, Ukrainian National Army, Ukrainian National Committee, contract officer.

La Guerre en dentelles: Women and the Prix de Rome in French Cultural Politics

1998 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-129 ◽  
Author(s):  
Annegret Fauser
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Cultural Politics ◽  
Music Composition ◽  
Public Recognition ◽  
Nadia Boulanger ◽  
First Time

In 1903, one hundred years after the Prix de Rome had been created in music composition, women were allowed to participate in the competition for the first time. In 1913, Lili Boulanger became the first woman to win the prize, crowning the efforts of three others-Juliette Toutain, Hélène Fleury, and Nadia Boulanger-to achieve this goal. Their stories are fascinating case studies of the strategies women employed to achieve success and public recognition within the complex framework of French cultural politics at the beginning of the twentieth century.

EEN POPULAIRE ARISTOCRAAT

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 153-169
Author(s):  
Erica van Boven
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
General Public ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
Reading Public ◽  
Cultural Hierarchy ◽  
Intellectual Elite

A POPULAR ARISTOCRAT. ARTHUR VAN SCHENDEL AND THE READING PUBLIC IN THE 1930S In Dutch literary culture of the first half of the twentieth century, intellectual elite and general public were not only separate, but even opposite categories. ‘Highbrow’ and ‘middlebrow’ held polarized positions in matters of cultural hierarchy and literary taste, which led to fierce debates. Strikingly, one author was able to bridge this gap: Arthur van Schendel (1874-1946) appealed both ends of the spectrum and thus had an exceptional, connecting role in the cultural divides of the interwar period. This article analyses the responses to Van Schendels so-called ‘Dutch novels’ in order to find out what made Arthur van Schendel highly valued by leading professionals as well as loved by the reading audience.

Christianity, Plurality and Vernacular Religion in early Twentieth-Century Glastonbury: A Sign of Things to Come?

2015 ◽  
Vol 51 ◽  
pp. 302-321
Author(s):  
Marion Bowman
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Considerable Heterogeneity ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
The Past ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Vernacular Religion ◽  
Important Time ◽  
To Come ◽  
Shed Light

This essay focuses upon a significant place, Glastonbury, at an important time during the early twentieth century, in order to shed light on a particular aspect of Christianity which is frequently overlooked: its internal plurality. This is not simply denominational diversity, but the considerable heterogeneity which exists at both institutional and individual level within denominations, and which often escapes articulation, awareness or comment. This is significant because failure to apprehend a more detailed, granular picture of religion can lead to an incomplete view of events in the past and, by extension, a partial understanding of later phenomena. This essay argues that by using the concept of vernacular religion a more nuanced picture of religion as it is – or has been – lived can be achieved.

The life assurance controversy

1853 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 216-219
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Actual Condition ◽  
Life Assurance ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
To Come ◽  
State Of Affairs

It was hardly to be expected but that an attempt to demonstrate the inconveniences arising from daily increasing competition in the business of life assurance should meet with resistance and reprobation. The large number of persons interested in novel undertakings of the character in question would naturally feel themselves aggrieved at statements which went to prove that such undertakings were mischievous because they could not be successful, and which sought to demonstrate their hopelessness of success by an expose of their actual condition; on the other hand, it is not much to be wondered at, that minds familiar only with a state of affairs so wholly different should regard with anxiety and alarm a succession of enterprises threatening not merely to encroach on their own field of operation, but, by a series of failures, to bring all alike into general suspicion and discredit. As in most other controversies, much allowance is to be made on either side. The interests of the two parties are probably not altogether antagonistic, but they can scarcely fail to come into serious collision unless placed under more carefully devised regulations than at present exist.

scholarly journals Now: A Post-Romantic Countertextuality of the Contemporary

CounterText ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 186-206 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Corby
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Final Part ◽  
Ethical Position ◽  
Conceptual Apparatus ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Future ◽  
Contemporary Situation ◽  
To Come ◽  
Ethical Stance

In this essay James Corby questions the dominant future-oriented nature of the ethical turn of theory and philosophy in the final decades of the twentieth century and its aesthetic influence. Focusing in particular upon the ethical position of Jacques Derrida, Corby argues that the desire to avoid the closure of the contemporary and to preserve the possibility of difference by cultivating a radical attentiveness to that which is ‘to come’ often risks a too complete disengagement from the present, leading to an empty and ineffectual ethical stance that actually preserves the contemporary situation that it seeks to open up. Corby makes a case for this theoretical investment in the possibility of a non-contemporary (typically futural) rupture as being understood as forming part of a far-reaching romantic tradition. In opposition to this tradition he sketches a post-romantic alternative that would understand difference as an immanent, rather than imminent, matter. He argues that this should be considered congruent with a countertextual impulse oriented not towards a revelatory futurity, but, rather, towards the possible displacements, dislocations, and transformations already inherent in the contemporary. The final part of the essay develops this idea, positioning countertextuality as the articulation of alternative contemporaries. In this regard, the literature of the future is not ‘to come’, it is already here. The challenge is to recognise it as such, and this means being prepared to modify and change the conceptual apparatus that guides us in our thinking of literature and the arts.

The Political ‘Left’ in the Interwar Period, 1924–1939

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pamela Radcliff
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Great Depression ◽  
Interwar Period ◽  
The Political ◽  
Community Life ◽  
Bolshevik Revolution ◽  
Mass Society ◽  
The Great Depression ◽  
Political Struggles ◽  
Political Left

In the turbulent interwar period, the political ‘Left’ was one of the most visible protagonists, with historians continuing to disagree about the role it played in shaping the outcome of the political struggles. Embedded in strong ‘moral narratives’ about the ‘rise of fascism’, the ‘crisis of democracy’, and the nature of the Bolshevik Revolution, the political Left has been vilified or lionized. For the period from the mid-1920s until 1939, both supporters and detractors agree that the Left was on the defensive, internally divided and weakened by the Great Depression and subject to repression by the state, whether democratic, authoritarian, or Stalinist. This chapter argues that the failure narrative should not subsume the vibrant experimentation and rich and contradictory diversity of the Left experience. A portrait emerges of the interwar Left that wrestled with inevitably imperfect and varied solutions to the ‘problem of community life’ in twentieth-century mass society.

Conclusion

2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vernon Bogdanor
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Self Confidence ◽  
History Of ◽  
To Come ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Intellectual Elites

This concluding chapter sums up the key findings of this study on the history of the British constitution in the twentieth century. The findings reveal that while there was widespread confidence in the virtues of the constitution at the beginning of the twentieth century, that confidence seemed to have evaporated. This loss of confidence coincided with a collapse of national self-confidence that had begun in the 1960s when British political and intellectual elites began to come to terms with the fact that Great Britain was falling economically behind her continental competitors.

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