Lulu and/or Geschwitz Idealized, in the symphonic pieces from “Lulu” and Elsewhere

2019 ◽  
pp. 73-114
Author(s):  
Margaret Notley
Keyword(s):  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Nazi Germany ◽  
Ernst Krenek ◽  
Theodor Adorno ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
A Current

This chapter treats an immediate context for censorship, here of Berg’s libretto for Lulu by authorities in Nazi Germany, and direct consequences of that action. The chapter discusses a current in Berg’s Lulu and reactions to it traceable to a particular interpretation of “fin-de-siècle decadence”: a tendency in the opera and its initial reception by a group of critics close to Berg—Willi Reich, Theodor Adorno, Willi Schuh, and Ernst Krenek—to turn Lulu into an idealized abstraction, a symbol of musical beauty in decay at the turn of the century, and to represent the music itself as absolute. This trend found necessary expression in the Symphonic Pieces from “Lulu” in 1934, which Berg arranged in response to the rejection of his libretto, but it is also discernible in a sketch that can be dated to the period of his earliest ideas about the opera.

The Chronology of Apollinaire's Alcools

PMLA ◽  
1952 ◽  
Vol 67 (7) ◽  
pp. 907-923
Author(s):  
LeRoy C. Breunig
Keyword(s):  
Direct Current ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Fin De Siècle

Guillaume Apollinaire's poetry fills the twenty-year interregnum between the end of Symbolism as an organized movement and the birth of Surrealism. The earliest selections in Alcools were composed the year of Mallarmé's death in 1898, and Calligrammes appeared only a few months before Breton and Soupault began their collaboration on Les Champs magnétiques in 1919. The work of perhaps no other poet in France at the turn of the century flows in such a direct current between the two dominant schools of the last seventy-five years. Obviously our appreciation of this period would gain considerably could we but view the poems of Apollinaire in the order in which he created them, proceeding with him from the mellifluous, fin de siècle delicacy of his first published piece, Clair de lune, to the discordant lines of Victoire:On veut de nouveaux sons de nouveaux sons de nouveaux sonsOn veut des consonnes sans voyellesDes consonnes qui pètent sourdement Imitez le son de la toupieLaissez pétiller un son nasal et continuFaites claquer votre langueServez-vous du bruit sourd de celui qui mange sans civilitéLe raclement aspiré du crachement ferait aussi une belle consonne

The Unknown Weininger: Science, Philosophy, and Cultural Politics in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna

1996 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 453-493 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chandak Sengoopta
Keyword(s):  
Doctoral Dissertation ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
August Strindberg ◽  
Central Importance ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
Jewish Intellectual ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Cultural Themes ◽  
Science Philosophy

Otto Weininger (1880–1903) is a notorious figure in European history.1 A Jewish intellectual of Vienna, Weininger committed suicide at the age of 23 after publishing a single book based on his doctoral dissertation, Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and Character, 1903). The work was admired by some of the greatest intellects of our century—Franz Kafka, Ludwig Wittgenstein, James Joyce, Karl Kraus, August Strindberg. More recently, it has attained virtually legendary status among scholars as an exemplary text of European misogyny and antisemitism. While Geschlecht und Charakter is certainly unrivaled as a compendium of turn-of-the-century prejudices, stereotypes, and anxieties, it is not simply a deranged thinker's chronicle of personal nightmares. This fact has been obscured due to the failure of recent scholars to situate Weininger and his work in the intellectual and cultural contexts of fin-de-siècle Central Europe. This paper demonstrates that Geschlecht und Charakter is an intensely personal analysis of intellectual, political, and cultural themes that were of central importance to contemporary Viennese intellectuals.

scholarly journals The image of the “horror” world in the “Fin de siècle” prose (Mikhail Artsybashev, Fyodor Sologub, Leonid Andreyev)

2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 123-129
Author(s):  
Tatyana Alexandrovna Khitarova ◽  
Elena Georgievna Khitarova
Keyword(s):  
World Order ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
The World ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Literary Process

The article examines the problem of typological features of the chronotope of the prose of the writers of the “Fin de siècleˮ, who defined the model of the world order in the image of the “horror worldˮ. The goal is analysis of the prose samples of the middle epic of Mikhail Artsybashev, Fyodor Sologub (Teternikov), Leonid Andreyev. Perversion, the corporeality of the depicted reality are the main chronotopic features found in all the literary texts involved for consideration. As we can conclude, the writers of the “Fin de siècleˮ really do make fear and horror a constantly sounding plot-forming motif. However, this constant motif for the literary process of the turn of the century sounds in a unique personal key. The writers offer their own architecture of the image of the “horrorˮ. Thus, the sound of the fear motif is an artistic characteristic of the text, it determines both the dominant of its poetics, and the worldview and attitude of the creator of the text.

scholarly journals Victorian Hallucinogens1

2008 ◽  
pp. 0
Author(s):  
Susan Zieger
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Native American ◽  
Visual Experience ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
General Interest ◽  
Hallucinogenic Drugs ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
The Senses ◽  
Gendered Power

AbstractNineteenth-century British, U.S., and European writings about the hallucinogenic drugs peyote and mescaline in anthropological, medical, and general interest journals appropriated the drugs from the context of Native American rituals. Appealing primarily to vision, which was commonly understood to be the most intellectual of the senses, and generating sensations of omniscience and self-reflexivity, these drugs became the occasion for their writers’ fantasies of intellectual transcendence and concomitant disembodiment. These fantasies tacitly promoted the imperial, raced, classed, and gendered power of the elite hallucinogenic subject. They also connected with similarfin-de-sièclepractices of consumption, including Aesthetic delight in the refinement of visual experience and in the collection of obscure global artifacts, and the passive consumption of media entertainment such as kaleidoscopes, phantasmagoria, and cinema. Although not numerous, hallucinogenic writings should be considered part of the culture of visual modernity that helped shape subjectivities at the turn of the century.

Becoming Americans in Paris: The Commune as Frontier in Turn-of-the-Century Adventure Fiction

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. Michelle Coghlan
Keyword(s):  
Gilded Age ◽  
Popular Fiction ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Historical Romances ◽  
Adventure Fiction ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Red Flag ◽  
A Site ◽  
The U.S

This chapter charts the reconfiguration of the Commune’s domestic threat in American popular fiction in the 1890s. I show how America’s fin-de-siècle preoccupation with the revolution of 1871 consistently reframes Paris as a frontier of empire even as it critically reimagines it as a site where American tourists—or, more specifically, Gilded Age American men—might be said to “find” themselves. Setting Edward King’s 1895 boys’ book, Under the Red Flag, alongside G. A. Henty’s A Woman of the Commune, and two other immensely popular but virtually forgotten historical romances of the period, The Red Republic and An American in Paris, I argue that the 1890s were a particularly apt time to revisit the Commune because of the very real labor unrest plaguing the country, and more importantly because the “romance of the Commune” served to revise American conceptions of revolution at a moment when the U.S. was reimagining its role abroad and reevaluating its attitude towards empire.

“Burlesque Tragedy” and “tristan Rapture”

2019 ◽  
pp. 39-72
Author(s):  
Margaret Notley
Keyword(s):  
Drug Use ◽  
Sexual Relationships ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Tristan Und Isolde ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Original Works ◽  
Over The Top

This chapter addresses connections between the Lulu works of Wedekind and Berg and several understandings of “fin-de-siècle decadence.” The title quotes reviews of two works that owe their existence to censorship, Erdgeist and Symphonic Pieces from “Lulu,” both of which are arguably more perfect than the uncensored original works, Wedekind’s Ur-Lulu, suppressed in 1894, and Berg’s opera, rejected by authorities in 1934. After tracing the censorship of Wedekind’s Lulu plays, the chapter focuses on his transformation of Act 3 of the Ur-Lulu, manifestly a product of turn-of-the-century decadence in its ironic, over-the-top depiction of drug use and risqué sexual relationships, into passages in acts of the two later plays. It begins a discussion of Berg’s responses to those passages in the scenes of his opera’s Act 2, each of which recalls Tristan und Isolde in a different way, and touches on the broader significance of “fin-de-siècle decadence” in Berg’s time.

scholarly journals Breaking the Codes: Female Criminality in Fin-de-Siècle Paris

1970 ◽  
pp. 69-71
Author(s):  
Christopher E. Forth
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Weimar Germany ◽  
Female Criminality ◽  
Sexual Murder ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
History Of

Ann-Louise Shapiro's Breaking the Codes: Female Criminality in Fin-de-Siècle Paris is a compelling and innovative cultural history of the problem of the female criminal in France at the turn of the century. Shapiro's work is also refreshingly distinct from other histories of this period in that it brings a sense of theoretical rigor to her primary argument that the female criminal was "a code that condensed, and thus obscured, other concerns" (p. 4). In this sense Shapiro's work is reminiscent of Mary Louise Roberts' Civilization Without Sexes: Restructuring Gender in Postwar France, 1917-1927 (Chicago, 1994) and Maria Tatar's Lustmord: Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany (Princeton, 1995), recent works which address historical responses to the problem of dangerous femininity.

Wavering in Delight

2018 ◽  
pp. 56-76
Author(s):  
Myrto Drizou
Keyword(s):  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
The Novel ◽  
New Paradigm ◽  
The Past ◽  
Models Of Teaching ◽  
The Future ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Sister Carrie

In this chapter, Drizou argues that Theodore Dreiser’s novel Sister Carrie (1900) questions the rationalization of modern progress by depicting the turn of the century as a moment that wavers between the urgent incalculability of the future and the conventional knowledge of the past, embodied in the two main plotlines of the novel: Carrie’s hasty anticipation of the future and Hurstwood’s steady retreat to the past. For many scholars, the intersecting plotlines of Sister Carrie suggest the contrasting narratives of progress and decline that confirm the irreversibility of fate in turn-of-the-century naturalist texts. Dreiser complicates the teleology of this model, however, by dramatizing the temporal unpredictability of evolutionary tropes (change, adaptability, and chance) to illustrate wavering as a mode that allows his characters to measure their options and remain open to the future. This wavering mode furnishes a new paradigm of thinking about the fin de siècle as an incalculably open jangle that welcomes (and embodies) the resistance to rationalized discourses of modernity. In this sense, Dreiser’s novel prompts us to question and rethink our contemporary processes of rationalization, such as the standardization of knowledge through period-based models of teaching and temporally restrictive paradigms of scholarship.

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