Common Places: Sharing Spaces in Early Modern ‘Ordinary’ Houses

2021 ◽  
Vol 51 (4) ◽  
pp. 464-479
Author(s):  
Eleonora Canepari

The debate on common spaces inside buildings is linked to twentieth-century forms of popular housing, often devoid of places and opportunities to share a space which is conceived as fragmented and not collective. In recent years, an interest in the appropriation of urban space from the bottom up and the unanimous recognition of the need for places to meet within (or annexed to) buildings, have led to the definition of these ‘intermediate spaces’ as an essential part of living together. Compared to these common spaces, early modern houses pose an essential question: how was proximity within buildings structured, prior to the birth of intimacy? The well-known different perception of promiscuity, in fact, allowed a different structuring of collective housing and a physical proximity that coexisted with the strong social distance sanctioned by inequality by birth. To answer this question, the article examines the types of intermediate spaces, called loci comuni – stairs, landings, passages and courtyards – rather well-known in noble residences, much less in the houses of the popular classes. Through sources such as the fund of the Presidenza delle strade, inventories, land registers, notarial deeds of sale of houses and experts’ estimations, the article will investigate the uses of these spaces made by their inhabitants.

2020 ◽  
Vol 51 ◽  
pp. 193-219
Author(s):  
Claire Morelon

AbstractThis article analyzes the role of urban civic militias (burgher corps) in Habsburg Austria from the end of the nineteenth century to the aftermath of World War I. Far from a remnant of the early modern past, by the turn of the twentieth century these militias were thriving local institutions. They fostered dynastic patriotism and participated in the growing promotion of shooting among the population in the lead-up to the conflict. But they also played a major role in upholding the bourgeois ideals of protection of social hierarchies and property. In the context of the rise of the workers' movement and social unrest, the militias saw themselves as bulwarks of social order and bastions of bourgeois virtue. They reflected an exclusive conception of armed citizenship opposed to the egalitarian notion of the citizen-soldier that survived into the twentieth century. The sensory experience of burgher corps parades during the patriotic or church celebrations was supposed to convey stability and express hierarchies in the urban space. This article also links the practices of armed civilians before the war to the paramilitary groups that emerged in 1918 and emphasizes the legacy of local conceptions of armed defense of property and of notions of “good” citizenship in the aftermath of the war.


Author(s):  
Sarah S. Elkind

AbstractOil extraction began in the City of Los Angeles in the 1890s and continues to this day. A series of oil booms contributed to the city’s explosive growth in the early twentieth century. Because oil drilling was so dangerous, however, Los Angeles residents and city officials tried repeatedly to regulate oil exploration near homes and businesses. This article explains how oil drilling influenced Los Angeles residents’ understanding of property rights, how damage to residential property in the 1930s finally enabled city officials to pass and enforce limits on oil drilling, and then, how mobilization for World War II undermined those limits.


Paragraph ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 135-153
Author(s):  
Daisy Sainsbury

Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari's analysis of minor literature, deterritorialization and agrammaticality, this article explores the possibility of a ‘minor poetry’, considering various interpretations of the term, and interrogating the value of the distinction between minor poetry and minor literature. The article considers Bakhtin's work, which offers several parallels to Deleuze and Guattari's in its consideration of the language system and the place of literature within it, but which also addresses questions of genre. It pursues Christian Prigent's hypothesis, in contrast to Bakhtin's account of poetic discourse, that Deleuze and Guattari's notion of deterritorialization might offer a definition of poetic language. Considering the work of two French-language poets, Ghérasim Luca and Olivier Cadiot, the article argues that the term ‘minor poetry’ gains an additional relevance for experimental twentieth-century poetry which grapples with its own generic identity, deterritorializing established conceptions of poetry, and making ‘minor’ the major poetic discourses on which it is contingent.


2015 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-74
Author(s):  
Rebecca Masterton

This paper aims to engage in a critical comparison of the spiritual authority of the awliyā’ in the Shi‘i and Sufi traditions in order to examine an area of Islamic belief that remains unclearly defined. Similarities between Shi‘i and Sufi doctrine have long been noted, but little research has been conducted on how and why they developed. Taking a central tenet of both, walāyah, the paper discusses several of its key aspects as they appear recorded in Shi‘i ḥadīth collections and as they appear later in one of the earliest Sunni Sufi treatises. By extention, it seeks to explore the identity of the awliyā’ and their role in relation to the Twelve Imams. It also traces the reabsorption into Shi‘i culture of the Sufi definition of walāyah via two examples: the works of one branch of the Dhahabi order and those of Allamah Tabataba’i, a popular twentieth-century Iranian mystic and scholar.


Author(s):  
Emron Esplin

This essay explores Edgar Allan Poe’s extraordinary relationships with various literary traditions across the globe, posits that Poe is the most influential US writer on the global literary scene, and argues that Poe’s current global reputation relies at least as much on the radiance of the work of Poe’s literary advocates—many of whom are literary stars in their own right—as it does on the brilliance of Poe’s original works. The article briefly examines Poe’s most famous French advocates (Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Valéry); glosses the work of his advocates throughout Europe, Asia, and the Americas; and offers a concise case study of Poe’s influence on and advocacy from three twentieth-century writers from the Río de la Plata region of South America (Quiroga, Borges, and Cortázar). The essay concludes by reading the relationships between Poe and his advocates through the ancient definition of astral or stellar influence.


2020 ◽  
Vol 97 (3) ◽  
pp. 374-385
Author(s):  
Richard Kraut

Abstract Plato puts goodness at the center of all practical thinking but offers no definition of it and implies that philosophy must find one. Aristotle demurs, arguing that there is no such thing as universal goodness. What we need, instead, is an understanding of the human good. Plato and Aristotle are alike in the attention they give to the category of the beneficial, and they agree that since some things are beneficial only as means, there must be others that are non-derivatively beneficial. When G. E. Moore proposed in the early twentieth century that goodness is, as Plato had said, the foundation of ethics, he rejected not only the assumption that goodness needs a definition, but also that goodness is beneficial – that is, good for someone. This article traces the development of this debate as it plays out in the writings of Prichard, Ross, Geach, Thomson, and Scanlon.


Author(s):  
Brent A. R. Hege

AbstractAs dialectical theology rose to prominence in the years following World War I, the new theologians sought to distance themselves from liberalism in a number of ways, an important one being a rejection of Schleiermacher’s methods and conclusions. In reading the history of Weimar-era theology as it has been written in the twentieth century one would be forgiven for assuming that Schleiermacher found no defenders during this time, as liberal theology quietly faded into the twilight. However, a closer examination of this period reveals a different story. The last generation of liberal theologians consistently appealed to Schleiermacher for support and inspiration, perhaps none more so than Georg Wobbermin, whom B. A. Gerrish has called a “captain of the liberal rearguard.” Wobbermin sought to construct a religio-psychological method on the basis of Schleiermacher’s definition of religion and on his “Copernican turn” toward the subject and resolutely defended such a method against the new dialectical theology long after liberal theology’s supposed demise. A consideration of Wobbermin’s appeals to Schleiermacher in his defense of the liberal program reveals a more complex picture of the state of theology in the Weimar period and of Schleiermacher’s legacy in German Protestant thought.


2015 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 845-859
Author(s):  
EVAN CALDER WILLIAMS

This essay develops a history of salvage both as particular activity and as concept, arguing that it has quietly become one of the fundamental structures of thought that shape how we envision future possibility. However, the contemporary sense of the word, which designates the recuperation or search for value in what has already been destroyed, is a recent one and represents a significant transformation from the notion of salvage in early modern European maritime and insurance law. In that earlier iteration, salvage denoted payment received for helping to avert a disaster, such as keeping the ship and its goods from sinking in the first place. Passing through the dislocation of this concept into private salvage firms, firefighting companies, military usage, avant-garde art, and onto the human body itself in the guise of “personal risk,” the essay argues that the twentieth century becomes indelibly marked by a sense of the disaster that has already occurred. The second half of the essay passes into speculative culture, including fiction, video games, and film, to suggest that the most critical approaches to salvage have often come under the sign of science fiction but that the last decade in particular has shown how recent quotidian patterns of gentrification and defused antagonism have articulated stranger shifts in the figure of salvage than any speculative imaginary can currently manage.


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