Brahms's "Wiegenlied" and the Maternal Voice

2005 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 185-213 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen Bottge
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Key Words ◽  
Gilles Deleuze ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Critical Comparison ◽  
Friedrich Kittler ◽  
Mother And Child ◽  
Maternal Voice ◽  
Mother’S Voice ◽  
Musical Context

Brahms's familiar "Wiegenlied" op. 49, no. 4 (1868) is emblematic of numerous nineteenth-century compositions that sonorously enact idealized images of the mother and child. Its back and forth harmonic movement imitates the phenomenal sensation of rocking, and its interlocking syncopations support and interact with the emotive declamation of the singer's voice. Because its musical features are so easily accessible, the "Wiegenlied" has escaped music-analytical attention, its deceptive simplicity seemingly transparent to our music-theoretical gaze. Yet, certain aspects of this music render our familiar analytical or critical strategies inadequate for explaining the intuitions we have about it, aspects that suggest tracing their connections within a broader cultural and musical context. My discussion of the lullaby draws from a number of cultural theorists--among them Friedrich Kittler, Michel Chion, Gilles DeLeuze, Flix Guattari, and Theodor W. Adorno--to theorize the power of the mother's voice (la voix maternelle) in forming lifelong vocal and musical connections. I provide a close reading of Alexander Baumann's "S'is Anderscht" (1842), the Austrian vocal duet that inspired Brahms's composition of the lullaby, and a critical comparison of it with the lullaby. Finally, after uncovering latent etymological sources of several key words in the lullaby's text, I offer a hermeneutic re-reading of the poem, one that ultimately undermines our casual assumptions of this simple childhood song.

A Reading of Westcott's Gospel of Creation: An Early Venture into Ecological Theology?

2013 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 185-202
Author(s):  
Duncan Reid
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Ecological Theology ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Science And Theology ◽  
Doctrine Of Creation ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

AbstractIn response to the contemporary ecological movement, ecological perspectives have become a significant theme in the theology of creation. This paper asks whether antecedents to this growing significance might predate the concerns of our times and be discernible within the diverse interests of nineteenth-century Anglican thinking. The means used here to examine this possibility is a close reading of B. F. Westcott's ‘Gospel of Creation’. This will be contextualized in two directions: first with reference to the understanding of the natural world in nineteenth-century English popular thought, and secondly with reference to the approach taken to the doctrine of creation by three late twentieth-century Anglican writers, two concerned with the relationship between science and theology in general, and a third concerned more specifically with ecology.

scholarly journals CARL SPITTELER A STOSUNKI POLSKO-ROSYJSKIE W DRUGIEJ POŁOWIE XIX WIEKU

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Zieliński
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Nobel Prize ◽  
Close Reading

“Carl Spitteler and Polish-Russian Relationships in the Second Half of the Nineteenth century”This paper deals with Carl Spitteler’s opinions, still not researched and descri- bed, about Polish-Russian relationships in the second half of the nineteenth century, it focuses on the issues of the Russification of former Polish territo- ries. Spitteler had an opportunity to get acquainted in depth both with Russia and the Kingdom of Poland The author reaches interesting conclusions from close reading of a writer who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1919.

scholarly journals “Celebration of the Body”: Marshall McLuhan and the Sensory Conceptualism of N.E. Thing Co. Ltd.

2015 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Lauder
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Art ◽  
The Body ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Marshall Mcluhan ◽  
Friedrich Kittler ◽  
Artist's Book ◽  
Livre D'artiste

Through a close reading of the 1976 artist’s book and exhibition catalogue “Celebration of the Body,” the N.E. Thing Co. Ltd.’s pioneering representations of the body’s “informationalization” are situated within the conceptual company’s creative reworking of Marshall McLuhan’s sensory media theories. In turn, McLuhan’s thought is located within a genealogy of physiological aesthetics that troubles conventional narratives of Conceptual art as a movement defined by its engagement with theories of cognition, language, and systems. Friedrich Kittler’s analysis of modernism as reflecting the decomposition of the body under a regime of psychophysical experimentation provides the framework for this article’s re-evaluation of the Toronto School theorist and his influence on the foundational Vancouver-based “critical company.”En utilisant une lecture attentive du livre d’artiste et catalogue d’exposition « Celebration of the Body », 1979, les représentations du corps numérisé de N.E. Thing Co. sont encadrées dans le remaniement créatif des théories médiatique de Marshall McLuhan entreprit par la compagnie.  À leurs tours, les pensées de McLuhan sont placées dans une généalogie d’esthétique physiologique qui dérange les récits conventionnels de l’art conceptuel comme étant un mouvement défini par son engagement avec les théories de la cognition et du langage. L’analyse de Friedrich Kittler de modernisme comme réflexion de la décomposition du corps effectuée par des expériences psychophysique fournit le cadre pour cette réévaluation du théoricien de l’École de Toronto et son impact sur la « compagnie critique » fondatrice de Vancouver.

Colonial Relations in Miniature: Affective Networks, Race, and the Portrait in Victor Séjour’s “Le Mulâtre”

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Madeline Zehnder
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Social Ties ◽  
Emotional Connection ◽  
Critical Comparison ◽  
The Family ◽  
Geographically Distributed ◽  
Life Function ◽  
Familiar Objects

Abstract This essay attends to the presence of a small portrait carried by an enslaved character, Georges, in Victor Séjour’s 1837 sketch “Le Mulâtre” (“The Mulatto”). While most eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fiction deploys miniature portraits to mediate social ties and signal emotional connection, in “Le Mulâtre” the carrying of a miniature departs from this trope, marking alienation, not affiliation. Reading Séjour’s text against popular depictions and material histories of ivory portrait miniatures, I demonstrate that these familiar objects of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century life function not merely as emblems of intimacy, as past scholars have argued, but rather as tools of what Elizabeth Maddock Dillon calls “intimate distance”—a social configuration that depends on asserting closeness with geographically distributed white populations while disavowing intimacy with physically present Black and Indigenous peoples. Although the portrait is said to depict Georges’s father, who readers know is also the man’s white enslaver, the object remains hidden from view in a bag until the final moments of the sketch, which concludes with the father’s beheading and the son’s suicide. I argue that by emplotting the miniature in a moment of bloodshed rather than of sentiment, Séjour registers the affective and material violence that undergirds white colonial definitions of the family, and invites broader critical comparison of the ways that both sentimental and colonial structures depend on racialized distributions of affections. In the concluding portion of this essay, I turn to the “little buckskin pouch” containing Alfred’s miniature and consider how its resemblance to Afro-Atlantic folk charms recasts the racialized binaries traditionally advanced by miniature portraits, calling attention to whiteness as a ritualized notion dependent on material signifiers.

Kaleidoscopic Pedagogy in the Classroom Laboratory

2018 ◽  
pp. 3-23
Author(s):  
Ryan Cordell ◽  
Benjamin J. Doyle ◽  
Elizabeth Hopwood
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Data Analysis ◽  
Pedagogical Practices ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Learning Spaces ◽  
Text Encoding ◽  
Text Encoding Initiative ◽  
Classroom Laboratory ◽  
Nuanced Understanding ◽  
Interpretive Process

Ryan Cordell, Benjamin Doyle, and Elizabeth Hopwood’s essay seizes a nineteenth-century invention, the kaleidoscope, as a model and metaphor for pedagogical practices and learning spaces that encourage play and experimentation. Through examples that involve setting letterpress type, the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) encoding of nineteenth-century texts as an interpretive process, and the collaborative creation of Wikipedia pages, the authors describe how experiments with contemporary technologies help students claim scholarly agency over the texts and tools central to their study of the nineteenth century. Kaleidoscopic pedagogy encourages students to discover how C19 competencies like close reading and contemporary methods of coding and data analysis have the potential to be mutually constitutive, inspiring a more nuanced understanding of both periods.

Food Provisioning at Betty’s Hope Plantation, 1780s–1850s

2020 ◽  
pp. 68-82
Author(s):  
Geneviève Godbout
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Food Production ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Food Provisioning ◽  
Informal Trade

Throughout the colonial period, the occupants of the Betty’s Hope site relied a complex provisioning networks to obtain edible goods, tableware, and other necessities not only from the British Metropole and from local producers in Antigua but also from neighboring islands, including Guadeloupe, and from continental America. In this context, Betty’s Hope residents called upon food production and convivial hospitality were used to negotiate and stabilize their position within Antiguan society, both under slavery and after Emancipation (1834), under the particular constraints of absentee ownership and colonial trade regulations. The chapter combined the analysis of material cultural recovered at Betty’s Hope plantation with a close reading of correspondence relating to provisioning on the estate, to illustrate the enduring presence of informal trade, customary reciprocity, smuggling and illicit transactions on the estate throughout the nineteenth century.

Everything is Noise: Don Delillo’s White Noise and the Affectivity of Media, Religion, and Divination

2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 158-174
Author(s):  
Eric Chalfant
Keyword(s):  
Information Theory ◽  
White Noise ◽  
Media Studies ◽  
Affect Theory ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Spiritual Meaning ◽  
Friedrich Kittler ◽  
Warren Weaver

This paper provides a theoretical defense of the concept of noise, borrowed and loosened from the field of information theory, as a heuristic tool for discussing mediation as divination and exploring the intersection of media studies and religious studies. I first provide a theoretical primer for the concept of noise as it is articulated by Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver and developed in media studies by Friedrich Kittler and in religious studies by Mark Taylor. Then, a close reading of Don Delillo’s White Noise draws out the potential of noise to highlight media’s ability to provide spiritual meaning and truth through an affect of divination. Finally, I connect these themes to current conceptions of media’s relationship to truth as well as recent anthropology on religious divination, suggesting the utility of noise to aid in scholarly efforts to materialize both media studies and religious studies as they engage with affect theory.

‘What is a mouth’: Joyce Wieland’s Pierre Vallières (1972) and the politics of the film portrait

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 10-23
Author(s):  
Bettina Brunner
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Gilles Deleuze ◽  
Spoken Word ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
French Canadian ◽  
Political Speech ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Shirley Clarke

Focusing on Joyce Wieland’s film portrait Pierre Vallières (1972), this article follows the Canadian artist and filmmaker’s practice as it evolved through her engagement with the New York film avant-garde of the 1960s. Through an analysis of Wieland’s collaboration with Shirley Clarke, I will also discuss Pierre Vallières in relation to US-American documentary practices from the same period. Referring to Clarke’s Portrait of Jason (1967) with its focus on the spoken word as well as Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests, I will place Wieland’s film within this line of film portraits engaging with identity and a performative notion of subjectivity. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze, this article concludes with a close reading of Wieland’s film, discussing her use of the close-up as a means of thwarting the linear narrative and logic of its subject’s political speech. Pierre Vallières’ politics thus emerges within an aesthetics that crosses the boundaries of documentary and avant-garde, communicating with audiences beyond the film’s original context of French-Canadian emancipation.

Biometric Aesthetics

Public ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 30 (60) ◽  
pp. 108-125
Author(s):  
Robert Heynen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Face Recognition ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Scientific Approach ◽  
Francis Galton ◽  
Machine Readable ◽  
Social Logics

This article examines contemporary biometric science against the backdrop of its development in nineteenth century eugenic and biostatistical practices, most notably the composite photography of Francis Galton. Focusing on automated face recognition, the article argues that contemorary biometric science is inextricable from its aesthetic investments, which in turn shape the ways in which faces and bodies are differentiated in identification systems. Based on a close reading of biometric engineering texts and projects, this aesthetico-scientific approach offers new ways of conceptualizing how biometrics constitutes rather than merely reflects bodies, and encodes racist, misogynist, and other social logics into the conception and design of technologies themselves. These are not biases that can be corrected, as ostensibly progressive biometric projects like IBM’s Diversity in Faces initiative suggest, but rather are inextricable from the biometric desire to render faces and bodies as transparent and machine-readable.

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