Rainer Maria Rilke

2021 ◽  
pp. 5-30
Author(s):  
Michael Hofmann

One doesn’t think of Rainer Maria Rilke as writing poems on sociological or documentary themes, on subjects that might otherwise reside in newspapers and books of social history, anything like emigration or poverty or unemployment. To some extent, one would be wrong. From the vantage point of a Swiss-managed Neapolitan luxury hotel, the poet describes the phenomenon of industrial-strength emigration from Southern Italy at the opening of the twentieth century. Is this an exercise in the macabre, the heartless, or something somehow strangely prophetic of Rilke’s own future career?

Author(s):  
Marek Korczynski

This chapter examines music in the British workplace. It considers whether it is appropriate to see the history of music in the workplace as involving a journey from the organic singing voice (both literal and metaphorical) of workers to broadcast music appropriated by the powerful to become a technique of social control. The chapter charts four key stages in the social history of music in British workplaces. First, it highlights the existence of widespread cultures of singing at work prior to industrialization, and outlines the important meanings these cultures had for workers. Next, it outlines the silencing of the singing voice within the workplace further to industrialization—either from direct employer bans on singing, or from the roar of the industrial noise. The third key stage involves the carefully controlled employer- and state-led reintroduction of music in the workplace in the mid-twentieth century—through the centralized relaying of specific forms of music via broadcast systems in workplaces. The chapter ends with an examination of contemporary musicking in relation to (often worker-led) radio music played in workplaces.


2021 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Steven Ruggles

AbstractQuantitative historical analysis in the United States surged in three distinct waves. The first quantitative wave occurred as part of the “New History” that blossomed in the early twentieth century and disappeared in the 1940s and 1950s with the rise of consensus history. The second wave thrived from the 1960s to the 1980s during the ascendance of the New Economic History, the New Political History, and the New Social History, and died out during the “cultural turn” of the late twentieth century. The third wave of historical quantification—which I call the revival of quantification—emerged in the second decade of the twenty-first century and is still underway. I describe characteristics of each wave and discuss the historiographical context of the ebb and flow of quantification in history.


2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-29
Author(s):  
Luisa Levi D’Ancona Modena

With a focus on art donations, this article explores several case studies of Jewish Italian patrons such as Sforni, Uzielli, Sarfatti, Castelfranco, Vitali, and others who supported artists of movements that were considered modern at their time: the Macchiaioli (1850-1870), the Futurists (1910s), the Metaphysical painters (1920s), the Novecento group (1920-1930s), and several post WWII cases. It reflects on differences in art donations by Jews in Italy and other European countries, modes of reception, taste, meanings and strategy of donations, thus contributing to the social history of Italian and European Jewry and the history of collections and donations to public museums.


2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 347-363
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Tilley ◽  
Paul Christian ◽  
Susan Ledger ◽  
Jan Walmsley

Until the very end of the twentieth century the history of learning difficulties was subsumed into other histories, of psychiatry, of special education and, indeed, of disability. Initiatives to enable people with learning difficulties and their families to record their own histories and contribute to the historical record are both recent and powerful. Much of this work has been led or supported by The Open University’s Social History of Learning Disability Research (SHLD) group and its commitment to developing “inclusive history.” The article tells the story of the Madhouse Project in which actors with learning difficulties, stimulated by the story of historian activist Mabel Cooper and supported by the SHLD group, learned about and then offered their own interpretations of that history, including its present-day resonances. Through a museum exhibition they curated, and through an immersive theatre performance, the actors used the history of institutions to alert a wider public to the abuses of the past, and the continuing marginalization and exclusion of people with learning difficulties. This is an outstanding example of history’s potential to stimulate activism.


Author(s):  
Gabriel Solis

Ethnomusicology has often had an ambivalent relationship with technology: we owe our discipline to mid-twentieth-century developments in recording technology. Nevertheless there is a strong counter-modern streak that characterizes ethnomusicologists as a group. This essay investigates the reasons for ethnomusciologists’ mistrust of certain kinds of music technology and interprets ambivalence as a mode of critical engagement. It surveys turning points in the field from comparative musicology to the critical turn and from the critical turn to the new digital humanities. I conclude that digital humanities needs ethnomusicological ambivalence in the form of critical engagement. Good data analytics needs a skeptical view from the vantage point of music scholars and contextual knowledge-bearers in the cultures of study.


Text Matters ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 386-410
Author(s):  
Abdolali Yazdizadeh

Hyperreality is a key term in Jean Baudrillard’s cultural theory, designating a phase in the development of image where it “masks the absence of a profound reality.” The ambiance of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961) closely corresponds to Baudrillard’s notion of the hyperreal as images persist to precede reality in the fictional world of the novel. Since for Baudrillard each order of simulacra produces a certain mode of ideological discourse that impacts the perception of reality, it is plausible that the characters of this fictional context should be ideologically impacted by the hyperreal discourse. From this vantage point it is possible to have a new critical assessment of Yossarian’s (protagonist) antiheroic stance and study the role of the “business of illusion,” whose ideological edifice is based on the discourse of the hyperreal, on his antiheroic stance and actions. By drawing on Baudrillard’s cultural theory this paper aims to read Heller’s novel as a postmodern allegory of rebellion against the hyperreality of the twentieth-century American life and trace its relevance to modern-day U.S.


2021 ◽  
pp. 196-206
Author(s):  
Kathryn Babayan

In the Conclusion, I draw on the analytical purchase of eroticism to provide a distinct vantage point onto the connections between urbanity, friendship, and spirituality. Adopting a different way of doing history in the field of early modern Persianate studies, I focus on a discrete moment in the story of Isfahan to think more broadly with historians of sexuality about the valences of erotic desires that bound together networks of friends living in previous centuries. Thinking sex with the early moderns compels me to see erasures that today silence passionate friendships and obscures the entangled history that love shared with eros and beauty. My history of Isfahan presents an early emergence of heteroerotic anxieties, provoked by the adab of urban love and Sufi homoerotic desire, that in the twentieth century were recuperated to make Iran modern.


Latin Jazz ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 36-63
Author(s):  
Christopher Washburne

This chapter documents the strong ties of the Caribbean and Latin America to the formative period of jazz and how that influence reverberated throughout the twentieth century. It argues that the strong foundational influence of Caribbean and Latin American music on pre-jazz styles makes the birth of jazz synchronous with the birth of Latin jazz. By building on the work of a number of scholars who have recently begun to tackle this complexity through historical studies of immigration patterns and the social and political development of New Orleans throughout the 1700s and 1800s and by conducting a “sonic archeology” of jazz styles throughout the twentieth century, reverberations of jazz’s pre-history are uncovered and shown to resound loudly. Along with a discussion of the social history of New Orleans, the focus is on the function of certain rhythmic cells in the jazz repertoire that are most typically associated with Caribbean and Latin American styles.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document