Music, Bacchus, and Freedom

2018 ◽  
pp. 160-176
Author(s):  
Hedy Law
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
World View ◽  
The Body ◽  
Music Drama ◽  
French Music ◽  
Birth Of Tragedy ◽  
Symphonic Music ◽  
Freedom Of Action

Nietzsche points out in The Birth of Tragedy (1872, rev. 1886) that modern Dionysiac music began with Beethoven’s symphonic music and matured in Wagner’s music drama. Yet his account fails to explain a convention of Bacchus in pre-nineteenth-century music. This chapter provides a corrective by explaining the relationships among music, Bacchus, and freedom in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French music. With the use of Euripides’s Bacchae, the section “Bacchus and Pentheus” in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and Nietzsche’s essay “The Dionysian World View,” this article relates the themes of musical deviance and political defiance, liberation and destruction, and orgy and regeneration to the ideas of positive and negative freedoms as well as freedom of action and freedom of motion. This article thus contextualizes d’Alembert’s De la liberté de la musique of 1759 by arguing that representations of Bacchus enable music and the body to construct freedom as an embodied concept.

The Sober Bacchae: Dance as Phenomenal Limitation in Nietzsche

2019 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 59-76
Author(s):  
Monique Lyle
Keyword(s):  
World View ◽  
The Body ◽  
Specific Function ◽  
Alain Badiou ◽  
Classical Greece ◽  
Birth Of Tragedy

This essay seeks to dispel entrenched critical opinion regarding dance across Nietzsche's writings as representative of Dionysian intoxication alone. Taking as its prompt the riposte of Alain Badiou, ‘Nietzsche is miles away from any doctrine of dance as a primitive ecstasy’ and ‘dance is in no way the liberated bodily impulse, the wild energy of the body’, the essay uncovers the ties between dance and Apollo in the Nietzschean theory of art while qualifying dance's relation to Dionysus. Primarily through an analysis of The Dionysiac World View and The Birth of Tragedy, the essay seeks to illuminate enigmatic statements about dance in Nietzsche (‘in dance the greatest strength is only potential, although it is betrayed by the suppleness of movement’ and ‘dance is the preservation of orderly measure’). It does this through an elucidation of the specific function of dance in Nietzsche's interpretation of classical Greece; via an assessment of the difficulties associated with the Nietzschean understanding of the bacchanal; and lastly through an analysis of Nietzsche's characterization of dance as a symbol. The essay culminates in a discussion of dance's ties to Nietzschean life affirmation; here the themes of physico-phenomenal existence, joy and illusion in Nietzsche are surveyed.

Turning Vanity Fair into The Cœlestial City: England’s Legal Narratives of the Body Politic from Bunyan to Thackeray

Pólemos ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 123-145
Author(s):  
Matteo Nicolini
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Strong Influence ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Political ◽  
Constitutional History ◽  
Vanity Fair ◽  
Legal Narratives ◽  
English Constitutional History

Abstract The article addresses the different narratives that characterize English constitutional history. It first examines the mainstream narrative, i. e., the retrospective reading of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century constitutional events dispensed by jurists and politicians in an attempt to pack the Establishment Constitution. It then focuses on the alternative legal narratives about the Constitution elaborated during the Civil War and the Restoration. Among them, it ascertains John Bunyan’s impact on the Establishment Constitution. Bunyan was a member of the New Model Army, a radical, and a Puritan who ended up in prison. Despite this background, he exerted a strong influence on Victorian society and on Thackeray’s representation of the body politic. As a consequence, Bunyan entered the political discourse in the first half of the nineteenth century when politicians started to reform English representative institutions, and therefore became part of the Establishment Constitution.

scholarly journals The Music of Power:

2014 ◽  
Vol 67 (3) ◽  
pp. 685-734 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Everist
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Power Relationships ◽  
Music Drama ◽  
French Music ◽  
Institutional Structures ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Stage Music ◽  
Opera Houses

Music for the stage has always been embedded in a network of power relationships between states, impresarios, librettists, artists, entrepreneurs, and composers. This article seeks to understand and explain how these relationships functioned in the period when French music drama was subject to a system of licenses, 1806–64. At the center of the inquiry are institutional structures and their relationship to those responsible for both the creation and the cultivation of stage music in the period. They explain the context for the cultural agents and products not only of the main opera houses in nineteenth-century Paris—the Opéra, the Opéra-Comique, and the Théâtre-Italien—but also of the host of smaller, shorter-lived institutions that supported and promoted opera during the period.

Remember Me

2020 ◽  
pp. 557-577
Author(s):  
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Body ◽  
Latter Day Saints ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Dead ◽  
The Rich ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Church

This chapter explores the eighteenth-century concept of sensibility as it took form in popular culture in the United States in the early nineteenth century. Although later generations made fun of the weeping sentimentality of parlor poetry and embroidered memorials to the dead, nineteenth-century Americans believed that a pen mark on a page or a twined lock of hair could animate invisible chords in the body that connected one person to another through memory. To write about Mormonism in relation to sensibility may seem odd, since to outsiders the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints seemed the epitome of grim-faced patriarchy, with its embrace of polygamy and attempt at theocratic government. A closer look at the rich materials preserved in its archives shows the many ways in which early Saints used common cultural forms to express unique religious belief such as baptism for the dead. Latter-day Saints celebrated plural unions in the language of sentimental friendship. Like other Americans, they used tangible things to cross boundaries of space and time.

The Eighteenth-Century Ballet-Pantomime and Modern Mime

2009 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-43
Author(s):  
Edward Nye
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
French Literature ◽  
The Body ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary Aesthetics ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Compare And Contrast ◽  
Lincoln College ◽  
As If

Histories of mime largely overlook one of the most remarkable theatrical phenomena of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century: the ballet-pantomime. In contrast, it is widely discussed in dance history circles, as if there were a tacit understanding that only one half of this hyphenated art mattered: the ballet rather than the pantomime. This article explores the mime component of the ballet-pantomime in order to compare and contrast it with modern mime, especially Etienne Decroux's principles and practices. Through the works of Noverre particularly (since Decroux declares himself an admirer), but with reference also to other famous and less famous eighteenth-century choreographers and dancers, Edward Nye discusses five aspects of mime: use of the body, mime and dance, mime and language, objective and subjective mime, and pedagogy. He finds differences as well as similarities between modern and eighteenth-century mime, but overall argues that there is no reason to exclude the ballet-pantomime from histories of mime. Edward Nye is Fellow of Lincoln College, Oxford, and University Lecturer in French. He has published on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century subjects in French literature and the arts, notably Literary and Linguistic Theories in Eighteenth-Century France (OUP, 2000), and on the literary aesthetics of sports writing, in A Bicyclette (Les Belles Lettres, 2000), and of dance, in Danse et littérature; sur quel pied danser? (ed., Rodopi, 2003).

Genius under Observation

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ann Jefferson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Medical Science ◽  
The Body ◽  
Mental Functioning ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Broad Consensus

This chapter details the emergence of a new medicine of the mind in France. The philosophical component of the new medicine was based in large part on the principles of eighteenth-century sensualist philosophy. This tradition held out to the practitioners of mental medicine the presumption of a connection between the body and the mind, which had particular importance for their growing interest in genius. The broad consensus that had existed in the eighteenth century between aesthetics and a philosophy of the mind is mostly lost in the nineteenth century as two opposing models of mental functioning emerge. The powers of observation widely attributed to genius in the eighteenth century were now claimed as the prerogative of (medical) science, and contrasted with imagination, which was predominantly associated with genius and the arts.

Edmund Burke's Idea of the Body Corporate: A Study in Imagery

1965 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 184-197 ◽  
Author(s):  
Walter D. Love
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
History Of Ideas ◽  
Personal Life ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ways Of Thinking

Burke is recognized as master of a language highly figurative, full of grace and telling images. But the imagery of nonfiction prose is not so much studied as the imagery of poetry, drama, and fiction. It should be. It reveals a great deal about a thinker. I have not studied Burke's imagery to spy on his personal life, conscious or subconscious, as some students of other writers do, nor have I tried to evaluate his style. I have used it as an oblique way of getting at the meaning of some of his concepts and I think it reveals something about his place in the history of ideas, making him a stalwart of eighteenth-century ways of thinking, instead of a harbinger of the nineteenth century.

Perpindahan dan Perubahan : Transportasi dalam Struktur Naratif Riwayat Perjalanan ke Amerika di Era Viktorian

Metahumaniora ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Ari J. Adipurwawijdana
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Henry James ◽  
World View ◽  
Democratic Society ◽  
Transportation Infrastructure ◽  
Material Base ◽  
Travel Narrative ◽  
Infrastructure System ◽  
The Subject

ABSTRAKRiwayat yang disajikan penulis Britania era Viktorian tentang perjalannnya ke Amerikamengasumsikan adanya sebuah jaringan prasarana transportasi. Sistem transportasiterkait dengan riwayat perjalanan (travel narrative) dalam tiga hal, yaitu (1) sebagaibasis material bagi perjalanan, (2) sebagai substruktur riwayat, dan (3) sebagai pokokpembicaraan dalam riwayat itu sendiri. Buku Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832)merupakan model bagi cara infrastruktur transportasi menentukan aspek naratologis,yaitu urutan dan perspektif dalam struktur naratif riwayat perjalanan. Karya tersebut jugamenyajikan transportasi sebagai pokok pembicaraan dalam teksnya itu sendiri walaupun tidaksejauh sebagaimana yang tampak pada The Amateur Emigrant (1895) karya Robert LouisStevenson. Dalam hal ini, The American Scene (1907) karya Henry James juga relevankarena, walaupun tidak secara gamblang membicarakan transportasi sebagai topik dantidak pula menampakkan ciri-ciri riwayat perjalanan, karya tersebut merepresentasicara wawasan Britania-Amerika trans-Atlantik dianggap sebagai sesuatu yang lumrah.Wawasan ini juga memandang menganggap perjalanan trans-Atlantik sebagai semacamperjalanan menembus waktu, yang menunjukkan ketidaknyaman para penulis Britaniaabad kesembilanbelas terhadap transformasi sosial ke masyrakat demokratis yangdirepresentasi secara metaforis oleh pemahaman mereka tentang Amerika.Kata kunci: catatan perjalanan Viktorian, transportasi, wisataABSTRACTNarratives presented by Victorian British writers about their travels to America assume theavailability of a transprtation infrastructure system. Such a system is related to the travelnarrative in three things, namely, (1) as a material base for travel, (2) as a narrative substructurehistory, and (3) as the subject-matter of the narratives. Fanny Trollope’s Domestic Mannerof the Americans (1832) is a model for the way transportation infrastructure determinesnarratological aspects, namely order and perspective in the structure of the travel narrative.The piece also presents transportation as a subject-matter in its text although it does notgo so far as do Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Amateur Emigrant (1895). In discussingtransportation Henry James’ The American Scene is also relevant because, despite it’s notexplicitly speaking of transportation as a topic nor does it show the convential characteristicsof the travel narrative, the work represents a British-American trans-Atlantic world viewas a given. This world view also considers trans-Atlantic travels as a kind of voyage acrosstime, implying the discomfort of nineteenth-century British writers concerning the socialtransition into a democratic society represented by America as a metaphor.Keywords: Victorian travel narrative, transportation, tourism

Historical Fragments’ Mobile Echo

Transfers ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-119 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan E. Bell ◽  
Kathy Davis
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Cultural Revolution ◽  
Ming Dynasty ◽  
Third Century ◽  
Refugee Crisis ◽  
The Third ◽  
Opium War ◽  
The Subject

Translocation – Transformation is an ambitious contribution to the subject of mobility. Materially, it interlinks seemingly disparate objects into a surprisingly unified exhibition on mobile histories and heritages: twelve bronze zodiac heads, silk and bamboo creatures, worn life vests, pressed Pu-erh tea, thousands of broken antique teapot spouts, and an ancestral wooden temple from the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) used by a tea-trading family. Historically and politically, the exhibition engages Chinese stories from the third century BCE, empires in eighteenth-century Austria and China, the Second Opium War in the nineteenth century, the Chinese Cultural Revolution of the mid-twentieth century, and today’s global refugee crisis.

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