Rolland, Romain (1866–1944)

Author(s):  
Charles Coustille-Cossou

Writer, professor, musicologist, biographer, essayist, novelist, playwright, great letter writer and diarist, mystic in search of a pacified world and of a heroic heart, Romain Rolland profoundly marked the first half of the twentieth century. While he initially wrote for the theatre, his first success would come from the ten-volume novel Jean-Christophe, published between 1904 and 1912. Through the life of a young and enthusiastic German musician with a French first name, he depicted, in great detail, two rival societies under the threat of war. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1915. A talented piano player in his youth, Romain Rolland entered the École Normale Supérieure in 1886, defended a dissertation on the Origins of Modern Lyrical Drama [Les origines du théâtrelyrique moderne], and went on to teach art history and musicology at the Sorbonne. In Rome, he met Malwida von Meyensburg (a former friend of Nietzsche and Wagner) who accelerated his debut in literature. While he initially wrote for the theatre, his first success would come from the ten-volume novel Jean-Christophe, published between 1904 and 1912. Through the life of a young and enthusiastic German musician with a French first name, he depicted, in great detail, two rival societies under the threat of war.

2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Brigitte Falkenburg

Abstract The paper presents a detailed interpretation of Edgar Wind’s Experiment and Metaphysics (1934), a unique work on the philosophy of physics which broke with the Neo-Kantian tradition under the influence of American pragmatism. Taking up Cassirer’s interpretation of physics, Wind develops a holistic theory of the experiment and a constructivist account of empirical facts. Based on the concept of embodiment which plays a key role in Wind’s later writings on art history, he argues, however, that the outcomes of measurements are contingent. He then proposes an anti-Kantian conception of a metaphysics of nature. For him, nature is an unknown totality which manifests itself in discrepancies between theories and experiment, and hence the theory formation of physics can increasingly approximate the structure of nature. It is shown that this view is ambiguous between a transcendental, metaphysical realism in Kant’s sense and an internal realism in Putnam’s sense. Wind’s central claim is that twentieth century physics offers new options for resolving Kant’s cosmological antinomies. In particular, he connected quantum indeterminism with the possibility of human freedom, a connection that Cassirer sharply opposed.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patricia Emison

Film, like the printed imagery inaugurated during the Renaissance, spread ideas---not least the idea of the power of visual art---across not only geographical and political divides but also strata of class and gender. Moving Pictures and Renaissance Art History examines the early flourishing of film, 1920s-mid-60s, as partly reprising the introduction of mass media in the Renaissance, allowing for innovation that reflected an art free of the control of a patron though required to attract a broad public. Rivalry between word and image, narrative and visual composition shifted in both cases toward acknowledging the compelling nature of the visual. The twentieth century also saw the development of the discipline of art history; transfusions between cinematic practice and art historical postulates and preoccupations are part of the story told here.


Author(s):  
Adam Herring

This chapter discusses the interpretive challenges that art historians and anthropologists have faced in approaching Inca intellectual and artistic achievements, which do not fit comfortably in Western categories. George Kubler took up the question of Inca art in the mid-twentieth century, creating a space in art history for studying the Incas. This development occurred at a time when archaeologists such as John Rowe worked to place the Incas within the broader context of Andean civilizations, and structuralists like Tom Zuidema were beginning to challenge historical narratives in search of underlying elements of Andean culture. The scholarly interest in Inca art, material culture, and intellect was but one aspect of the Inca focus of that time, as artists found inspiration in Inca ruins and museum galleries in the United States, and other countries began to exhibit Inca artifacts as an art to be approached on its own terms.


2021 ◽  
Vol 66 (4) ◽  
pp. 173-186
Author(s):  
Alí Calderón Farfán ◽  

Future Past. The Evolution of the Concept of Poetry in Octavio Paz. Octavio Paz (1914) is a poet writing in Spanish whose aesthetic ideas have built a vision of relevant poetry for at least three traditions: poetry in French, English and, of course, Spanish. This study will analyze, from the metalinguistic perspective proposed by Reinhart Koselleck, how the concept of “poetry” evolved in the thought of the Mexican Nobel Prize winner. Framed by his tradition, by his space of experience, Octavio Paz wrote works that have been instrumental in understanding and valuing poetry in the twentieth century. From “Poesía de soledad y poesía de communion” (1943) to La otra voz, Poesía y fin de siglo (1990), Paz synthesized the aesthetic ideas of his time in El arco y la lira (1956), rethought the lyrical exercise in “Los signos de rotación” (1956), modified his poetic in the prologue to Poesía en movimiento and made his position explicit in Los hijos del limo and his thoughts on Lévi-Strauss and Marcel Duchamp. By focusing on these texts, as well as on a corpus of conferences, interviews, correspondence and even poetry recitals, this study explores the evolution of poetic thought and the horizon of expectations that the work of the last Spanish-speaking poet who received the Nobel Prize opens for us. Keywords: Octavio Paz, style, poetics, post-utopian time, semantics of concepts


2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 251-290
Author(s):  
Anna Elizabeth Winterbottom

Abstract The practice of medicine and healing is always accompanied by a range of paraphernalia, from pillboxes to instruments to clothing. Yet such things have rarely attracted the attention of historians of medicine. Here, I draw on perspectives from art history and religious studies to ask how these objects relate, in practical and symbolic terms, to practices of healing. In other words, what is the connection between medical culture and material culture? I focus on craft objects relating to medicine and healing in Lanka during the Kandyan period (ca. 1595–1815) in museum collections in Canada and Sri Lanka. I ask what the objects can tell us, first, about early modern Lankan medicine and healing and, second, about late nineteenth- and twentieth-century efforts to reconstruct tradition. Finally, I explore what studying these objects might add to current debates about early modern globalization in the context of both material culture and medicine.


2015 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
Author(s):  
Linda Boersma ◽  
Patrick van Rossem

In 2010, Afterall Publishers launched a series of exhibition histories wholly devoted to the study of landmark exhibitions.[1] The aim was to examine art in the context of its presentation in the public realm. In this way, research into art history shifted from the artistic production of one individual artist to the context of the presentation, and to the position, views, and convictions of the curator. In the introduction to the book, published in 2007 with its contextually pertinent title, Harald Szeemann: Individual Methodology, Florence Derieux stated: “It is now widely accepted that the art history of the second half of the twentieth century is no longer a history of artworks, but a history of exhibitions.”[2] Not everyone agrees with this, however. For example, art historian Julian Myers justifiably criticized this statement when he wrote that the history of art and exhibitions are inextricably linked.


Author(s):  
Robert N. Minor

In the flurry of intellectual activity in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Bengal, Rabindranath Tagore became one of the best-known playwrights, poets, novelists, educators and philosophers, winning the Nobel Prize for literature in 1913. His thought drew on the English Romantics as well as Sanskrit and Bengali writers and movements. Tagore was not a systematic philosopher. He termed his position ‘a poet’s religion’ which valued imagination above reason. He moved between the personal warmth of human relationships to a theistic Divine and belief in an Absolute as a unifying principle. He advocated a thoughtful but active life, criticizing asceticism and ritualism.


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