scholarly journals Other Stories: Experimental Forms of Contemporary Historying at the Crossroads Between Facts and Fictions

2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-15
Author(s):  
Małgorzata Sugiera
Keyword(s):  
New Wave ◽  
Main Argument ◽  
Historical Discourse ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Past ◽  
Academic History ◽  
The Future ◽  
Rhetorical Dimension ◽  
Hayden White ◽  
Experimental History

Summary The process of questioning the authority of academic history—in the form in which it emerged at the turn of the 19th century—began in the 1970s, when Hayden White pointed out the rhetorical dimension of historical discourse. His British colleague Alun Munslow went a step further and argued that the ontological statuses of the past and history are so different that historical discourse cannot by any means be treated as representation of the past. As we have no access to that which happened, both historians and artists can only present the past in accordance with their views and opinions, the available rhetorical conventions, and means of expression. The article revisits two examples of experimental history which Munslow mentioned in his The Future of History (2010): Robert A. Rosenstone’s Mirror in the Shrine (1988) and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s In 1926 (1997). It allows reassessing their literary strategies in the context of a new wave of works written by historians and novelists who go beyond the fictional/factual dichotomy. The article focuses on Polish counterfactual writers of the last two decades, such as Wojciech Orliński, Jacek Dukaj, and Aleksander Głowacki. Their novels corroborate the main argument of the article about a turn which has been taking place in recent experimental historying: the loss of previous interest in formal innovations influenced by modernist avant-garde fiction. Instead, it concentrates on demonstrating the contingency of history to strategically extend the unknowability of the future or the past(s) and, as a result, change historying into speculative thinking.

scholarly journals The fiction of History: recalling the past and imagining the future with Caesar at Troy.

2010 ◽  
Vol 23 (1/2) ◽  
pp. 143-160
Author(s):  
Richard Alston
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Memory ◽  
Political Power ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Cultural Trauma ◽  
Historical Account ◽  
Historical Discourse ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
A Site

This essay considers the nature of historical discourse through a consideration of the historical narrative of Lucan’s Pharsalia. The focus is on the manner in which Lucan depicts history as capable of being fictionalised, especially through the operation of political power. The discourses of history make a historical account, but those discourses are not, in Lucan's view, true, but are fictionalised. The key study comes from Caesar at Troy, when Lucan explores the idea of a site (and history) which cannot be understood, but which nevertheless can be employed in a representation of the past. yet, Lucan also alludes to a ‘true history’, which is unrepresentable in his account of Pharsalus, and beyond the scope of the human mind. Lucan’s true history can be read against Benjamin and Tacitus. Lucan offers a framework of history that has the potential to be post-Roman (in that it envisages a world in which there is no Rome), and one in which escapes the frames of cultural memory, both in its fictionalisation and in the dependence of Roman imperial memory on cultural trauma.

The Garden in the Machine: Two American Avant-Garde Films and the Nineteenth-Century Visual Arts

Prospects ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 22 ◽  
pp. 239-262
Author(s):  
Scott MacDonald
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Visual Arts ◽  
Film Studies ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Past ◽  
Academic Fields ◽  
The Future ◽  
Historical Periods ◽  
Logical Extension ◽  
As If

One of the primary reasons I became interested in film studies was the seeming open-endedness of the field. Cinema was new, I reasoned, and would continue to be new, unlike other academic fields, and particularly those devoted to historical periods: as a scholar and a teacher, I would face the future, endlessly enthralled and energized by the transformation of the potential into the actual. That my development as a film scholar/teacher increasingly involved me in avant-garde film seemed quite natural — a logical extension of the attraction of film studies in general: Avant-garde film was the newest of the new, the sharpest edge of the present as it sliced into the promise of the future. Scholars in some fields may empathize with the attitude I describe, but scholars in all fields will smile at its self-defeating implications: of course, I can see now how typically American my assumptions were — as if one could maintain the excitement of youth merely by refusing to acknowledge the past! Obviously, film studies, like any other discipline, is only a field once its history takes, or is given, a recognizable shape.

The Third Manifesto: ‘We Shall Come to See’

1988 ◽  
Vol 4 (14) ◽  
pp. 120-121
Author(s):  
John Andreasen
Keyword(s):  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Art Forms ◽  
Science And Politics ◽  
The University ◽  
Changing Society

In June 1985, a fortnight's discussions on ‘The Theatre in the Future’ were held as part of the Fools' Festival in Copenhagen. The seminars discussed the position of theatre and its possibilities in a rapidly changing society, often from deeply opposed positions – socially engaged versus wildly avant-garde, verbal versus imagistic, anthropological versus robotic, and so on. Participants were an exciting mix of professional performers of many kinds, plus theatre critics and ‘ordinary’ engaged people, who for two weeks exchanged experiences and visions of theatre in conjunction with other art forms, and with science and politics. The manifesto below was the contribution to these seminars of John Andreasen, a veteran of ‘sixties happenings, who has subsequently concentrated on street and environmental theatre, and for the past twelve years has taught and directed in the Drama Department of the University of Aarhus.

scholarly journals Living Simulacrum

2022 ◽  
pp. 219-229
Author(s):  
Joanna Kiliszek
Keyword(s):  
Focal Point ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Point Of Reference ◽  
Contemporary Artists

The Neoplastic Room at the Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź was originally designed in 1948 by the avant-garde artist Władysław Strzemiński. Destroyed in 1950 and reconstructed in 1960, it became the focal point of the museum, with the ‘International Collection of Modern Art’ by the a.r. group being exhibited there. At the same time, it became a point of reference for contemporary artists and a strategy for building a permanent collection for the museum, as well as a reflection on how the past can give a vision of the future. This essay focuses on the gesture of ‘re-curating’ the Neoplastic Room in relation to the performative practice of the artists involved (e.g., Daniel Buren, Elżbieta Jabłońska).

scholarly journals Sekularingseringstesen i religionssociologien

1999 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lene Kühle
Keyword(s):  
Social Reality ◽  
Sociology Of Religion ◽  
Main Argument ◽  
New Paradigm ◽  
Sociological Study ◽  
Political Sphere ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
Dominant Paradigm

Secularization has been á major issue in sociological debates on religion. Recent developments in theory as well as in social reality seems to indicate that the future for the seularization thesis will not be as glorious as the past. The main argument in this article is that the secularization thesis, which can more properly be understood as a paradigm in the Kuhnian sense, is no longer a very useful frame for the sociological study of religion. This argument is supported by three examples from the contemporay political sphere, where the description in terms of "secularization" seems to lead to ambiguous conclusions. The article gives a brief presentation of two candidates for a new paradigm and discusses the requirements that the new paradigm is expected to meet. Whether any of these paradigms or perhaps a completely different one is going to assume the position as the dominant paradigm in the sociology of religion is still to be seen.

scholarly journals The Memory of the Avant-Garde and the New Wave in the Contemporary Serbian Novel

2020 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marko Avramović
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
First Century ◽  
New Wave ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Past ◽  
Twenty First Century

This article is dealing with the topic of two past twentieth-century epochs in a few representative Serbian novels at the turn from the twentieth to the twenty-first century. These are the 1980s and the New Wave era in Yugoslavia, an epoch close to the past that can still be written about from the perspective of an immediate witness, and the avant-garde era, that is, the period between the two world wars marked in art by different movements of the historical avant-garde. The novels Milenijum u Beogradu (Millennium in Belgrade, 2000) by Vladimir Pištalo, Vrt u Veneciji (The Garden in Venice, 2002) by Mileta Prodanović, and Kiša i hartija (Rain and Paper, 2004) by Vladimir Tasić are being interpreted. In these novels, it is particularly noteworthy that the two aforementioned epochs are most commonly linked as part of the same creative and intellectual currents in the twentieth century.

scholarly journals Thinking beyond, living beyond: Futurism.

wisdom ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 176-187
Author(s):  
Lucio GIULIODORI ◽  
Valentina ULIUMDZHIEVA ◽  
Elena NOTINA ◽  
Irina BYKOVA
Keyword(s):  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
To Come ◽  
The One

Living in the future, constantly thinking over it, incessantly inventing it, anticipating it, more than a Weltanschauung, a state of consciousness. It’s not about predicting rather living the prediction, experimenting with it, chasing the words to describe it, imagining the machines to produce it. The futurists’ undertaking was fueled by an overwhelming desire to overcome their present time through art and influence, by dint of its momentum, the society, culture and life that thrived around it, shifting their current world and the one to come by virtue of an overflowing power of insights as well as an innovative and creative strength. This is what Futurism was, its constant, compelling self-supersession was its ontological matrix as this movement was projected and installed in a dimension of time that had severed both the past and the present. This study aims to frame this avant-garde on the basis of this chief cornerstone.

Steps Towards an Ecology of Experience: Empiricism, Pragmatism and George Eliot’s The Spanish Gypsy

2018 ◽  
pp. 107-138
Author(s):  
Philipp Erchinger
Keyword(s):  
John Dewey ◽  
William James ◽  
Practical Wisdom ◽  
Philosophical Tradition ◽  
Main Argument ◽  
American Pragmatism ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Ecological View ◽  
Spanish Gypsy

Chapter 4 makes the case that the work of Eliot and Lewes exemplifies a pragmatist understanding of knowledge that is centred on the idea of “experience as experiment” (Jay) or “experience as a craft” (Sennett). Distinguishing between two main senses of ‘experience’, practical wisdom and intense awareness, the chapter traces the manifold implications of that term through G.H. Lewes’s five volume fragment Problems of Life and Mind, Samuel Butler’s Life and Habit and George Eliot’s The Spanish Gypsy. Moreover, close readings of these texts are interwoven with references to the philosophical tradition of American Pragmatism, as represented by the work of William James and John Dewey. Briefly, my main argument is that these Pragmatist writers shared with their Victorian predecessors an ecological view of experience as an incipient pattern, an advancing middle between the past and the future as well as inside and outside, or subject and object, that essentially lacks anything like a firm ground.

scholarly journals ‘Montage, My Fine Care’: Realism, Surrealism and Postmodernism after Bazin

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ramona Fotiade
Keyword(s):  
New Wave ◽  
French Cinema ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Past ◽  
Mise En Scene ◽  
Shot Transitions ◽  
Time Image ◽  
Silent Era

The title of this chapter takes its cue from one of Jean-Luc Godard’s well-known articles, published in Cahiers du cinéma in 1956, which engaged with Bazin’s conception of cinematic realism in an attempt to effect a generational break with the past by proposing a revised understanding of montage, not simply as an integral part of mise-en-scène, but as a form of deliberate authorial statement and, in that sense, as a practical extension of the New Wave ideology or politique des auteurs. In highlighting Bazin’s formative influence on the New Wave directors (in particular, his relationship to Truffaut and Godard), this chapter also focuses on the revived interest in early avant-garde experimentation (as evidenced, for instance, by Godard’s use of silent era shot transitions, image/sound disjunction and quotations from Surrealist poets in A bout de souffle), as well as the emergence of postmodern strategies and notions of rhythm, movement and time in French cinema (again present in the early work of Jean-Luc Godard), which prefigured Deleuze’s re-appraisal of montage as part of his theory of the movement-image and the time-image.

Alternative path for the future or a return to the past? Araujo’s “philosophical” history of psychology

2017 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 108-116 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adrian C. Brock
Keyword(s):  
Sociology Of Knowledge ◽  
History Of Psychology ◽  
Philosophy Of Psychology ◽  
Historical Discourse ◽  
The Past ◽  
Alternative Path ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of ◽  
Insight Into

Araujo begins by criticising what he calls the “social turn” in the history of psychology. He singles out the work of Kurt Danziger for special criticism in this regard. He then outlines the emergence of an allegedly new field called “History and Philosophy of Science” (HPS) and calls for a different approach which he labels a “philosophical” history of psychology. Here I examine his criticism of Danziger’s work and suggest that it is unjustified. I also point out that there is nothing new about the field of HPS and nothing original about the idea of relating history and philosophy of psychology. I conclude by suggesting that, although Araujo’s criticism is unjustified, it can give some insight into where his alternative path for the future will lead. It is an attempt to excise the sociology of knowledge from historical discourse and to return to a more traditional history of ideas.

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