The Gospel according to Auerbach

PMLA ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 135 (3) ◽  
pp. 455-473
Author(s):  
Jane O. Newman

Erich Auerbach's Mimesis (1946) can usefully be read in the context of the Christian existentialist thought to which Auerbach was exposed during his years as a professor at the University of Marburg between 1929 and 1935–36. Specifically, placing Auerbach's account of Peter's denial of Christ as related in the Gospel of Mark in conversation with the work of Auerbach's Marburg colleague Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976) helps us to understand Auerbach's indebtedness to Bultmann and to see Mimesis in new ways, as a project with a longer collaborative history that concerns not only literary “realism” but also the dargestellte Wirklichkeit (“represented reality”) of the finitude of the human condition. Acknowledging the importance of early-twentieth-century Christian existentialism in Germany for Auerbach's work helps explain the affective hold that Mimesis has had on lay and professional readers alike.

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 454-473
Author(s):  
Rachel Zellars

This essay opens with a discussion of the Black commons and the possibility it offers for visioning coherence between Black land relationality and Indigenous sovereignty. Two sites of history – Black slavery and Black migration prior to the twentieth century – present illuminations and challenges to Black and Indigenous relations on Turtle Island, as they expose the “antagonisms history has left us” (Byrd, 2019a, p. 342), and the ways antiblackness is produced as a return to what is deemed impossible, unimaginable, or unforgivable about Black life.While the full histories are well beyond the scope of this paper, I highlight the violent impossibilities and afterlives produced and sustained by both – those that deserve care and attention within a “new relationality,” as Tiffany King has named, between Black and Indigenous peoples. At the end of the essay, I return briefly to Anna Tsing’s spiritual science of foraging wild mushrooms. Her allegory about the human condition offers a bridge, I conclude, between the emancipatory dreams of Black freedom and Indigenous sovereignty.  


2021 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Elena Dai Prà ◽  
Valentina De Santi ◽  
Giannantonio Scaglione

Abstract. The representation of the areas in which some of the most significant events of the First World War took place has produced a wide range of materials, such as cartography, aerial and terrestrial photos, textual descriptions and field surveys. In addition, war events were also represented through three-dimensional models. Topographic maps and models constitute composite figurations, which are rich in informative data useful for the preservation of the memory of places and for increasing the knowledge of cultural heritage. Hence, these sources need to be studied, described, interpreted and used for future enhancement. The focus of this paper are archival materials from the collections kept at the Italian War History Museum of Rovereto (Museo Storico Italiano della Guerra), in the Trentino-Alto Adige region. Firstly, we will investigate the cartographic fond in order to assess the composition and origin of its materials. Secondly, we will present the Museum’s collection of Early-Twentieth Century models. Such precious heritage is not yet part of an exhibition, and is kept in the Museum’s warehouses. The paper constitutes the occasion to present the initial results of a still ongoing project by the Geo-Cartographic Centre for Study and Documentation (GeCo) of the University of Trento on the study and analysis of two archival complexes preserved in the abovementioned Museum. In particular, the paper focuses on the heuristic value of such representational devices, which enable an analysis of the different methods and languages through which space is planned and designed, emphasizing the complementarity between different types of visualization.


Author(s):  
Charlotte Jones

The Introduction sets synthetic realism in the context of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century culture and aesthetics to show why literary realism needs to be grasped in metaphysical terms. Ranging across contemporary periodical culture and works of literature, philosophy, and science, it examines the ways in which realist theory and practice grapples with the recalcitrance of ‘reality’ as a shifting referential cipher. The Introduction also considers previous critical approaches and suggests that the effects of these encounters between realist aesthetics and philosophical discourse were more various, ambiguous, and complex than we might have thought. It concludes with brief overviews of the book’s five main chapters and elucidates the overarching arguments that are developed within them.


Author(s):  
Victor Buchli

The domestic sphere or ‘home cultures’ as the term is used here is the location of many disciplinary investigations into the home. It is in the domestic sphere that one investigates the key elements of the human condition. This article's essence happens to be households and home cultures. It is where family, gender, and the nature of the individual are understood. It is also where the basic elements of cosmology and religious life and the elemental context for the understanding of political and economic life are lived and perceived. Here public and private realms are forged; nature/culture boundaries are created and negotiated. The home is typically how we know the world and know about people who inhabit the world. It is the key point of orientation for members of a given society as it is to its visitors and outsiders. A study of the gradual change in the domestic realm in the twentieth century concludes this article.


2012 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
pp. 307-324 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philippa Burt

While the dialogical relationship between the early twentieth-century British theatre and the rise of socialism is well documented, analysis has tended to focus on the role of the playwright in the dissemination of socialist ideas. As a contrast, in this article Philippa Burt examines the directorial work of Harley Granville Barker, arguing that his plans for a permanent ensemble company were rooted in his position as a member of the Fabian Society. With reference to Pierre Bourdieu's concept of habitus and Maria Shevtsova's development of it in reference to the theatre, this article identifies a correlation between Barker's political and artistic approaches through extrapolating the central tenets of his theory on ensemble theatre and analyzing them alongside the central tenets of Fabianism. Philippa Burt is currently completing her PhD in the Department of Theatre and Performance at Goldsmiths, University of London. This article is developed from a paper presented at the conference on ‘Politics, Performance, and Popular Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain’ at the University of Lancaster in July 2011.


2007 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oliver Double

Punk rock performance consciously draws on popular theatre forms such as music hall and stand-up comedy – as was exemplified on the occasion when Max Wall appeared with Ian Dury at the Hammersmith Odeon. Oliver Double traces the historical and stylistic connections between punk, music hall and stand-up, and argues that punk shows can be considered a form of popular theatre in their own right. He examines a wide range of punk bands and performers – including The Sex Pistols, Iggy Pop, Devo, Spizz, The Ramones, The Clash, and Dead Kennedys – to consider how they use costume, staging, personae, characterization, and audience–performer relationships, arguing that these are as important and carefully considered as the music they play. Art movements such as Dada and Futurism were important influences on the early punk scene, and Double shows how, as with early twentieth-century cabaret, punk performance manages to include avant-garde elements within popular theatre forms. Oliver Double started his career performing a comedy act alongside anarchist punk bands in Exeter, going on to spend ten years on the alternative comedy circuit. Currently, he lectures in Drama at the University of Kent, and he is the author of Stand-Up! On Being a Comedian (Methuen, 1997) and Getting the Joke: the Inner Workings of Stand-Up Comedy (Methuen, 2005).


2008 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-164
Author(s):  
JOHN BUTT

I clearly remember that when this journal was first devised there lay some niggling doubt behind my tremendous enthusiasm for this timely initiative. Wasn’t there something problematic about viewing the eighteenth century as a whole? Did I intuit some sort of fundamental divide, perhaps somewhere between the deaths of J. S. Bach and Handel, one that somehow cast this century into two irreconcilable worlds? The seventeenth century was perhaps enough of a mess for its disunity to become a historiographical topic in its own right, its separate threads providing at least some narrative potential, even if these could never convincingly be drawn into a single whole. And the nineteenth century was perhaps sufficiently punctuated with various revolutions and restorations, together with an overriding story of industrial progress, to fall into a coherent (if divisive) family of narratives. Even the twentieth century – that which surely saw the largest number of changes in the human condition and the exponential pluralizing of ‘legitimate’ musical traditions – seems to have a clear enough trajectory, much of the music at its end having a discernible genealogical connection with that of its beginning. So what was it that was worrying me about the eighteenth century?


Author(s):  
Rónán McDonald

Beckett, arguably the most important playwright of the twentieth century, has achieved an international reputation that goes well beyond his achievement as a writer. There is in effect a ‘Beckett brand’, a marketable image of the man and his works. The abstraction of his theatre work, its lack of definite geographical or specific referents, has led to a tenacious discourse of universalism. His global fame developed from the first production ofWaiting for Godot, seen as the epitome of modernist experiment, delivering a profound image of the human condition free of historical specificity and thus available to any number of different interpretive schemes. The production history of Beckett’s work in recent times, however, has shown that it is at its most effective in its trans-historical capacity, represented most tellingly in instances such as the productions ofGodotin Sarajevo or New Orleans. Beckett is ‘glocal’ rather than global.


2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 45-80
Author(s):  
Mimi Howard

Abstract This article provides a genealogy of Hannah Arendt’s treatment of political economy in the years prior to the publication of The Human Condition (1958). In the early 1950s her archival papers and diary entries display deep concern for a host of topics at the intersection of political and economic thought: labor, work, slavery, consumption, industrialization, and automation. Such interests, which were passed through the philosophical canon from Aristotle to Marx, would serve as the theoretical basis for many of the distinctions that define The Human Condition. When set within the context of midcentury debates around political economy, it becomes clear that Arendt conceived the distinctions not only to respond to the aporias of Western philosophy but also to contest contemporaries who put stock in dialectical materialist accounts of political emancipation. Understanding Arendt’s adversaries more clearly provides the chance to see her conceptual distinctions as interventions into concurrent attempts to revise Marxian political economy in the latter half of the twentieth century.


2017 ◽  
Vol 78 (4) ◽  
pp. 930-959 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward P. Hahnenberg

Theodore M. Hesburgh, CSC, was the driving force behind the 1967 Land O’Lakes Statement—a watershed document that affirmed both the distinctive identity of Catholic universities and the “true autonomy and academic freedom” they needed to excel. This article explores the prominent role of theology in the Land O’Lakes Statement by means of an examination of Hesburgh’s specifically theological commitments. Attending first to the status of Catholic theology in the early twentieth century, the article considers Hesburgh’s neo-Scholastic formation, his early work on the theology of the laity, and the evolution of his thinking as president of the University of Notre Dame. It concludes that the category of mediation, present in Hesburgh’s earliest work, would come to ground the dialogical role he thought theology had to play to ensure the nature and mission of the contemporary Catholic university.


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