Magical Printing

2019 ◽  
pp. 27-64
Author(s):  
Arthur Asseraf
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Printing Press ◽  
Magical Thinking ◽  
Actual Usage ◽  
History Of ◽  
Catch Up

This chapter gives a brief history of newspapers in colonial Algeria, showing how beliefs about newspapers contrasted with their actual usage. The men who conquered Algeria believed that the printing press could bring modernity. This belief can be described as a form of magical thinking. In practice, newspapers behaved in unexpected ways as they interacted with the rest of the news ecosystem. In the summer of 1881, the French Parliament passed two laws that instituted a division between those who could publish and those who could not. But while Europeans dominated printing, they did not control reading. Algerians had read newspapers well before the French arrived, and continued to import publications not intended for them. Yet by the turn of the twentieth century, the belief in magical printing had spread to elite Muslim Algerians, who saw their production of newspapers as an attempt to ‘catch up’ with Europeans.

scholarly journals A tipografia nacional finissecular: micro-história de um tipógrafo orientalista

2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marta Pacheco Pinto
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Printing Press ◽  
History Of ◽  
Oriental Studies

This essay investigates an orientalist typography operating in Portugal from the end of the nineteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century by focusing on the typographer José António Dias Coelho (1858-1940). He served for almost fifty years at the national printing press (Imprensa Nacional) and was responsible for the composition of most of the works then published by well-reputed Portuguese orientalists. The essay is divided into two parts: first, evidence is provided of his notorious performance in using Oriental types based on testimonies extracted from books’ paratexts by Portuguese orientalists (such as Guilherme de Vasconcelos Abreu, Sebastião Rodolfo Dalgado, or David Lopes); then, a micro-history of the Portuguese typographer is written so as to evince his role in the genealogy of Oriental Studies in Portugal.

scholarly journals From everyday speech to literary style: The decline of the distant address De in Norwegian during the twentieth century

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Agnete Nesse
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Factors ◽  
Popular Media ◽  
Linguistic Features ◽  
Literary Style ◽  
Actual Usage ◽  
Address Forms ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractChange in norms for the use of address forms and change in the actual usage of these forms are an important part of the history of any language. By investigating how certain grammatical features are chosen for specific pragmatic meaning, we deepen our understanding of the relationship between language and society. These changes can be described from several angles by focussing on intralinguistic factors (which linguistic features are used) or on social factors. In this article, we will take both perspectives into consideration by looking at the forms of pronominal address that have been used in Norway, as well as how and why they have changed. The data is drawn primarily from radio and weekly magazines, the popular media of the twentieth century.

scholarly journals Anon is Not Dead: Towards a History of Anonymous Authorship in Early-Twentieth-Century Britain1

2016 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Emily Kopley
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Oral Tradition ◽  
Printing Press ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Printed Word ◽  
Aesthetic Ideal

In 1940, Virginia Woolf blamed the printing press for killing the oral tradition that had promoted authorial anonymity: “Anon is dead,” she pronounced. Scholarship on the printed word has abundantly recognized that, far from being dead, Anon remained very much alive in Britain through the end of the nineteenth century. Even in the twentieth century, Anon lived on, among particular groups and particular genres, yet little scholarship has addressed this endurance. Here, after defining anonymity and sketching its history in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, I offer three findings. First, women had less need for anonymity as they gained civil protections elsewhere, but anonymity still appealed to writers made vulnerable by their marginalized identities or risky views. Second, in the early twentieth century the genre most likely to go unsigned was autobiography, in all its forms. Third, on rare occasions, which I enumerate, strict anonymity achieves what pseudonymity cannot. I conclude by suggesting that among British modernist authors, the decline of practiced anonymity stimulated desired anonymity and the prizing of anonymity as an aesthetic ideal.

Hard Objects in George Oppen's Discrete Series

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 496-517
Author(s):  
Ned Hercock
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Ludwig Wittgenstein ◽  
Discrete Series ◽  
Human Experience ◽  
John Ruskin ◽  
Gerard Manley Hopkins ◽  
Marcel Duchamp ◽  
The World ◽  
Production History ◽  
History Of

This essay examines the objects in George Oppen's Discrete Series (1934). It considers their primary property to be their hardness – many of them have distinctively uniform and impenetrable surfaces. This hardness and uniformity is contrasted with 19th century organicism (Gerard Manley Hopkins and John Ruskin). Taking my cue from Kirsten Blythe Painter I show how in their work with hard objects these poems participate within a wider cultural and philosophical turn towards hardness in the early twentieth century (Marcel Duchamp, Adolf Loos, Ludwig Wittgenstein and others). I describe the thinking these poems do with regard to industrialization and to human experience of a resolutely object world – I argue that the presentation of these objects bears witness to the production history of the type of objects which in this era are becoming preponderant in parts of the world. Finally, I suggest that the objects’ impenetrability offers a kind of anti-aesthetic relief: perception without conception. If ‘philosophy recognizes the Concept in everything’ it is still possible, these poems show, to experience resistance to this imperious process of conceptualization. Within thinking objects (poems) these are objects which do not think.

Review: Urban Latino Cultures: La Vida Latina en LA by Gustavo Leclerc, Raúl Villa, and Michael J. Dear (eds.)

1999 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 126-128
Author(s):  
Catherine S. Ramirez
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Mexican American ◽  
History Of ◽  
Crime Wave ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries ◽  
The City ◽  
History Of Los Angeles

Throughout the twentieth century (and now the twenty-first), the specter of a Latina/o past, present, and future has haunted the myth of Los Angeles as a sunny, bucolic paradise. At the same time it has loomed behind narratives of the city as a dystopic, urban nightmare. In the 1940s Carey McWilliams pointed to the fabrication of a “Spanish fantasy heritage” that made Los Angeles the bygone home of fair señoritas, genteel caballeros and benevolent mission padres. Meanwhile, the dominant Angeleno press invented a “zoot” (read Mexican-American) crime wave. Unlike the aristocratic, European Californias/os of lore, the Mexican/American “gangsters” of the 1940s were described as racial mongrels. What's more, the newspapers explicitly identified them as the sons and daughters of immigrants-thus eliding any link they may have had to the Californias/os of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries or to the history of Los Angeles in general.

Queering Musical Biography in the Writings of Edward Prime-Stevenson and Rosa Newmarch

2020 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 100-118
Author(s):  
Kristin M. Franseen
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Instrumental Music ◽  
Primary Source ◽  
Gender And Sexuality ◽  
Benjamin Britten ◽  
Twentieth Century Music ◽  
History Of ◽  
Music Research ◽  
Symphonic Music ◽  
Biographical Knowledge

Beginning with the “open secret” of Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears's relationship and continuing through debates over Handel's and Schubert's sexuality and analyses of Ethel Smyth's memoirs, biography has played a central role in the development of queer musicology. At the same time, life-writing's focus on extramusical details and engagement with difficult-to-substantiate anecdotes and rumors often seem suspect to scholars. In the case of early-twentieth-century music research, however, these very gaps and ambiguities paradoxically offered some authors and readers at the time rare spaces for approaching questions of sexuality in music. Issues of subjectivity in instrumental music aligned well with rumors about autobiographical confession within Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 6 (Pathétique) for those who knew how to listen and read between the lines. This article considers the different ways in which the framing of biographical anecdotes and gossip in scholarship by music critic-turned-amateur sexologist Edward Prime-Stevenson and Tchaikovsky scholar Rosa Newmarch allowed for queer readings of symphonic music. It evaluates Prime-Stevenson's discussions of musical biography and interpretation in The Intersexes (1908/9) and Newmarch's Tchaikovsky: His Life and Works (1900), translation of Modest Tchaikovsky's biography, and article on the composer in Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians to explore how they addressed potentially taboo topics, engaged with formal and informal sources of biographical knowledge (including one another's work), and found their scholarly voices in the absence of academic frameworks for addressing gender and sexuality. While their overt goals were quite different—Newmarch sought to dismiss “sensationalist” rumors about Tchaikovsky's death for a broad readership, while Prime-Stevenson used queer musical gossip as a primary source in his self-published history of homosexuality—both grappled with questions of what can and cannot be read into a composer's life and works and how to relate to possible queer meanings in symphonic music. The very aspects of biography that place it in a precarious position as scholarship ultimately reveal a great deal about the history of musicology and those who write it.

“The History of Scottish Theology, Volume 3: The Long Twentieth Century” edited by David Fergusson and Mark W. Elliott

2020 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 75-77
Author(s):  
Philip D. Foster
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
History Of

Review of David Fergusson and Mark W. Elliot, eds., The History of Scottish Theology, Volume 3: The Long Twentieth Century (Oxford: OUP, 2019), pp. xii+373, ISBN 978-0198759355. £95.00

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