The Cultural Dynamics of Reception

2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Marie-Louise Coolahan
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Production ◽  
Critical Study ◽  
Reception Studies ◽  
Cultural Dynamics ◽  
Low Countries ◽  
Geographical Regions ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Material ◽  
International Comparative ◽  
The Relationship

The cultural dynamics of reception are best understood as a reiterative process of reshaping and reframing. Reception as an object of critical study embraces first the history of how texts were read, disseminated, and consumed across media, languages, and geographical regions. But if this is the first port of call, such analysis quickly draws in questions about the relationship between reception and production, audience and agency, about contemporary and posthumous reputation. This special issue investigates the ways in which the act of reception is a reiterative process on a continuous spectrum with cultural production. Receivers — of texts, events, reputations — are mediators, creatively reconstituting that which they receive according to their own agendas and contemporary imperatives. The articles in this collection embrace international, comparative, and new material contexts for early modern reception studies as they address poetry, romance, letters, history, hagiography, autobiography, and literary reviews. The transnational perspectives that emerge lead from the Low Countries to Italy, Ireland to France and the Spanish Netherlands, Spain to England, and England to France. The introductory essay for the issue additionally examines recent digital projects concerned with the history of reading and reception, exploring in particular how digital resource design foregrounds questions of representation and our immersion, as critics, in the act of reception.

World-Ecological Satire: Peat, Brian O'Nolan, and the Irish Free State's Energy Regime

2019 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 90-104
Author(s):  
Robert Kiely
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Production ◽  
Ecological Perspective ◽  
Energy Regime ◽  
Energy History ◽  
History Of ◽  
External Site ◽  
Ecological Relations ◽  
Nature And Society ◽  
Human Actors ◽  
The Relationship

A world-ecological perspective of cultural production refuses a dualist conception of nature and society – which imagines nature as an external site of static outputs  – and instead foregrounds the fact that human and extra-human natures are completely intertwined. This essay seeks to reinterpret the satirical writing of a canonical figure within the Irish literary tradition, Brian O'Nolan, in light of the energy history of Ireland, understood as co-produced by both human actors and biophysical nature. How does the energy imaginary of O'Nolan's work refract and mediate the Irish environment and the socio-ecological relations shaping the fuel supply-chains that power the Irish energy regime dominant under the Irish Free State? I discuss the relationship between peat as fuel and Brian O'Nolan's pseudonymous newspaper columns, and indicate how questions about energy regimes and ecology can lead us to read his Irish language novel An Béal Bocht [The Poor Mouth] (1941) in a new light. The moments I select and analyze from O'Nolan's output feature a kind of satire that exposes the folly of separating society from nature, by presenting an exaggerated form of the myth of nature as an infinite resource.

Framing The Fosters: jokes, racism and Black and Asian voices in British comedy television

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gavin Schaffer
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Racial Politics ◽  
Black British ◽  
Stand Up Comedy ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Post War ◽  
Cultural Leaders ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter interrogates the relationship between television comedy, power and racial politics in post-war Britain. In a period where Black and Asian Britons were forced to negotiate racism as a day-to-day reality, the essay questions the role played by television comedy in reflecting and shaping British multicultural society. Specifically, this chapter probes Black and Asian agency in comedy production, questioning who the joke makers were and what impact this had on the development of comedy and its reception. The work of scholars of Black and Asian comedy television such as Sarita Malik, and of Black stand-up comedy such as Stephen Small, has helped us to understand that Black- and Asian-led British comedy emerged belatedly in the 1980s and 1990s, hindered by the historical underrepresentation of these communities in British cultural production and the disinclination of British cultural leaders to address this problem. This chapter uses these scholarly frames of reference, alongside research that addresses the social and political functions of comedy, to re-open the social history of Black British communities in post-war Britain through the story of sitcom.

The cultural production of Cabaret Voltaire: Marxism, the politics of modernism and post-punk

2021 ◽  
Vol 00 (00) ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Nick Stevenson
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Electronic Music ◽  
Critical Assessment ◽  
Aesthetic Theory ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
History Of ◽  
Critical Understanding ◽  
Post Industrial ◽  
The Relationship

This article explores the contribution of Cabaret Voltaire to the history of industrial and electronic music in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Heavily influenced by the music of Kraftwerk, the Cabs drew upon the dystopian landscapes of William Burroughs to create a paranoid soundscape. Like Kraftwerk, Cabaret Voltaire’s music was influenced by the artistic movements of the twentieth century (most prominently Dada) and drew upon modernist techniques. Especially significant in this regard was their location within post-industrial Sheffield and the ideologies of post-punk more generally. This discussion offers a critical assessment of Cabaret Voltaire as a form of avant-garde music that sought to carefully position itself in the context of the cultural politics of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Primarily through the work of Marxist aesthetic theory, I seek to offer a critical appreciation of the relationship between Cabaret Voltaire and the influence of Dada and modernism. The aim of the discussion is to reclaim a more critical understanding of Marxism while exploring its arguments in relation to artistic forms of modernism and popular culture. Especially important at this juncture is the rejection of the cultural populism of postmodernism and the reclaiming of a more critical language of evaluation and critique. Here the argument is that whatever Cabaret Voltaire’s limitations they continue to remind us of modernism’s ongoing capacity to offer arresting forms of art and critique.

Making Progress: Disaster Narratives and the Art of Optimism in Modern America

2005 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kevin Rozario
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Landscape ◽  
Building Materials ◽  
Narrative Imagination ◽  
The Face ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Material ◽  
Words And Images ◽  
The Relationship

As the philosopher Martin Heidegger once revealed, there are etymological affinities linking the words building, dwelling, and thinking. The history of language, in this instance, teaches a profound lesson: that building is never simply a technical exercise, never solely a question of shelter, but also inevitably a forum for dwelling on life; it is nothing less, in many respects, than a form of thinking. Louis Sullivan famously described the architect as “a poet who uses not words but building materials as a medium of expression.”Certainly, when we build we are telling stories about the world, sculpting the cultural landscape even as we remold the physical one. But if buildings tell stories, it is also true that stories make buildings. When offices, stores, and homes are suddenly and unexpectedly annihilated, it is necessary not only to manufacture new material structures but also to repair torn cultural fabrics and damaged psyches. With this in mind, I propose to explore the relationship between the rebuilding of cities with mortar and bricks and the rebuilding of cultural environments with words and images in the aftermath of great urban disasters—a double process neatly caught in the twin meanings of the word reconstruction as “remaking” and as “retelling.” The reconstruction of events in our minds, the stories we hear and tell about disasters, the way we see and imagine destruction—all of these things have a decisive bearing on how we reconstruct damaged buildings, neighborhoods, or cities. Construction, in this sense, is always cultural. We cannot build what we cannot imagine. We create worlds with words. We build stories with stories. Certainly we cannot build with any confidence or ambition without some faith in the future. So when we consider the extraordinary endurance of American cities over the past couple of centuries when confronting fires, floods, earthquakes, and wars, one of our tasks must be to ask how people have perceived and described the disasters that have befallen them. In this chapter, I will examine the role of disaster writings and what I amcalling a “narrative imagination” in helping Americans to conceive of disasters as instruments of progress, and I will argue that this expectation has contributed greatly to this nation’s renowned resilience in the face of natural disasters.

On Editing Barbot

1993 ◽  
Vol 20 ◽  
pp. 53-59 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. E. H. Hair
Keyword(s):  
Critical Edition ◽  
The Other ◽  
Critical Study ◽  
Ideal World ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Transmission Of Information ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Material ◽  
North And South ◽  
Relevant Section

In 1974 the very first issue of HA included an analysis of a small section of John Barbot's Description of the coasts of North and South Guinea. Since this represented the first fruits of a project to edit Barbot's writings on Guinea, it is appropriate that, now the completed edition is published, a review of the history of the editing, the methods and problems of the editors, and the problems that the consumer will face in using the edition, should also appear in HA.Why Barbot? When, twenty years ago, I decided that Barbot's account of Guinea should be edited, I already knew that it was partly unoriginal, and that in an ideal world priority would be given to editing the other, earlier, recognized compendium on Guinea, the relevant section of Dapper's account of all Africa. For although Dapper is also partly unoriginal, it has probably a wider range of new material than Barbot, not least the very detailed Kquoja account. Why then Barbot rather than Dapper? The answer is simple. I recognized the lack of critical editing of Guinea sources and felt I had to take the plunge somewhere. But whereas Dapper wrote in Dutch, a language of which I have only dictionary command, the earlier manuscript version of Barbot was in French, a language I could cope with. Dapper will have his turn. Adam Jones, one of the co-editors of “Barbot on Guinea,” having Dutch, has already published studies of Dapper's sources. Moreover, in the edition of Barbot we have taken the unusual step of including in the annotation fairly frequent references to the lines of transmission of information, for instance, not only noting the material Barbot borrowed from Dapper but also, where the material was not original to Dapper, the sources of his borrowing—thus doing part of the work of a critical edition of Dapper. In fact we have generally tried to make the edition of Barbot a starting point for the critical study of many other pre-1700 Guinea sources.

Lessing as Editor of Reimarus

2017 ◽  
Vol 129 (6) ◽  
pp. 265-270
Author(s):  
John Riches
Keyword(s):  
Critical Point ◽  
Christian Faith ◽  
Historical Jesus ◽  
Critical Study ◽  
The Bible ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s publication of Fragments of an Unknown Wolfenbüttel Author in the 1770s unleashed a storm of debate and controversy, which ended with censor stepping in and forbidding further contributions. The Fragmentenstreit, the ‘Battle of the Fragments’, as it came to be known, was a critical point in the development of German theology. For Schweitzer, as is made clear by the full title of his survey of historical Jesus studies ( The Quest of the Historical Jesus: A Critical Study of its Progress from Reimarus to Wrede), the publication of the fragment ‘On the purpose of Jesus and his disciples’ marks the true beginnings of an historical engagement with the Gospel stories about Jesus. For Lessing, Reimarus’ text certainly raised questions about the interpretative methods and categories which are most properly applied to the Gospels; it also raised issues about the relationship between reason and revelation, the place of the Bible, the canon, in the development of Christian faith, and indeed of the very nature of faith itself. We will look briefly at some of these questions. There is, too, a much wider and more demanding question: what influence did this debate have on the subsequent history of German theology which, in the 150 years which followed, saw the rise of both liberal and more confessionally oriented theologies, the prominence of figures like Schleiermacher, Hegel, Ritschl, Barth, and Bultmann? We can offer no more than a few pointers to the beginnings of such developments.

scholarly journals Undivided object: language, ethnography and sources

2011 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 510-535
Author(s):  
Heloisa Pontes
Keyword(s):  
Social History ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
Social Processes ◽  
Intellectual Life ◽  
Object Language ◽  
The Social ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Basic Argument ◽  
The Relationship

This article argues that anthropology should not avoid studying the world of art and the specialized fields of cultural production. To do this it is necessary to examine the relationship between ethnography, language and social processes, as well as the way in which we make use o four sources (written, oral and visual) in our research. While this is the basic argument of the text, it also moves into a discussion of the sources that are available for the social history of the theater and Brazilian intellectual life from 1940 to 1960: photographs, interviews, reminiscences, biographies, autobiographies as well as books and theater repertories.

Introduction: The stories of American history and why they matter

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-7
Author(s):  
Eric Avila
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Cultural Production ◽  
American History ◽  
Driving Force ◽  
Spatial Context ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
National Boundaries ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
The Relationship

The book opens in explaining that this very short introduction to American cultural history emphasizes culture as a driving force in American history. Cultural history is the history of stories, their origins, transmission, and significance in time. However, no work of cultural history can disentangle the cultural from political, economic, and social processes of change. The relationship between culture and identity needs to be understood along with the spatial context of cultural production and its physical location within distinct geographies. American culture has been the sum of diverse global influences, from almost every part of the world, but it has not contained itself within national boundaries.

Artistic space in I.S. Turgenev’s prose poem «threshold» and in chinese literature of the XX century

2019 ◽  
pp. 167-176
Author(s):  
Sai Na
Keyword(s):  
Chinese Literature ◽  
Comparative Method ◽  
Research Topic ◽  
Prose Poem ◽  
Prose Poems ◽  
Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev ◽  
Russian Literary ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Material ◽  
The Relationship

The popularity of «Prose Poems» (1878–1882) by Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev dates back more than a hundred years, while they remain the very first works of the writer, translated into Chinese. The study of Turgenev has gained particular relevance in China. This article discusses the understudied issue of the influence of the Turgenev’s prose poem «Threshold» on Chinese literature through the example of the work of the classics of Chinese literature of the first half of the 20th century, such as Lu Xin (1881–1936), the father of the modern Chinese novel, Li Ni (1913–1968), the singer of «sorrow and grief», and Lu Li (1908–1942), one of the founders of the new Chinese lyrical prose. Using the comparative method, the article analyses the artistic features of the following prose poems: «The Traveler» by Lu Xin, «The Falcon Song» by Li Ni, and «The Door and the Recluse» by Lu Li. The author reveals the significant influence that the philosophical ideas of Turgenev and his creative style had on these writers and Chinese literature in general. The comparative analysis shows that in the poems of Lu Sin and Li Ni, the spatial characteristics of Turgenev's prose poem «The Threshold» are recreated, while Lu Li was inspired by the philosophical meaning of this work of art. In this way, opening a new page for Russian literary scholars in the history of the relationship between Russian and Chinese cultures, the research topic and the analysis done reveal new material for Russian literary studies about on the history of the reception of Turgenev‘s creative work in China.

Historical borders and maps as symbolic supports to master narratives and history education

2020 ◽  
pp. 095935432096222
Author(s):  
Cristian Parellada ◽  
Mario Carretero ◽  
María Rodríguez-Moneo
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Production ◽  
History Education ◽  
Border Studies ◽  
Historical Maps ◽  
Sociocultural Perspective ◽  
Master Narratives ◽  
History Of Cartography ◽  
Production And Consumption ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship

This article represents an attempt to establish a fruitful dialogue among the field of border studies, history education, sociocultural psychology, and the history of cartography. Seminal studies on borders have asserted that the historical maps included in textbooks are basically an imagined representation. This paper will consider the extent to which cultural and educational origins and uses of these maps, particularly in school settings, act as a support to historical essentialist views. Via the example of history education in Argentina, we carried out an empirical and theoretical examination of the processes of cultural production and consumption of historical maps and their relationship to historical master narratives. Results show that most laypeople largely think of national borders as possessing an essential and immutable character. We consider that closer study, from a sociocultural perspective, of the relationship between master narratives and historical maps may add an enriching element to the existing body of work produced by border studies.

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