“Have You Ever Seen a Shrunken Head?”: The Early Modern Roots of Ecstatic Truth in Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo

PMLA ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 122 (2) ◽  
pp. 483-501 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard John Ascárate
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
New World ◽  
South American ◽  
American Film ◽  
Captivity Narrative ◽  
Film Image ◽  
European Tradition ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Hans Staden ◽  
The Way

Shortly into Werner Herzog's South American film Fitzcarraldo (1982), the Peruvian rubber baron Don Aquilino (José Lewgoy) asks the eponymous protagonist (Klaus Kinski) if he has ever seen a shrunken head. This paper argues that Fitzcarraldo's short, fumbling response (“Yes. I mean, no. Sort of …”) calls into question both the European tradition of representing the New World and the very status and nature of the film image. Close analysis of a single visual from the film also demonstrates the difficulty of constructing images endowed with what the director has called over the years “ecstatic truth.” Though critically praised for his unique vision, Herzog affiliates himself through Fitzcarraldo, however unknowingly, with a constellation of texts and practices having colonialist aims, extending all the way to Warhaftig Historia (1557), the controversial captivity narrative of the would-be German conquistador Hans Staden.

Prophecy as Diplomacy in the Fifteenth-Century Mediterranean

2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mayte Green-Mercado
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Political Discourse ◽  
New World ◽  
Late Medieval ◽  
Affective Associations ◽  
The Way

Abstract Late medieval and early modern diplomats and intermediaries drew on the authoritative language of prophecy, a language that conveyed divine threats to the current order, or divine sanctions of a new world. Because apocalyptic discourse has the capacity to conjure affective associations through its redemptive potential, its use in a diplomatic context seems to have been aimed at shaping the way individuals perceived the issues at hand. Based on a number of case studies from both Christian and Islamic contexts, this contribution renders it clear that it was precisely these cultural and political commonalities that made prophecy a recognizable political and diplomatic discourse. As a totalizing religio-political discourse, prophecy articulated the aspirations of a multitude of competing universalizing imperial projects that were emerging in the fifteenth century, which required diplomatic mediation.

The cruelest harvest: Virgilian agricultural pessimism in the poetry of the Brazilian colonial period

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 445-469
Author(s):  
Adriana Vazquez
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Latin America ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Agricultural Production ◽  
New World ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
South American ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
European Expansion

Abstract Classical imagery and mythological narratives provided ready literary analogues for framing European expansion into the New World in the colonial and early modern periods. This article examines the manipulation of classical images of agricultural fecundity and Virgilian pessimism in select works of two Brazilian poets working in the neoclassical tradition during the colonial period, José Basílio da Gama (1740–95) and Inácio José de Alvarenga Peixoto (1744–93), by which both poets advance a critique of Iberian expansion into Latin America. I argue that both poets, writing in dialogue with one another, activate an especially Virgilian agricultural imagery that sets war in contradiction to agricultural production in a post-colonial critique of European imperialist expansion into Brazil. The poetry of these figures exhibits a remarkable reversal of sympathies that distinguishes South American treatment of ancient material from that of European receptions that aligned imperial Europe with the Roman empire and its traditional heroes, a comparison established in order to justify colonialist expansion into the New World.

Domestication

2019 ◽  
pp. 12-27
Author(s):  
Timothy Alborn
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
New World ◽  
Gold Extraction ◽  
The Many ◽  
Gold Bearing ◽  
The Way

After surveying early-modern gold extraction and export from the New World, this chapter discusses the contrasts Britons developed between their own and Iberia’s encounters with gold during the three centuries after the Conquest, as well as their relief at never being subjected to the temptation of possessing gold-bearing colonies. Such efforts paralleled the way they thought about the many other commodities they imported from exotic climes. In all these cases, a process of domestication converted a barbaric substance into a signifier of civilization. Throughout the century after 1750, Britons tirelessly debated the boundaries between gold’s productive, unproductive, and corrosive uses, all the while pondering what exactly rendered it so valuable.

“I'd make thee eat the mischief thou hast vented”: Discourse of Law in Ben Jonson's Catiline His Conspiracy

2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-45
Author(s):  
Akihiko Shimizu
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Political Discourse ◽  
Legal Discourse ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
State Of Emergency ◽  
Gunpowder Plot ◽  
Effective Use ◽  
Legal Procedures ◽  
The Way

This essay explores the discourse of law that constitutes the controversial apprehension of Cicero's issuing of the ultimate decree of the Senate (senatus consultum ultimum) in Catiline. The play juxtaposes the struggle of Cicero, whose moral character and legitimacy are at stake in regards to the extra-legal uses of espionage, with the supposedly mischievous Catilinarians who appear to observe legal procedures more carefully throughout their plot. To mitigate this ambivalence, the play defends Cicero's actions by depicting the way in which Cicero establishes the rhetoric of public counsel to convince the citizens of his legitimacy in his unprecedented dealing with Catiline. To understand the contemporaneousness of Catiline, I will explore the way the play integrates the early modern discourses of counsel and the legal maxim of ‘better to suffer an inconvenience than mischief,’ suggesting Jonson's subtle sensibility towards King James's legal reformation which aimed to establish and deploy monarchical authority in the state of emergency (such as the Gunpowder Plot of 1605). The play's climactic trial scene highlights the display of the collected evidence, such as hand-written letters and the testimonies obtained through Cicero's spies, the Allbroges, as proof of Catiline's mischievous character. I argue that the tactical negotiating skills of the virtuous and vicious characters rely heavily on the effective use of rhetoric exemplified by both the political discourse of classical Rome and the legal discourse of Tudor and Jacobean England.

Shakespeare Afoot

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Kerrigan
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Richard Iii ◽  
Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
As You Like It ◽  
A Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Way

That Shakespeare adds a limp to the received characterization of Richard III is only the most conspicuous instance of his interest in how actors walked, ran, danced, and wandered. His attention to actors’ footwork, as an originating condition of performance, can be traced from Richard III through A Midsummer Night’s Dream and As You Like It into Macbeth, which is preoccupied with the topic and activity all the way to the protagonist’s melancholy conclusion that ‘Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player | That struts and frets his hour upon the stage’. Drawing on classical and early modern accounts of how people walk and should walk, on ideas about time and prosody, and the experience of disability, this chapter cites episodes in the history of performance to show how actors, including Alleyn, Garrick, and Olivier, have worked with the opportunities to dramatize footwork that are provided by Shakespeare’s plays.

Civil Society in UN Peacebuilding Discourse

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura J. Shepherd
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
United Nations ◽  
Local Knowledge ◽  
Political Legitimacy ◽  
Civil Society Organizations ◽  
Conceptual Domain ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
The United Nations ◽  
Over Time ◽  
The Way

Chapter 5 outlines the ways in which civil society is largely associated with “women” and the “local,” as a spatial and conceptual domain, and how this has implications for how we understand political legitimacy and authority. The author argues that close analysis reveals a shift in the way in which the United Nations as a political entity conceives of civil society over time, from early engagement with non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to the more contemporary articulation of civil society as consultant or even implementing partner. Contemporary UN peacebuilding discourse, however, constitutes civil society as a legitimating actor for UN peacebuilding practices, as civil society organizations are the bearers/owners of certain forms of (local) knowledge.

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