Cinema, Museums, Memory and Education

2019 ◽  
pp. 17-26
Author(s):  
Elisa Mandelli
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Living Organism ◽  
City Life ◽  
Moving Images ◽  
Ideal Medium ◽  
Educational Role ◽  
The Times

In the first decades of the twentieth century, film was considered an ideal medium for the preservation of memory and was rapidly included among the educational means used in museums. This chapter explores the ways in which films and moving images were used in museums as educative tools, and how they were shown to visitors, in auditoriums or in galleries. This chapter also discusses how, in addition to their educational role, films responded to the museum’s need to keep up with the times and to show that the museum was a ‘living’ organism, attentive to the demands of a modern and urban public and ready to fit in the dynamics of city life, with its growing number of attractions and forms of entertainment.

The Rain Calls of Frogs and the Reigning Paradigm of American Herpetology

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-35
Author(s):  
Gordon L. Miller
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Animal Communication ◽  
The United States ◽  
Emotional States ◽  
Breeding Sites ◽  
Gradual Disappearance ◽  
The Times ◽  
Traditional Natural ◽  
Breeding Seasons ◽  
The Comparative Study

American zoologists and herpetologists during the past fifty years have successfully deciphered the mating calls of frogs and toads with ever increasing precision and sophistication. However, the vocalizations most commonly termed “rain calls,” which typically occur beyond both normal breeding seasons and breeding sites, have remained a persistent puzzle. This article traces the gradual disappearance of rain calls, along with a corresponding decline in any mention of emotional states, from herpetological studies of anuran vocalizations in the United States from the middle of the twentieth century to the present and examines the historical roots of this disappearance. This evaporation of rain calls is indicative of a much larger change in the scientific climate of the times involving the transition from traditional natural history to the Neo-Darwinian, adaptationist paradigm of contemporary biology. Rain calls thus increasingly became anomalous, thereby eliminating a possibly fruitful line of inquiry in the comparative study of human-animal communication, in this case with evolution's earliest vocalizers. The contours and benefits of a more encompassing paradigm, envisioned by some leading early twentieth-century zoologists, are briefly discussed.

cAbdullah Yūsuf cAlī & Muhammad Asad: Two Approaches to the English Translation of the Qur'an

2000 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-123 ◽  
Author(s):  
Muzaffar Iqbal
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Comparative Study ◽  
Life Experiences ◽  
Academic Career ◽  
British India ◽  
Human Understanding ◽  
English Translations ◽  
Political Milieu ◽  
The Times

This article attempts to present a comparative study of the role of two twentieth-century English translations of the Qur'an: cAbdullah Yūsuf cAlī's The Meaning of the Glorious Qur'ān and Muḥammad Asad's The Message of the Qur'ān. No two men could have been more different in their background, social and political milieu and life experiences than Yūsuf cAlī and Asad. Yūsuf 'Alī was born and raised in British India and had a brilliant but traditional middle-class academic career. Asad traversed a vast cultural and geographical terrain: from a highly-disciplined childhood in Europe to the deserts of Arabia. Both men lived ‘intensely’ and with deep spiritual yearning. At some time in each of their lives they decided to embark upon the translation of the Qur'an. Their efforts have provided us with two incredibly rich monumental works, which both reflect their own unique approaches and the effects of the times and circumstances in which they lived. A comparative study of these two translations can provide rich insights into the exegesis and the phenomenon of human understanding of the divine text.

Political Autobiography and the Art of the Plausible: R. A. Butler at the Foreign Office, 1938–1939

1985 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
pp. 901-922 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Stafford
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Educational System ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
British Politics ◽  
Suez Crisis ◽  
Foreign Office ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Times ◽  
The Right ◽  
Enoch Powell

R. A. Butler has been one of the outstanding figures in twentieth-century British politics. After his death The Times described him as ‘the creator of the modern educational system, the key-figure in the revival of post-war Conservatism, arguably the most successful chancellor since the war and un-questionably a Home Secretary of reforming zeal’. His record of achievement was unequalled by his rivals in the contests for the party leadership in 1957 and in 1963, but on both occasions the leadership eluded him. How and why this happened was understandably of the greatest interest to those who reviewed Rab's memoirs, The art of the possible, which were published in 1971. These memoirs won unanimous praise for their literary excellence, but otherwise met with a rather mixed reception. Enoch Powell, one of Rab's supporters in 1963, described them as ‘a work of astonishing self-revelation [belonging] with the classic Confessions. Augustine and Rousseau were not more unsparing of themselves than Rab…’ The ‘large episodes’ of Rab's career, Powell went on, ‘are treated with a generous vision (including, it need not be added, a generosity to Rab) which leaves the reader with improved understanding and perspective’. Powell's comments were echoed by others on the Right, but the Left was more critical. Anthony Howard noted that ‘what tend…to get wholly left out are the mistakes and blunders’ – the now infamous Villacoublay meeting during the Suez crisis; and Rab's astonishing admission to the journalist George Gale during the 1964 campaign that the election was slipping Labour's way. Harold Wilson, who had offered Rab the mastership of Trinity, was perhaps the least charitable of all. He found The art of the possible disappointing because, he claimed, Rab underwrote the great occasions. Rab's reticence about Suez, however, upset Wilson less than the description of his tribulations at the hands of Labour MPs as government spokesman for the policy of non-intervention during the Spanish Civil War. Here was an issue which could excite the older soldiers of the British Left, and if Wilson was alone among Rab's reviewers in making more than passing reference to Rab's association with appeasement this was why.

scholarly journals Serbian music criticism in the first half of the twentieth century: Its canon, its method and its educational role

Muzikologija ◽  
2008 ◽  
pp. 185-202
Author(s):  
Aleksandar Vasic
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Negative Attitude ◽  
Music Criticism ◽  
Educational Mission ◽  
Violin Concerto ◽  
The Public ◽  
Educational Role ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Professional Critics

Serbian music criticism became a subject of professional music critics at the beginning of the twentieth century, after being developed by music amateurs throughout the whole previous century. The Serbian Literary Magazine (1901- 1914, 1920-1941), the forum of the Serbian modernist writers in the early 1900s, had a crucial role in shaping the Serbian music criticism and essayistics of the modern era. The Serbian elite musicians wrote for the SLM and therefore it reflects the most important issues of the early twentieth century Serbian music. The SLM undertook the mission of educating its readers. The music culture of the Serbian public was only recently developed. The public needed an introduction into the most important features of the European music, as well as developing its own taste in music. This paper deals with two aspects of the music criticism in the SLM, in view of its educational role: the problem of virtuosity and the method used by music critics in this magazine. The aesthetic canon of the SLM was marked by decisively negative attitude towards the virtuosity. Mainly concerned by educating the Serbian music public in the spirit of the highest music achievements in Europe, the music writers of the SLM criticized both domestic and foreign performers who favoured virtuosity over the 'essence' of music. Therefore, Niccol? Paganini, Franz Liszt, and even Peter Tchaikowsky with his Violin concerto became the subject of the magazine's criticism. However their attitude towards the interpreters with both musicality and virtuoso technique was always positive. That was evident in the writings on Jan Kubel?k. This educational mission also had its effect on the structure of critique writings in the SLM. In their wish to inform the Serbian public on the European music (which they did very professionally), the critics gave much more information on biographies, bibliographies and style of the European composers, than they valued the interpretation itself. That was by far the weakest aspect of music criticism in the SLM. Although the music criticism in the SLM was professional and analytic one, it often used the literary style and sometimes even profane expressions in describing the artistic value and performance, more than it was necessary for the genre of music criticism. The music critics of the SLM set high aesthetic standards before the Serbian music public, and therefore the virtuosity was rejected by them. At the same time, these highly professional critics did not possess a certain level of introspection that would allow them to abstain from using sometimes empty and unconvincing phrases instead of exact formulations suitable for the professional music criticism. In that respect, music critics in the SLM did not match the standards they themselves set before both the performers and the public in Serbia.

Die Brücke [The Bridge]

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dagmar Grimm
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Two Dimensional ◽  
Technical Institute ◽  
New Era ◽  
Dimensional Effect ◽  
The Future ◽  
Leave Of Absence ◽  
German Art ◽  
The Times

Convinced that art should be an expression of life representing the vitality of the times, four architecture students in Dresden joined together to found Die Brücke [The Bridge] in 1905. The name, suggested by one of their founding members, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, reflected their intention to provide a bridge between the art of previous generations and that of the new era of the twentieth century. As the initiator of Die Brücke and its chief spokesman, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner had the audacious idea of renewing German art. He was joined by Fritz Bleyl, Erich Heckel, and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, fellow students studying at Dresden’s Technische Hochschule [Dresden Technical Institute]. In preceding years, both Kirchner, who had taken leave of absence to study art, and Bleyl had been working on woodcuts influenced heavily by the earlier Jugendstil. While Bleyl remained interested in the illusion of space, Kirchner had begun to simplify his style to include greater planarity, with jagged lines providing delineation and contour, creating a two-dimensional effect that was already indicative of his signature stylistic innovations of the future.

scholarly journals The Idea of Tragedy in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and A View from the Bridge

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 115
Author(s):  
Hanyue Li
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Greek Tragedy ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
Arthur Miller ◽  
The Times ◽  
Twentieth Century America ◽  
Death Of A Salesman

Arthur Miller is acknowledged as a heavyweight in portraying ordinary life’s tragedy in twentieth-century America. He believes that tragedy is no longer confined to the kingly man placed aloofness from others; he denies rigid definitions of traditional Greek tragedy and enriches them to keep abreast of the times in modern society. Most Miller scholars, unfortunately, are still preoccupying themselves with Death of a Salesman. Available criticism of these two plays is scant and not extensive. This paper studies both the ostensible structures of standardized Greek tragedy and the hidden ideas of modern tragedy as they are intertwiningly applied to the two texts to see how Miller expresses his idea of modern tragedy behind the shield of Greek tragedy and how it gives a new lease on the life of antiquated classical tragedy in modern society.

The Hispano-Moroccan Wars (1859–1927) and the (De)nationalization of the Spanish People

2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (2) ◽  
pp. 290-310
Author(s):  
Alfonso Iglesias Amorín
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
Armed Conflicts ◽  
Spanish History ◽  
The Awakening ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Times ◽  
The Sacrifice

The Spanish army participated in several armed conflicts in Moroccan territory during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These conflicts tested the capacity of the Spanish nation to inspire and induce its citizens to defend it. How the wars were fought, how they were transmitted to the population, and how the population reacted to them evolved with the times. Although nationalist fervour and ‘nation consumption’ intensified, so did the sacrifice the nation required of its people. In this gap between patriotic zeal and actual willingness, it is possible to observe the degree of nationalization among Spaniards. Analysis ‘from below’, based on the perceptions of the lower classes versus those of the upper classes, or of individuals versus the community, expands and refines the traditional scope to make nuances visible. This departure from traditional historiography, based on analysis ‘from above’, moves beyond the patriotic enthusiasm for the Hispano-Moroccan War of 1859 to the indifference surrounding the War of Melilla of 1893, resistance to recruitment as the Barranco del Lobo disaster struck in 1909, and the fear and desire for revenge after the 1921 debacle of Annual. By inverting the vantage point, resistance emerges where homogeneous support was assumed, inviting exploration to discover if the unpopularity of the twentieth-century conflicts favoured Spanish de-nationalization and the awakening of other national consciences. This attempt to discern real attitudes concerning the wars that altered the course of Spanish history involves looking at how ways of knowing have evolved regarding what happened across the Straits of Gibraltar.

The Fate of the History of Mentalités in the Annales

1982 ◽  
Vol 24 (3) ◽  
pp. 424-437 ◽  
Author(s):  
André Burguiére
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Historical Knowledge ◽  
Quarter Century ◽  
Historical Method ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Times

In a letter addressed to the medievalist Ferdinand Lot and dated June 1941, Charles Seignobos, hereditary enemy of the Annales, declared, “I have the impression that, for approximately the last quarter-century, the effort to think about historical method, which was vigorous in the 1880s and especially so in the 1890s, has reached a stalemate,” and noted that, as a sign of the times, “the Revue de Synthese Historique … has changed its name.” Seignobos, then only a year before his death, was writing a book on “the principles of the historical method.” His letter alluded to American and German output (“a mediocre American, Barnes, published a fat book in 1925 in which he summarized a large number of works….”), but made no mention of Lucien Febvre, Marc Bloch, or of the Annales, then in its twelfth year. To choose to ignore the Annales while discoursing on historical method is of course unjust and absurd. But aside from this omission, Charles Seignobos's remarks are not without pertinence. It is true that France at the turn of the last century and particularly during the first decade of the twentieth century, had been the center of a passionate and fascinating debate on the nature of historical knowledge, on the legitimacy of its pretensions to be a science, and so forth, and that by the 1940s this debate had ceased.

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