Sentimental Remembrance and the Amusements of Forgetting in Karl and Harty's “Kentucky”

2016 ◽  
Vol 69 (2) ◽  
pp. 477-524
Author(s):  
Sumanth Gopinath ◽  
Anna Schultz
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Country Music ◽  
Racial Formations ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Source Models ◽  
Song Transmission ◽  
Archival Work ◽  
Hillbilly Music

In the 1940s “Kentucky” was the greatest hit of Karl and Harty, one of radio's most popular country music duos during the heyday of live hillbilly music in Chicago. Soon after it was released in 1941, aspects of “Kentucky” were already being forgotten—indeed, were predicated on forgetting outmoded racial formations and modes of song transmission—though the song is explicitly about remembering the lost spaces of rural, southern youth. The nostalgic sentimentality of “Kentucky” occludes a secondary stratum of musical and textual qualities that evoke racialized modes of dance and entertainment. Through close analysis, interviews, and archival work, we examine the song's racial and geographical signifiers and source models to show how tensions between its dual dialectic of memory/forgetting and sentimentality/entertainment participated in the mid-twentieth-century decline of hillbilly music and rise of commercial country.

Victorians in the Closet: Oscar Wilde's Monstrous Hollywood Legacy

2021 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 711-729
Author(s):  
Kate Hext
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Reciprocal Relationship ◽  
Horror Films ◽  
Early Cinema ◽  
Visual Effects ◽  
Early American ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Picture Of Dorian Gray ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
Twentieth Century America

This essay offers a new perspective on the Victorians’ representation in early cinema. It argues that the profile of Oscar Wilde and the decadent movement was such, in early twentieth-century America, that its movies often viewed the Victorians through a decadent lens. Situating its discussion in a detailed exposition of Hollywood's interest in late-Victorian decadence, this essay discusses the reciprocal relationship between Oscar Wilde's imagination and cinematic horror. It sketches the inherently cinematic qualities in decadent writing and, focusing on Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), offers a new reading of how it incorporates different cinematic technologies to create a sense of supernatural horror. The essay goes on to examine how Wilde's novel inspired early American horror films, with close analysis of how its dialogue and visual effects were incorporated into the genre-defining adaptation of Jekyll and Hyde (1920).

Reading German Jewry through Vernacular Photography: From the Kaiserreich to the Third Reich

2015 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 300-334 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leora Auslander
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Forced Migration ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
Religious Practice ◽  
Photograph Albums ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
The Third Reich ◽  
German Jewish ◽  
The One ◽  
German Jewry

AbstractBuilding on a generation of scholarship that argues that an understanding of German Jewish life must move beyond debates over terms—assimilation, acculturation, integration, subcultures, and symbiosis—this article uses three photograph albums created by the Wassermann family of Bamberg, in conjunction with the written record, to suggest an alternative interpretive framework for understanding the complexity of German Jewish lives in the first third of the twentieth century. Rethinking this history through a close analysis of photographs and photograph albums is particularly productive because even if photography and album-making were ubiquitous practices throughout the twentieth century, the special affinity of Jews for photography has been well-documented. Their paradoxical historic experience—including ghettoization and forced migration, on the one hand, and powerful feelings of “at-homeness” in their various diasporic dwelling places, on the other, in combination with the specificities of Jewish religious practice—has given Jews a particular relation to time and to place, a relation sometimes made manifest in photography. That relation is, furthermore, historical, changing with each context in which Jews find themselves living.

Theology from Listening

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-93
Author(s):  
Rhiannon Grant
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Small Groups ◽  
Multiple Modes ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
The World ◽  
English Speaking

Abstract This publication explores the changes and continuities in liberal Quaker theology over the long twentieth century (1895 to 2019) in multiple English-speaking Quaker communities around the world. A close analysis is conducted of Quaker theologising through multiple modes: formal, corporate methods; material produced by individuals and small groups within Quaker communities; and writing by individuals and small groups working primarily within academic or ecumenical theological settings. It is concluded that although liberal Quaker theology is diverse and flexible, it also possesses a core coherence and can meaningfully be discussed as a single tradition. At the centre of liberal Quaker theology is the belief that direct, unmediated contact with the Divine is possible and results in useful guidance.

Hearkening to Thalia: Toward the Rebirth of Comedy in Continental Philosophy

2009 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 401-415
Author(s):  
Bernard Freydberg
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Continental Philosophy ◽  
The Third ◽  
Greek Comedy ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Three Stages

AbstractThis paper discloses and furthers the rebirth of comedy in Continental philosophy in three stages. The first treats Greek comedy, bringing forth the comic contours in Plato and exploring the philosophical content of Aristophanic comedy. The second examines certain German encounters with comedy, from the staid Wieland translations of Aristophanes through the thoughtful discussions of Schiller, Hegel, and Nietzsche. The third investigates twentieth-century American comedy and its connection to American Continental philosophy, and includes a close analysis of the Marx Brothers' Horsefeathers. The latter serves as a bridge to some surprising developments regarding comedy, poetry, and philosophy.

Back to the Future Qasbah

2020 ◽  
pp. 57-89
Author(s):  
Megan Eaton Robb
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Temporal Distance ◽  
The Public ◽  
Space And Time ◽  
Physical Isolation ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
The Future

This chapter delves into the role of space and time in the formation of the public. Statements in Madīnah linked Bijnor’s physical isolation to a temporal distance, a spatial-temporal rift that allowed it to define a segment of the Urdu public that stood at odds with the “Westernized city,” and from this position also to reach out and connect with a broader Muslim qaum. This chapter explores the power of alternate temporalities, enabled by nostalgia, as a mechanism of power. Statements about the passage of time were irruptive, enabling the construction of an alternative qasbah timescape, and with this alternative timescape, an alternative public. While the qasbah has more recently been tied to an idealized past, close analysis of the discourse of Madīnah newspaper reveals an early twentieth-century voice that saw the present, past, and future as productively intertwined in the qasbah.

Locating Australian Corporate Memory

1999 ◽  
Vol 73 (2) ◽  
pp. 256-264 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Ville ◽  
Grant Fleming
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Large Study ◽  
Business History ◽  
Corporate Leadership ◽  
Corporate Memory ◽  
National University ◽  
Sound Foundation ◽  
The University ◽  
Archival Work ◽  
Selection Of

This research note reports on the quantity of business records available in Australia as indicated by a recent survey of the top one hundred firms operating during the twentieth century. The archival work was undertaken as part of a large study investigating aspects of corporate leadership in Australia, conducted Jointly at the Australian National University and the University of Melbourne. We found that the surviving records of Australian businesses cover a wide selection of firm types, and that the comprehensiveness of many archives places business history on a sound foundation for the future.

“The Frog’s Courtship” and Other Sources

Sweet Thing ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 79-134
Author(s):  
Nicholas Stoia
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Oral Tradition ◽  
The United States ◽  
Country Music ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Harmonic Language ◽  
Major Branch ◽  
Textual Content

The stanzaic form of “The Frog’s Courtship” represents a second major branch in the lineage of the “Sweet Thing” scheme. Chapter 2 concerns its progress from Elizabethan England all the way to late nineteenth-century ragtime and early twentieth-century blues and country music. The stanzaic form appears in the United States by the early nineteenth century and then largely disappears from print until reemerging in several songs collected by folklorists in the early twentieth century, demonstrating its strong endurance in oral tradition. More often than “Captain Kidd,” this second stanzaic form appears in extensively abbreviated versions, reflecting its oral mode of transmission, which allows for more flexibility in length of bars. In early ragtime, the form unites with the harmonic language of contemporaneous popular music and acquires melodic and textual content that subsequently imbues early blues and country music as pervasive elements of the twentieth-century “Sweet Thing” scheme.

Entertainment for Everyone: The Nashville Ryman Auditorium before the Advent of Country Music

2019 ◽  
pp. 009614421989368
Author(s):  
Martin Rempe
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Country Music ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Cleavages ◽  
Music Scene ◽  
Personal Management ◽  
Professional Network ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This article reconsiders the story of Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium from its beginnings in the late nineteenth century to the advent of country music in the early 1950s. Closely scrutinizing the management of Lula C. Naff and her professional network, it argues that the Ryman, thanks to its diversified programming, turned into a music venue for everyone in the course of the first half of the twentieth century, despite ongoing segregation, social cleavages, and cultural parochialism. As such, the Ryman was neither simply the mythical birthplace of a purely local music scene nor a cosmopolitan hotspot of musical special gigs. Rather, the Auditorium developed its distinct aura from the particular mixture of its local religious origin and personal management as well as from its diversified connections into various cultural and social constituencies, on stage as well as in the audience.

scholarly journals The Concept of “the Establishment” and the Transformation of Political Argument in Britain since 1945

2021 ◽  
Vol 60 (2) ◽  
pp. 257-284
Author(s):  
Stuart Middleton
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Political Authority ◽  
Social Democratic ◽  
Conservative Politics ◽  
Margaret Thatcher ◽  
Political Commentary ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Political Vocabulary

AbstractThis article examines the formation and development of the concept of the Establishment in British political argument after its recoining in a celebrated article by the journalist Henry Fairlie in 1955. The author argues that the term “the Establishment” did not have a stable referent but rather acquired a range of possible meanings and uses as part of a new political vocabulary within which the course and significance of recent political and social change was contested, and that ultimately transformed social-democratic and conservative politics in Britain. The article situates the formation of the concept of the Establishment within a prolonged contestation of social and political authority in Britain during the middle of the twentieth century and traces the recoining of the term in conservative political commentary prior to Henry Fairlie's frequently cited 1955 Spectator article. From the late 1950s, it is argued, the concept acquired more distinctively contemporary meanings that enabled its adoption by Harold Wilson during the mid-1960s and its subsequent reappropriation by Margaret Thatcher in the mid-1970s. These usages registered and helped to accomplish fundamental political realignments, the understanding of which depends upon a close analysis of political and social concepts.

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