scholarly journals From Orpheus to Bob Dylan: the Story of "Words and Music"

2017 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 277-301
Author(s):  
Walter Bernhart

This paper tells a story of the relationship between “words and music” from the viewpoint of changing tendencies to either convergence or distance between the two forms of communication, depending on whether aesthetic dispositions and cultural conditions favour the merging or the drifting apart of both media. Thus, “fusionist” and “separatist” tendencies in the development of the arts are identified as manifested, in Western cultural history, by the impressive span of intermedial interaction extending from early mythical origins (Orpheus) to most recent manifestations (Bob Dylan). The focus is on the history of European musical theatre and the European song tradition. In the latter case, “interpretive” and “non-interpretive” songs are distinguished depending on whether the link between “words and music” is on the semantic or on the prosodic level. Contemporary pop songs, as represented by Dylan, are finally discussed in the context of the terminological framework presented and in view of the age-old tradition of singer-poets.

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Babette Hellemans

This pioneering textbook explores the theoretical background of cultural variety, both in past and present. How is it possible to study 'culture' when the topic covers the arts, literature, movies, history, sociology, anthropology and gender studies? Understanding Culture examines the evolution of a concept with varying meanings depending on changing norms. Offering a long-duration analysis of the relationship between culture and nature, this book looks at the origins of studying culture from an international perspective. Using examples from the several scholarly traditions in the practice of studying culture, Understanding Culture is a key introduction to the area. It identifies the history of interpreting culture as a meeting point between the long-standing historical investigation of 'humanism' and 'postmodernism' and is a comprehensive resource for those who wish to further their engagement with culture as both a historical and contemporary phenomenon.


Author(s):  
Moshe Rosman

This chapter examines some problems posed by the Jewish pluralism paradigm. With regard to the metasolution of influence, there is a firm article of faith shared by practically all of today's Judaica scholars that, in all times and places, pre-modern or ‘traditional’ Jews lived in intimate interaction with surrounding cultures to the point where they may be considered to be embedded in them and, consequently, indebted to them in terms of culture. This contrasts with an older conception of Jewish culture which represented Jews as living in at least semi-isolation from the non-Jewish world. The chapter thus demonstrates that there are more than these two possible approaches to the history of Jewish culture, and that these two themselves should be understood in a more sophisticated way. It asserts that the first approach (universal cultural influence, in its incarnation as hybridity theory), when applied mechanically, unimaginatively, and uncritically can be as ideological, dogmatic, and inappropriate as the second (Jewish cultural autonomy) often has been. The chapter next contemplates the metahistories implied by the various approaches to Jewish cultural history and their relationship to intellectual presuppositions for engaging in Jewish studies in the academy.


Author(s):  
Sabine Jacques

This chapter provides an overview of the nature and definition of parody in the context of copyright law. The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has introduced two requirements that must be satisfied before a work may be considered a ‘parody’: firstly, it must ‘evoke an existing work while being noticeably different from it’, and secondly, it must ‘constitute an expression of humour or mockery’. The chapter first traces the origin and history of parody in the arts, including music, before discussing the relationship of parody with concepts such as satire, caricature, and pastiche. It then examines why a parody exception has been considered necessary in copyright law. The chapter goes on to analyse the legal evolution of parody in France, Australia, Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom, showing that the existing international human rights framework may influence the definition of parody in intellectual property law.


2017 ◽  
Vol 56 (3) ◽  
pp. 605-628 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margery Masterson

AbstractThis article takes an unexplored popular debate from the 1860s over the role of dueling in regulating gentlemanly conduct as the starting point to examine the relationship between elite Victorian masculinities and interpersonal violence. In the absence of a meaningful replacement for dueling and other ritualized acts meant to defend personal honor, multiple modes of often conflicting masculinities became available to genteel men in the middle of the nineteenth century. Considering the security fears of the period––European and imperial, real and imagined––the article illustrates how pacific and martial masculine identities coexisted in a shifting and uneasy balance. The professional character of the enlarging gentlemanly classes and the increased importance of men's domestic identities––trends often aligned with hegemonic masculinity––played an ambivalent role in popular attitudes to interpersonal violence. The cultural history of dueling can thus inform a multifaceted approach toward gender, class, and violence in modern Britain.


2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 56-95
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Moser

Abstract This article considers the emotional status of grave goods in medieval China. Its purpose is twofold. First, the author investigates the conceptual structures available for interpreting the emotional processes involved in medieval burials. He argues that it is possible, and indeed productive, to read grave goods as traces of emotional operations and, in so doing, to articulate a dimension of the embodied processes that structured and motivated wider developments in the social and cultural history of China. Second, the author demonstrates how sensory-based analyses of grave goods can elucidate intermediating processes among the conceptualization of emotion in philosophical texts, the representation of emotion in the literary and visual arts, and the actual experience of emotion in premodern China. Using the recently discovered cemetery of the Northern Song Lü family as a case study, he articulates the emotional function of the aesthetic appreciation that occurred when selecting objects for burial. In explaining the relationship between the sensorial affect of the grave goods and the family's commitment to the abstract ideal of sincerity, the author uses the concept of the emotive object to chart common ground for histories of thought and the arts in China.


1997 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 408
Author(s):  
Jonathan D. Majer

A number of publications have considered the biogeography of various subsets of the Pacific Region, including the earlier works by J. L. Gressitt (Pacific Basin Biogeography) and by F. J. Radovsky and others (Biogeography of the Tropical Pacific). In addition to these, substantial edited volumes have been produced on the Biogeography and Ecology of New Guinea (by J. L. Gressitt), on Biogeography and Ecology in Australia (by A. Keast), on the relationship between these two regions in Bridge and Barrier: The Natural and Cultural History of the Torres Strait (by D. Walker) and on Hawaiian Biogeography: Evolution of a Hot Spot Archipelago (by W. L. Wagner and V. A. Funk). A substantial list of papers, reviews and symposia also pertain to the biogeography of this region.


1999 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 342-365
Author(s):  
Donald R. Kelley

AbstractChristophe Milieu's De Scribenda Vniversitatis rervm historia libri qvinqve (Basel, 1551) interprets the "universe of things" (universitas return) within an evolutionary and historical framework consisting of five connected and progressive "grades" (gradus) of existence accessible to human understanding: nature (natura), the world of God's creation and man's animal aspect; prudence (prudentia), including the arts of survival; government (principatus), the stage of civil society and political history; wisdom (sapientia), equivalent to civilization and including the higher sciences and philosophy; and literature (litetatura), in which knowledge of the preceding phases of "progress" (progressio) is expressed in writing. Milieu's "narrative" constitutes a pioneering and comprehensive history of western culture.


2015 ◽  
Vol 20 (4-6) ◽  
pp. 358-396 ◽  
Author(s):  
Valentina Pugliano

Famed for his collection of drawings of naturalia and his thoughts on the relationship between painting and natural knowledge, it now appears that the Bolognese naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522–1605) also pondered specifically color and pigments, compiling not only lists and diagrams of color terms but also a full-length unpublished manuscript entitled De coloribus or Trattato dei colori. Introducing these writings for the first time, this article portrays a scholar not so much interested in the materiality of pigment production, as in the cultural history of hues. It argues that these writings constituted an effort to build a language of color, in the sense both of a standard nomenclature of hues and of a lexicon, a dictionary of their denotations and connotations as documented in the literature of ancients and moderns. This language would serve the naturalist in his artistic patronage and his natural historical studies, where color was considered one of the most reliable signs for the correct identification of specimens, and a guarantee of accuracy in their illustration. Far from being an exception, Aldrovandi’s ‘color sensibility’ spoke of that of his university-educated nature-loving peers.



1987 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-103 ◽  
Author(s):  
Atsuko Hirai

In his presidential address at the 1977 annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, Marius Jansen pointed out that the relationship between monarchy and modernization in Japan is a significant subject of research for Western scholars specializing in Japanese studies. Specifically, Jansen emphasized the need to investigate the popular perceptions of the monarch usually overlooked by Japanese historians. He noted that a study of Japanese mentalité must cover a vast area, including “imagery, iconography, and ritual.” Until we “get at” this level of the social and cultural history of modern Japan, Jansen feared, we will fail to gain “a better understanding of modernization, of Japan, in world history” (1977:612–22).


2011 ◽  
Vol 19 (5) ◽  
pp. 1265-1271 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tiago Braga do Espírito Santo ◽  
Taka Oguisso ◽  
Rosa Maria Godoy Serpa da Fonseca

The object is the relationship between the professionalization of Brazilian nursing and women, in the broadcasting of news about the creation of the Professional School of Nurses, in the light of gender. Aims: to discuss the linkage of women to the beginning of the professionalization of Brazilian nursing following the circumstances and evidence of the creation of the Professional School of Nurses analyzed from the perspective of gender. The news articles were analyzed from the viewpoint of Cultural History, founded in the gender concept of Joan Scott and in the History of Women. The creation of the School and the priority given in the media to women consolidate the vocational ideal of the woman for nursing in a profession subjugated to the physician but also representing the conquest of a space in the world of education and work, reconfiguring the social position of nursing and of woman in Brazil.


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