‘Retailed to all posterity’: Post-truth, oral tradition, and the popular voice in Richard III

2020 ◽  
Vol 103 (1) ◽  
pp. 6-20
Author(s):  
Richard Ashby
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Oral Tradition ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Richard Iii ◽  
The Past ◽  
Historical Moment ◽  
The Way

This article proposes a presentist reading of Richard III, a play that can be used to reflect on – and critique – our perversely post-truth historical moment. While the powerful distort the past for political purposes, the play dramatises the way abiding truths about history are nevertheless passed down through time by a popular culture of oral tradition. Drawing on Walter Benjamin, I also relate a timeless, oral tradition to proverbial wisdoms and to the concept of redemptive, Messianic time.

scholarly journals Las brujas y la mitología vasca en El guardián invisible de Fernando González Molina: de la tradición oral al lenguaje cinematográfico

2020 ◽  
Vol 27 ◽  
pp. 95-103
Author(s):  
Magdalena Anna Gajewska
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Oral Tradition ◽  
Morphological Analysis ◽  
Negative Influence ◽  
Young Girls ◽  
The World ◽  
Free Women ◽  
The Way

Witches and Basque mythology in El guardián invisible by Fernando González Molina: From the oral tradition to cinematographic languageThe article investigates the way the oral tradition of Basque mythology and folkloric tales of witches resonate in the cinematographic language of the film El guardian invisible by Fernando Gonzalez Molina, which presents the investigation of the killings of young girls in Navarra. The study is based on anthropological and morphological analysis which intends to find the meanings expressed by means of filmic expression related to the contents and topics of our interest. The world presented in the film is marked by the presence of supernatural powers, the quality of which may be observed in both the contents and form of the film. The motives of the mythology correspond to the way of presenting them in an oral story. Regarding the image of witchery, it seems to be inspired by the vision which led the inquisitioners to the zone in question. The film refers to the stories of the trials of witches and presents both witch-hunting and genocide of free women. At the same time, it criticises popular culture and its negative influence on creating the prejudicial image of witches.

Retcon Game

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew J. Friedenthal
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Positive Impact ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Cultural Shift ◽  
The Past ◽  
Stable Element ◽  
History Of ◽  
Source Of Information ◽  
Building Technique ◽  
The Way

This book argues that the narrative/world-building technique known as retroactive continuity, often overlooked by literary scholars and media historians alike, has become a naturalized and ubiquitous part of popular culture. A careful look at the history of retroactive continuity–or retconning– reveals how its growing acceptance as a part of popular narratives has led to a complex, complicated understanding of the ways in which history and story can interact, ultimately creating a cultural atmosphere that is increasingly accepting of revisionist historical narratives. This can be seen most potently in the way that the editable hyperlink, rather than the stable footnote, has become the de facto source of information in America today. The groundwork for this major cultural shift has been laid for decades via our modes of entertainment. To embrace the concept of retroactive continuity in fictional media means accepting that the past, itself, is not a stable element, but rather something that is constantly in contentious flux. Thus retconning, on the whole, has a positive impact on society, fostering a sense of history itself as a constructed narrative and engendering an acceptance of how historical narratives can and should be recast to allow for a broader field of stories to be told in the present.

After the Archive

2018 ◽  
pp. 606-626
Author(s):  
Peter McMurray
Keyword(s):  
Oral Tradition ◽  
Family Members ◽  
Former Yugoslavia ◽  
Oral Poetry ◽  
The Past ◽  
Audio Recordings ◽  
New Research ◽  
Do So ◽  
The Way

The afterlife of an archive determines what that archive was in the first place. In other words, the way an archive preserves, processes, analyzes, and circulates its holdings—or fails to do so—plays a central role in constituting not just the what of the archive (its ontology) but also its when (the temporalities it contains and allows). In the 1930s, Milman Parry, a scholar of Homeric epic, traveled to the former Yugoslavia to collect oral poetry from the area, hoping to use this contemporary tradition to think about the feasibility of epic song—and specifically the Iliad and Odyssey—as an oral tradition more broadly. Parry’s student, Albert Lord, published their findings on the topic, creating a massive rethinking of poetry and literature more generally. But the archive they created through their audio recordings in Yugoslavia, recorded on aluminum discs, wire spools, and reel-to-reel tape, served for decades as a kind of necessary proof of their findings, but not an archive that allowed for significant new research. In the past decade, however, a number of family members of the singers who had recorded for Parry have begun to contact the archive seeking information about recordings in the archive. This contact has led not only to meaningful encounters between these families and the archive but also to small but significant expansions in the archive’s holdings through a kind of genealogical ethnography of the archive itself and its multiple, simultaneous (and often divergent) histories.

scholarly journals Citational Poetics in Dance: … of a faun (fragments) by the Albrecht Knust Quartet, before and after 2000

2012 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 49-69 ◽  
Author(s):  
Isabelle Launay
Keyword(s):  
Oral Tradition ◽  
Hannah Arendt ◽  
Walter Benjamin ◽  
Speech Act ◽  
Speech Act Theory ◽  
Contemporary Dance ◽  
The Past ◽  
Before And After ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Prestige

How does one come to terms with the “already said” or the “already danced”? I ask this in light of the many instances where contemporary dance has insistently undertaken—as a condition of its own renewal—a critique of past works that have been transmitted through the oral tradition. This undoing of the oral tradition's dominance has instantiated a new relation to the past in contemporary dance. Hannah Arendt throws some light on this process when she quotes Walter Benjamin, for whom modernity required that we find a different way of connecting with the past—one that would replace transmission with citationality. To cite, in speech act theory, as in dance, presupposes that the authority of the past be replaced with that disquieting ability of the past to infiltrate the present in a disembodied way (Arendt 1974, 291). The challenge of citation to the prestige of oral person-to-person transmission of a dance has introduced a new way for contemporary artists to relate to and re-embody past works.

scholarly journals Identity of Ao-Naga and Sümi-Naga Women as Gleaned from Folklores

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 94
Author(s):  
Resenmenla Longchar ◽  
H. Salome Kinny
Keyword(s):  
Oral Tradition ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Striking Feature ◽  
Traditional Beliefs ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Past ◽  
Construction Of Identity ◽  
The Village ◽  
The Way

The word identity has drawn a lot of attention to itself more so in the present age where everyone seems to be in a quest to establish their own identity. This quest for identity is not an alien concept to Naga society which comprises of sixteen officially recognized communities. These communities rely upon their own set of folklores to glean their past. Folklores are a strong medium through which most of the traditional beliefs and cultural practices are embodied. It is a reflection of the past through which the identity of the community can be gleaned. Folklores are not mere spinning of tales to glorify one’s own community, but are narratives of the communities who follow oral-tradition. This paper attempts to glean the identity of Ao-Naga and Sümi-Naga women through their respective folklores. Ao-Naga and Sümi-Naga are two strong communities residing in Nagaland. Both the communities have rich folklores falling into different genres. A striking feature of most folktales is the way details are presented- the name of the village, location and presence of evidence in the present times suggesting the validity of the events in the folktales. After the construction of identity is done, this paper will compare the identity of women of these two communities. Women of both these communities have come a long way from what they were in the past. As the third and final component of this paper, it will analyse whether women are still under grip of their past identity or whether they have moved away from it to build a new identity for themselves in the 21<sup>st</sup> Century. This paper will further examine the identity of women in the 21<sup>st</sup> Century in the light of their past as constructed from the folklores.

AMERICANIZING PSYCHOANALYSIS

2015 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 607-617
Author(s):  
MITCHELL G. ASH
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
The Other ◽  
Institutional History ◽  
History Of Psychoanalysis ◽  
General Theme ◽  
The Past ◽  
Narrow Focus ◽  
Psychoanalytic Discourse ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Way

The general theme that unites the works to be discussed here is the history of psychoanalysis in America over the past hundred years, particularly during the heyday of its public impact from the 1950s through the 1970s. The broad outlines of this story have been well known for some time. Interesting about the volumes discussed here is the step that each book takes in its own way beyond a narrow focus on Freud and his followers or the institutional history of the psychoanalytic profession to examinations of so-called neo-Freudianism and of the entry of psychoanalytic discourse into American middle- and highbrow popular culture. The question whether, how, or to what extent psychoanalysis became “Americanized” in the course of all this is addressed explicitly in the volume by Elizabeth Lunbeck, and implicitly in the other books under review. In the following I will discuss each volume in turn, pointing to linkages among them along the way.

Historiography

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse Lander
Keyword(s):  
History Plays ◽  
History Writing ◽  
English History ◽  
Richard Iii ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
Revisionist History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Accounts ◽  
The Way

During the Reformation, arguments over the near and distant past are crucial for making people increasingly aware of the plurality of competing, even contradictory, accounts of the past. This article examines the way in which historical accounts of Richard III’s reign point to the emergence of a historiographical consciousness, an awareness that written history is partial in both senses of the word. It considers the extent of John Foxe’s influence on English history writing and how he made revisionist history mainstream. It analyses chronicle history plays, especiallyThe True Tragedie of Richard III, as evidence that historiographical consciousness was widespread in the period. It also treats the connection between dissimulation and conspiracy in Thomas More’sHistoryand cites George Buck’sThe History of King Richard III(1619) as a remarkable example of revisionism that deploys historical learning against received opinion.

Unveiling Common Article 3 to the Geneva Conventions

2021 ◽  
pp. 338-350
Author(s):  
Bianca Maganza
Keyword(s):  
Armed Conflict ◽  
The Past ◽  
Geneva Conventions ◽  
Critical Approaches ◽  
Contemporary Interpretation ◽  
Historical Moment ◽  
The Way

The chapter analyses the role that contingency played in the negotiation, adoption, and interpretation of Common Article 3 to the Geneva Conventions. It focuses in particular on the choice of including the Article in the Conventions, on the terminology that is used in the provision, and on the way in which the latter is currently interpreted. Through a study of the past contingencies that shaped the (hi)story of the provision, leading to the contingency of its contemporary interpretation, the chapter challenges the concept of non-international armed conflict as it is traditionally understood, proposing an exercise of self-reflexivity on the existence of different interpretive possibilities. Borrowing from both contextual and critical approaches to history, the analysis is informed by the two sibling frameworks of false necessity and false contingency, that are put in constant dialogue with each other. By adopting a two-tiered perspective, the ultimate aim of the analysis is to show that, with respect to a same issue, the necessity stemming from a given historical moment can turn into contingency when tested against the background of a different context.

Myth, Memento, and Memory: Avebury (Wiltshire, England)

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Wheatley
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Oral Tradition ◽  
World View ◽  
Anterograde Amnesia ◽  
Oral Traditions ◽  
Future Generations ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
The Way

In Christopher Nolan’s film Memento (Nolan 2000), Leonard Shelby— played by Guy Pearce—suffers from anterograde amnesia, which prevents him from generating any new memories. To deal with this, he creates material traces such as Polaroid photographs and notes and he tattoos the most significant facts onto his body. Each time he awakes, he encounters these mementos (notes, images, and tattoos) and must interpret them in order to decide what to do next. He sometimes leaves messages for himself, intended to constrain his future behaviour, but while these messages effect his actions, some of the notes or photos may be lost or destroyed, or he may fail to realize that they have been manipulated or altered. Further, he may not interpret them correctly, so that his actions are not what he intended. Despite his amnesia, however, the past is always implicated in Leonard’s story and it is always changing his future. In some sense, the way that Leonard leaves mementos for himself is a more interesting model for the way that successive human communities encounter the remains of the past than the idea of biographies. Just as on Leonard’s tattooed body, traces of the past such as earthworks and monuments are inscribed onto the landscape, yet oral tradition cannot transmit the detailed meanings of those traces or the intentions of their creators through long sequences of time so that human communities encountering them later are, metaphorically, amnesiacs. Sometimes earthworks and monuments are built with the intention of projecting a particular world-view, constraining future generations to act in particular (‘correct’) ways. Over long periods, however, oral traditions distort, people move away and areas are occupied by new inhabitants with no cultural memory of those intentions or meanings. Just as with Leonard’s tattoos, monuments become mementos that have to be interpreted and situated within a contemporary understanding of the world before meaningful action is possible. If we think of both Leonard’s tattoos and the physical traces of the past as mementos, then it’s worth thinking how these differ from memories.

Remembering the Past in Nineteenth-Century Scotland

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
James J. Coleman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Identity ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
21St Century ◽  
Collective Memories ◽  
The Past ◽  
Prevailing View ◽  
The Way

At a time when the Union between Scotland and England is once again under the spotlight, Remembering the Past in Nineteenth-Century Scotland examines the way in which Scotland’s national heroes were once remembered as champions of both Scottish and British patriotism. Whereas 19th-century Scotland is popularly depicted as a mire of sentimental Jacobitism and kow-towing unionism, this book shows how Scotland’s national heroes were once the embodiment of a consistent, expressive and robust view of Scottish nationality. Whether celebrating the legacy of William Wallace and Robert Bruce, the reformer John Knox, the Covenanters, 19th-century Scots rooted their national heroes in a Presbyterian and unionist view of Scotland’s past. Examined through the prism of commemoration, this book uncovers collective memories of Scotland’s past entirely opposed to 21st-century assumptions of medieval proto-nationalism and Calvinist misery. Detailed studies of 19th-century commemoration of Scotland’s national heroes Uncovers an all but forgotten interpretation of these ‘great Scots’ Shines a new light on the mindset of nineteenth-century Scottish national identity as being comfortably Scottish and British Overturns the prevailing view of Victorian Scottishness as parochial, sentimental tartanry

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