scholarly journals Choreographic Re-embodiment between Text and Dance

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Jones
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Samuel Beckett ◽  
Joseph Conrad ◽  
Emotional State ◽  
The Body ◽  
Mechanical Function ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Body Rhythm ◽  
Look Back ◽  
Modernist Fiction

This chapter explores the aesthetics of the experimental modernist fiction of Joseph Conrad and Samuel Beckett to open up debates about reenactment of dance in the twentieth century. Using the theories of Gabriele Brandstetter and Paul Ricoeur to explore correspondences in dance and literary skepticism about narrative, the discussion shows how both writers interpolate their stories with fleeting passages of gesture or movement phrases that syncopate and undermine the teleological flow of narrative. This discussion suggests a choreographic re-embodiment between dance and text that focuses on communication beyond words. The similarity of Conrad and Beckett lies in their uses of gesture, but while Conrad’s movement phrases re-embody early twentieth-century expressivism, Beckett’s look back to early twentieth-century innovations in abstraction which examine the mechanical function of the body, rhythm in time and space. Beckett does not reference a mental (or emotional) state, whereas Conrad’s gestures are affective, identifying an emotional interiority.

scholarly journals “One does what one can (on fait ce qu’on peut)”: Joseph Conrad as Translator

2019 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 52-62
Author(s):  
Randall Stevenson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Early Life ◽  
Cultural Difference ◽  
Joseph Conrad ◽  
Foreign Languages ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Key Factor ◽  
Modernist Fiction

Abstract Joseph Conrad’s fiction – Lord Jim especially – contains several instances of characters struggling with translation, or with foreign languages more generally, or transferring speech or syntactic patterns from one language to another. These features have much to suggest about Conrad’s own multilingual early life and his eventual adoption of English for his writing. They also have wider implications concerning his vision and tactics as a novelist – including his reliance on French fiction, and his regular emphases on cultural difference and on the cognitive and epistemological challenges of communicating experience. These challenges, in turn, initiate or anticipate concerns widely apparent in modernist fiction, indicating stresses in an advancing, globalised modernity which made its innovations so necessary. Appreciating Conrad’s interest in translation elucidates and confirms Fredric Jameson’s judgement of his writing as a key factor in the emergence of modernism in the early twentieth century.

Revaluations through Dance: Friedrich Nietzsche's Thought in Isadora Duncan's Speech The Dance of the Future

2019 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 206-219
Author(s):  
Meindert E. Peters
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
Eternal Recurrence ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Mind

Friedrich Nietzsche's influence on Isadora Duncan's work, in particular his idea of the Dionysian, has been widely discussed, especially in regard to her later work. What has been left underdeveloped in critical examinations of her work, however, is his influence on her earlier choreographic work, which she defended in a famous speech held in 1903 called The Dance of the Future. While commentators often describe this speech as ‘Nietzschean’, Duncan's autobiography suggests that she only studied Nietzsche's work after this speech. I take this incongruity as a starting point to explore the connections between her speech and Nietzsche's work, in particular his Thus Spoke Zarathustra. I argue that in subject and language Duncan's speech resembles Nietzsche's in important ways. This article will draw attention to the ways in which Duncan takes her cues from Nietzsche in bringing together seemingly conflicting ideas of religion and an overturning of morality; Nietzsche's notion of eternal recurrence and the teleology present in his idea of the Übermensch; and a renegotiation of the body's relation to the mind. In doing so, this article contributes not only to scholarship on Duncan's early work but also to discussions of Nietzsche's reception in the early twentieth century. Moreover, the importance Duncan ascribes to the body in dance and expression also asks for a new understanding of Nietzsche's own way of expressing his philosophy.

Maurice

2020 ◽  
pp. 127-153
Author(s):  
Finn Fordham
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Homosexual Orientation ◽  
The World ◽  
Resonant Term ◽  
Body And Soul ◽  
Edward Carpenter

As a queer bildungsroman, Maurice has a particular way of managing the relation between the body and the soul. Forster's exploration of the queer relationship between body and soul took place at a time when there was a battle over the nature of the soul, often defensive against materialism: concepts of identity and selfhood were undergoing radical contestations and the word 'soul' is a resonant term in modernist novels. How did emerging discourses, such as those of Havelock Ellis, Edward Carpenter, and many others, about homosexual orientation relate to these contemporary discourses around the self? The chapter focuses on two passages about body and soul, whose textual genesis reveals problems of phrasing, as Forster’s unprecedented investigation of sexuality takes him to the edge of identity. It then examines how certain spaces, such as windows and thresholds, become symbolic zones of transgressive encounters between inner and outer, soul and body. It concludes by showing how Forster avoids drawing up any consistent ‘doctrine’ of body and soul. As a work of fiction in which different visions of the world come into conflict with each other, Maurice is a unique and vital witness of transforming discourses about homosexuality in the early twentieth century.

Introduction to Core Texts of the Sŏn Approach (Sŏnmun ch’waryo禪門撮要‎)

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-36
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Look Back ◽  
Selection Of

The Introduction presents the early twentieth-century compendium Core Texts of the Sŏn Approach, a work of Sŏn revivalism in Korea, as an attempt to look back over the intervening centuries to the Sŏn of the mid-Koryŏ period (late 1100s and 1200s) in order to compile a compact textual repository of authentic Korean Sŏn. Many modern reference works give Kyŏnghŏ Sŏngu (1849?–1912) as the compiler of this Sŏn compendium, though this attribution is by no means certain. The fifteen texts in Core Texts of the Sŏn Approach, eight by Chinese authors and seven by Korean authors, are described. This is followed by an explanation of the rationale behind the selection of five of the fifteen texts for translation. Two topics singled out for attention are the huatou Chan of Dahui Zonggao and the story of Patriarchal Master Chin’gwi and Śākyamuni Buddha.

The Problem of Social Identities in Early Twentieth Century Russia: Observations on the Commentaries by Alfred Rieber and William Rosenberg

Slavic Review ◽  
1988 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 512-517
Author(s):  
Leopold h. Haimson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
Social Identities ◽  
The Body ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Revolution

Alfred Rieber and William Rosenberg have greatly contributed by their respective commentaries to broadening the scope of the issues addressed in my discussion of “The Problem of Social Identities in Early Twentieth Century Russia” (see Slavic Review [Spring 1988]: 1-20). They have also helped bring out the complexity of the processes involved, after the outbreak of the Revolution of 1917, in the shaping and reshaping of the representations that individuals and groups entertained of themselves, of one another, and of the body politic as a whole.

scholarly journals Selling Sex Toys: Marketing and the Meaning of Vibrators in Early Twentieth-Century America

2016 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 393-433 ◽  
Author(s):  
HALLIE LIEBERMAN
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Gender Roles ◽  
New York Times ◽  
The Body ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Household Appliance ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Sex Toys

The electromechanical vibrator originated in the late nineteenth century as a device for medical therapy. In the first three decades of the twentieth century, however, marketing of vibrators as consumer appliances became pervasive. Ads appeared in the pages ofThe New York TimesandScientific Americanand plastered street cars. Companies marketed vibrators to grandparents, mothers, infants, and young adults. Vibrators are widely sold today, however, as instruments for masturbation, a use that was rarely mentioned but well known before World War II. How was vibrator advertising able to become so ubiquitous during the early twentieth century, despite draconian antiobscenity laws and antimasturbation rhetoric? This article argues that companies achieved this result by shaping the meaning of vibrators through strategic marketing. This marketing overtly portrayed vibrators as nonsexual while covertly conveying their sexual uses through imagery and the sale of phallic, dildo-like attachments.Companies positioned vibrators within two major consumer product categories in the early 1900s: labor-saving household appliances and electrotherapeutic devices. By advertising the vibrator as both a labor-saving household appliance and a sexualized health panacea, companies could slip vibrator ads past the censors, while supplying user manuals that clued consumers into specific sexual uses. In household appliance ads, companies drew on traditional gender roles to present vibrators as emblems of domesticity and motherhood, whereas in electrotherapeutic ads they presented vibrators as symbols of progressive gender roles, the sexualized new woman and the body-conscious “self-made man.”

A Brownian Model for Literary Crowds

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Crossland
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Brownian Motion ◽  
James Joyce ◽  
Joseph Conrad ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Molecular Physics ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Brownian Model ◽  
Night And Day

Chapter 6 applies the ideas explored in Chapter 5 to a range of early twentieth-century literary texts, especially those by Woolf and Lawrence. The focus here is on crowd and city scenes, including the modernist figures of the flâneur and the passante. The chapter as a whole argues for the relevance of contemporary ideas on molecular physics, especially Brownian motion, to portrayals of individual characters in relation to crowds, drawing on a range of texts including Woolf’s Night and Day and Mrs Dalloway, Lawrence’s The Trespasser and The White Peacock, and texts by Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, and H. G. Wells. Together with Chapter 5, this chapter demonstrates how ideas, language, and imagery were shared across disciplines in the early twentieth century, and argues that considering different disciplines together can help us to recapture a sense of the ways in which particular issues were experienced at the time.

Frenzied Flappers: The Hysterical Female in Early Twentieth-Century Social Dance

2019 ◽  
Vol 55 (3) ◽  
pp. 339-350
Author(s):  
Hope Margetts
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Mental Distress ◽  
The Body ◽  
Social Dance ◽  
Social Dancing ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Tensions ◽  
Social Dances

Abstract It is widely acknowledged that the freer, more sexualized movements of social dancing in the early twentieth century (1900–1929) accompanied the beginnings of female emancipation both socially and politically. However, less explored are the similarities between the provocative, inelegant choreography of such social dances and the symptoms of female hysteria, a medical phenomenon that saw the body as a canvas for mental distress as provoked by social tensions. This essay will address the possible alignment of hysteria and popular social dance in relation to the evolving Modern Woman. It will examine the motivations of modern, ‘hysterical’ dances, and discuss their progressive status in terms of gender by considering perceived psychosomatic interactions within the female dancing body.

Hieroglyphic Modernisms

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse Schotter
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New Media ◽  
British Museum ◽  
Silent Film ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Rosetta Stone ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Modernist Fiction

In the British Museum, one object attracts more tourists than any other: the Rosetta Stone. The decipherment of the Stone by Jean-François Champollion and the discovery of King Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922 contributed to creating a worldwide vogue for all things Egyptian. This fascination was shared by early-twentieth-century authors who invoked Egyptian writing to paint a more complicated picture of European interest in non-Western languages. Hieroglyphs can be found everywhere in modernist novels and in discussions of silent film, appearing at moments when writers and theorists seek to understand the similarities or differences between writing and new recording technologies. Hieroglyphic Modernisms explores this conjunction of hieroglyphs and modernist fiction and film, revealing how the challenge of new media spurred a fertile interplay among practitioners of old and new media forms. Showing how novelists and film theorists in the modernist period defined their respective media in relation to each other, the book shifts the focus in modernism from China, poetry, and the avant-garde to Egypt, narrative, and film.

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