scholarly journals Daniel Call’s Schocker: German Knittelvers in the late twentieth century

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 7-30
Author(s):  
David Chisholm

The word “Knittelvers” has been used since the eighteenth century to describe four-stress rhyming couplets which seem to be rather simply and awkwardly constructed, and whose content is frequently comical, course, vulgar or obscene. Today German Knittelvers is perhaps best known from the works of Goethe and Schiller, as well as other late eighteenth and early nineteenth century writers.Well-known examples occur together with other verse forms in Goethe’s Faust and Schiller’s Wallensteins Lager, as well as in ballads and occasional poems by both poets. While literary critics have shown considerable interest in Knittelvers written from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, there has been almost no discussion of the further use and development of this verse form from the nineteenth century to the present, despite the fact that it continues to appear in both humorous and serious works by many contemporary German writers. This article focuses on an example of dramatic Knittelvers in a late twentieth century play, namely Daniel Call’s comedy Schocker, a modern parody of Goethe’s Faust. Among other things, Call’s play, as well as other examples of Knittelvers in works by twentieth and early twenty-first century poets, demonstrates that while this verse form has undergone some changes and variations, it still retains metrical characteristics which have remained constant since the fifteenth century. Today these four-stress couplets continue to function as a means of depicting comic, mock-heroic and tragicomic situations by means of parody, farce and burlesque satire.

2019 ◽  
Vol 59 (1) ◽  
pp. 2
Author(s):  
Neal Wyatt

As RA service has moved from its second-wave renaissance during the late twentieth century/early twenty-first century (with a steady stream of reference tools, conference programming, and think pieces) into an often underpromoted but bedrock mainstay of the public library, what do advisors continue to discuss among themselves and see as areas of need? If you could gather a handful of advisors together, over a cup of coffee one rainy morning before book group began, what would they talk about? What would they ask each other? What do they know to be foundational about the service? As important, what might they suggest we all re-think? This column invites you to eavesdrop on such a conversation. It was conducted over email between six advisors: two at the start of their careers, two helping to define the field, and two who have lead the way for librarians, for a combined eight decades. These advisors share research, hard-won and lived-in lessons, showcase the luminous nature of RA work as well as its difficulties, propose a change for RA education, and, of course, each suggests a book to read.


Author(s):  
R. Blake Brown

AbstractThis article explains why and how some Canadians have asserted a right to possess firearms from the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century. It demonstrates that several late-nineteenth-century politicians asserted a right to arms for self-defence purposes based on the English Bill of Rights. This “right” was forgotten until opponents of gun control dusted it off in the late twentieth century. Firearm owners began to assert such a right based upon the English Bill of Rights, William Blackstone, and the English common law. Their claims remained judicially untested until recent cases finally undermined such arguments.


2017 ◽  
Vol 62 (4) ◽  
pp. 609-620 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria G. Lebedeva ◽  
Anthony R. Lupo ◽  
Chasity B. Henson ◽  
Alexandr B. Solovyov ◽  
Yury G. Chendev ◽  
...  

Author(s):  
Karen A. Winstead

Scholars of the late twentieth century effectively contested the longstanding assumption that saints were principally understood in the Middle Ages as exemplars of piety. Saints could also exemplify political, religious, social, and sexual dissent; they could even be bad examples. This broader view opens promising lines of research for the twenty-first century, several of which are explored in this essay. One such line is reconsideration of the still-common assumption that exemplarity was gendered—that male saints were models for male readers, and female saints for female readers. A second is greater attention to lives written in the French of England, whose complex and various approaches to exemplarity foreshadow trends in fifteenth-century hagiography in English. The essay in turn encourages greater attention to the fifteenth century, when Middle English saints’ lives became both more literary and more engaged with controversies of the day, secular and religious.


2016 ◽  
Vol 29 (18) ◽  
pp. 6805-6822 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mei Zhao ◽  
Harry H. Hendon ◽  
Oscar Alves ◽  
Guoqiang Liu ◽  
Guomin Wang

Abstract Predictive skill for El Niño in the equatorial eastern Pacific across a range of forecast models declined sharply in the early twenty-first century relative to what was achieved in the late twentieth century despite ongoing improvements of forecast systems. This decline coincided with a shift in Pacific climate to an enhanced east–west surface temperature gradient across the Pacific and a stronger Walker circulation at the end of the twentieth century. Using seasonal forecast sensitivity experiments with the Australian Bureau of Meteorology coupled model POAMA2.4, the authors show that this shift in background climate acted to weaken key ocean–atmosphere feedbacks that amplify eastern Pacific El Niño, thus resulting in weaker variability that is less predictable. These results indicate that extreme El Niños, such as those that occurred in 1982/83 and 1997/98, were conditioned by the background climate and so were favored to occur in the late twentieth century. However, anticipating future changes in El Niño variability and predictability is an outstanding challenge because causes and prediction of low-frequency variations of Pacific climate have not yet been demonstrated.


Author(s):  
Mark Coeckelbergh

In chapter 2 historical Romanticism is outlined as it emerged and thrived in Germany, Britain, and France around 1800 and as it reached deep into the nineteenth century. The works and lives of Rousseau, Novalis, Morris, and others are discussed for this purpose. Moreover, he social and political side of Romanticism (Ruskin, Morris, and Marx) and romantic Gothic are discussed. Historical Romanticism is then linked to romanticism more broadly defined. The author argues that in many ways romanticism still persists today and that there is a line to be drawn start from Rousseau in the late eighteenth century to twentieth century counterculture and beyond. Even in the early twenty-first century forms of subjectivity are very much shaped by Romanticism - mainly in the form of our heritage from 1960s and 1970s romantic counterculture.


Author(s):  
Catherine Higgs

This chapter explores the intersections between European missionary outreach, political and commercial concerns, and the African reception and adaptation of Christianity south of the Sahara, beginning in the late fifteenth century ce and extending through the early twenty-first century. For the most part, missionaries, not monastics, spread the faith. The message from the outset was intertwined with political and commercial considerations—initially a trade in slaves, foodstuffs, and other commodities, and eventually, in the late nineteenth century, colonialism. Neither conquest nor evangelization proved formulaic or easy. In 1910, perhaps nine per cent of Africans were Christians, including those in the ancient north-eastern centres of Egypt and Ethiopia. By 2010, an estimated fifty per cent of Africans were Christians, most living south of the Sahara. Christianity has been redefined as an African faith, across a continuum that includes independent and indigenous interpretations, and, re-emerging in the twentieth century, a few Catholic monastics.


2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-110
Author(s):  
Denise Ruth Von Glahn

In a career spanning more than four decades, American composer Libby Larsen has turned to the natural world for inspiration on dozens of occasions: her piece Up Where the Air Gets Thin is just one of the results. Unlike many of her nature-based works which provide primarily aesthetic responses to the sights, sounds, feel, and smells of the natural environment, this 1985 duet for contrabass and cello comments on the limits of non-verbal communication and the impact of climate change. It is simultaneously reflective and didactic. “Sounds Real and Imagined” considers the ways Larsen marshals minimal musical materials and a sonic vocabulary that she associates with stillness and cold, in combination with her commitment to environmental awareness and advocacy. It situates the historic 1953 ascent of Mt. Everest by Sir Edmund Hillary and Tensing Norgay within the context of late-twentieth-century artistic responses and an early twenty-first century musicologist-listener’s consciousness.


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