Home in the Pampas: Alberto Gerchunoff’s Jewish Gauchos

Jews at Home ◽  
2010 ◽  
pp. 241-256
Author(s):  
Mónica Szurmuk

This chapter turns to Argentina, where Alberto Gerchunoff's Jewish Gauchos (1910) became an icon of Jewish incorporation into Argentinian society in the early twentieth century. In a series of vignettes, Gerchunoff showed that in working the land Jews had returned to a biblical way of life and had finally come home. His text received attention not just for its powerful narrative of immigrant Jews making a home in Argentina but even more for the way in which it claimed Argentina as a Jewish homeland. The publication of the book opened up a symbolic space for Jewish immigrants in the lettered culture of Buenos Aires and also in the future of the country. But, as the chapter shows, later in his life Gerchunoff came to doubt his idealism about Argentina as homeland, though by that time he had become separated from his text, which had taken on a life of its own in the Argentinian imagination.

2004 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 230-262 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Berry

In this essay, I explore historical and theoretical issues germane to an understanding of an 1885 piano composition with an intriguing title: LisztÕs Bagatelle ohne Tonart--a bagatelle "without tonality" or "without a key." After briefly describing the workÕs history and musical associations with other compositions by Liszt, I survey two present-day approaches that reveal ways in which the work defies tonality: octatonic interpretations via set-class examinations, and Schenker-influenced prolongational models. I then turn to focus instead on how the Bagatelle fit within the framework of nineteenth-century musical thought; how its processes were supported by contemporaneously evolving theories of chromaticism. Partly through an analysis based on the practice of Gottfried Weber (1779-1839), I demonstrate that the Bagatelle is not a piece "without tonality" as much as it is one "without the fulfillment of the tonic." It maintains harmonic tension by avoiding anticipated resolutions, as well as by preserving a sense of ambiguity as to what the actual "missing" key is. Next, I consider why Liszt was prompted to write a piece in such a manner. We know that he was a proponent of musical progress--of Zukunftsmusik ("music of the future")--but for this fact to be relevant we must confirm, first, that Liszt had definite ideas about a Zukunftsharmoniesystem; and second, that such a system is reflected in the processes exhibited by the Bagatelle. I argue that the BagatelleÕs traits are indeed in accordance with theoretical views about musicÕs future direction, to which Liszt subscribed. Relevant theories of Karl Friedrich Weitzmann (1808-80) and Franois-Joseph FŽtis (1784-1871) are assessed. Lastly, in a "Schoenbergian epilogue" I explore connections between LisztÕs operations and SchoenbergÕs ideas, addressing historical associations that conjoin their views of composing "ohne Tonart."I conclude that the 1885 BagatelleÕs attenuation of tonality was part of a tradition that extended from the mid-nineteenth into the early twentieth century--one that stretched from Liszt and his contemporaries through Schoenberg and his pupils and beyond, embracing along the way the theoretical prescriptions of Weitzmann, FŽtis, and Schoenberg himself. The various threads of theory and analysis explored in this article contribute to an understanding of the same strand of musical evolution: the increasing circumvention of tonality to the point that a piece could be written "ohne Tonart."


2010 ◽  
Vol 90 (3) ◽  
pp. 127-152
Author(s):  
Ljiljana Grcic

The monuments of folk architecture have its historical, artistic and tourist value. They illustrate the characteristics of local culture and way of life, and therefore should be preserved for the future. The main touristic functions in them can be cognitive, educational, fun, and also vacation and recreation. If we would like to keep the traditional folk architecture, it is necessary to protect vulnerable areas at the source or in the open air museums. This paper presents an overview of the ethno-parks and other facilities in the Macva, Sabac, Sabacka Pocerina and Posavina, which seems preserved examples of folk architecture and architecture from the nineteenth and early twentieth century, are part of the cultural heritage not only of these areas, but also the whole of Serbia.


2019 ◽  
pp. 1-31
Author(s):  
NICK YABLON

Since its reclamation in the 1970s, Edward S. Curtis's project to exhaustively photograph and describe American Indian cultures in the early twentieth century has invited shifting critical assessments. Complicating earlier arguments that it represents a nostalgic and inauthentic drama of a “vanishing” race, in which Indians functioned merely as props, recent scholars seek to recover his sitters’ agency or contemporary artists’ acts of reclamation. This article contributes to those efforts, but by exploring the temporal ambiguities inherent in the notion – then common among ethnographic photographers – of “preserving” a people for future viewers. It thus examines a photograph that Curtis contributed in 1913 to the Modern Historic Records Association, a short-lived organization that intended to assemble time capsules and archival vaults for historians in the distant future. Focussing on this single photograph – “The Oath – Apsaroke” (1908) – also allows us to track the way that Curtis's images could break free from his book project and resonate unpredictably across multiple domains, such as debates over the existence and meaning of Indian oaths.


2019 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 206-219
Author(s):  
Meindert E. Peters

Friedrich Nietzsche's influence on Isadora Duncan's work, in particular his idea of the Dionysian, has been widely discussed, especially in regard to her later work. What has been left underdeveloped in critical examinations of her work, however, is his influence on her earlier choreographic work, which she defended in a famous speech held in 1903 called The Dance of the Future. While commentators often describe this speech as ‘Nietzschean’, Duncan's autobiography suggests that she only studied Nietzsche's work after this speech. I take this incongruity as a starting point to explore the connections between her speech and Nietzsche's work, in particular his Thus Spoke Zarathustra. I argue that in subject and language Duncan's speech resembles Nietzsche's in important ways. This article will draw attention to the ways in which Duncan takes her cues from Nietzsche in bringing together seemingly conflicting ideas of religion and an overturning of morality; Nietzsche's notion of eternal recurrence and the teleology present in his idea of the Übermensch; and a renegotiation of the body's relation to the mind. In doing so, this article contributes not only to scholarship on Duncan's early work but also to discussions of Nietzsche's reception in the early twentieth century. Moreover, the importance Duncan ascribes to the body in dance and expression also asks for a new understanding of Nietzsche's own way of expressing his philosophy.


2010 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 267-290 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Currell

Showing how ‘modernist cosmopolitanism’ coexisted with an anti-cosmopolitan municipal control this essay looks at the way utopian ideals about breeding better humans entered into new town and city planning in the early twentieth century. An experiment in eugenic garden city planning which took place in Strasbourg, France, in the 1920s provided a model for modern planning that was keenly observed by the international eugenics movement as well as city planners. The comparative approach taken in this essay shows that while core beliefs about degeneration and the importance of eugenics to improve the national ‘body’ were often transnational and cosmopolitan, attempts to implement eugenic beliefs on a practical level were shaped by national and regional circumstances that were on many levels anti-cosmopolitan. As a way of assuaging the tensions between the local and the global, as well as the traditional with the modern, this unique and now forgotten experiment in eugenic city planning aimed to show that both preservation and progress could succeed at the same time.


Author(s):  
Risto Hilpinen

Medieval philosophers presented Gettier-type objections to the commonly accepted view of knowledge as firmly held true belief, and formulated additional conditions that meet the objections or analyzed knowledge in a way that is immune to the Gettier-type objections. The proposed conditions can be divided into two kinds: backward-looking conditions and forward-looking conditions. The former concern an inquirer’s current belief system and the way the inquirer acquired her beliefs, the latter refer to what the inquirer may come to learn in the future and how she can respond to objections. Some conditions of knowledge proposed in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century epistemology can be regarded as variants of the conditions put forward by medieval authors.


2011 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 563-577 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luke McKernan

The title of Allen Guttmann's landmark study of sports history,From Ritual to Record, captures the way cinematic treatments of the Olympic Games, Europe's most resonant sporting invention, developed in the early twentieth century. Projected film and the modern Olympic Games began in the same year, 1896, and the way the two phenomena have grown together demonstrates a progression from formality and ritual to an ever-increasing emphasis on individual, nation and achievement. This transition from ritual to record is demonstrated by two Olympic films from the European Games of Paris 1924 and Amsterdam 1928,Les Jeux Olympiques Paris 1924andDe Olympische Spelen. These cinematic records are not only documentary records of the events they portray, but are an important reminder that modern sports are witnessed by most not as stadium spectators but as viewers – in the case of the 1924 and 1928 films, as members of a cinema audience. The film record is essential to our understanding of the popularisation of modern sports, while through their contrary impulses to document and to idealise (particularly through the use of slow-motion photography), the two films demonstrate what is meaningful about Olympic sport.


Author(s):  
Meredith Martin

This chapter begins with a discussion of metrical mastery, outlining the way that Robert Bridges's intervention in his best-selling treatise Milton's Prosody expanded and popularized the theories that he and Gerard Manley Hopkins discussed together. It shows how Bridges and his influential competitor, George Saintsbury, were jostling for position during the height of the prosody wars between 1900 and 1910, and how their successes and failures characterize much of our contemporary thinking about early twentieth-century prosody. Author of the three-volume History of English Prosody (1906–10), Saintsbury was a prime mover in both the foundation of English literary study and the institutionalization of the “foot” as the primary measure of English poetry. Infused with Edwardian-era military rhetoric, Sainstbury's foot marched to a particularly English rhythm, which he traced through the ages with wit and martial vigor.


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