The Music Behind the Mask: Rossini’s Uncanny Salon

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-114
Author(s):  
Simon Cohen
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Old Age ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
Nineteenth Century France ◽  
Scant Attention ◽  
A Site ◽  
Changing Attitudes ◽  
Shed Light

Despite receiving scant attention from scholars and performers, Rossini’s Péchés de vieillesse (Sins of Old Age), written between 1857 and 1868 for his private salon, have a unique and expressive stylistic language. In these works, the composer gives musical voice to the uncanny discourses that emerged around the idea of his “creative death.” This paper establishes how Rossini’s return to composition functioned as a musical “exhumation,” with his compositional activities functioning as a site for broader discourses about disease, aging, and death in nineteenth-century France. Close readings of visual depictions of Rossini by Eugène Delacroix and Antoine Etex shed light on changing attitudes toward the composer, which coincided with broader aesthetic shifts taking place at the time. The tensions engendered by Rossini’s precarious status as both living and dead, and his nostalgic relationship to the past, constitute a kind of doubleness that can be heard in his late compositions. Bringing together cultural history and musical analysis, I show that the privacy of Rossini’s salon gave rise to music with unique signifying potential that has not yet been duly acknowledged.

Companionate Marriage across the Century’s Turn

2018 ◽  
pp. 175-198
Author(s):  
Melanie V. Dawson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African American ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
The Past ◽  
Attitudes Toward Marriage ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Companionate Marriage ◽  
Cautionary Tales ◽  
Changing Attitudes

The struggle to realize companionate marriage appears as a central conflict in literary works by Anglo-American, African American, and ethnic American writers, who grapple with the issues raised by new ideologies and cultures of marriage. Drawing from cultural history that includes Lindsey and Evans’s volume, The Companionate Marriage (1927), and responses to it as well as a range of literary marriages that demonstrate the power of the companionate ideal, this piece charts the interaction between changing attitudes toward marriage in life and literature. As the range and complexity of opinions circulating around this issue demonstrate, the ostensibly “modern” question of equality in marriage had been debated as far back as the mid-nineteenth century. By contrast, later, more modern narratives increasingly turn to depictions of non-companionate, patriarchal arrangements, which offer both cautionary tales about the past and counter a trenchant idealism about the companionate model.

scholarly journals ‘Padres de la Patria’ and the Ancestral Past: Commemorations of Independence in Nineteenth-Century Spanish America

2002 ◽  
Vol 34 (4) ◽  
pp. 775-805 ◽  
Author(s):  
REBECCA EARLE
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Spanish America ◽  
Political Elites ◽  
Indigenous Culture ◽  
Political Leaders ◽  
The Past ◽  
Nineteenth Century France ◽  
Shed Light

This article examines the civic festivals held in nineteenth-century Spanish America to commemorate independence from Spain. Through such festivals political leaders hoped, in Hobsbawm's words, ‘to inculcate certain values and norms of behaviour by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past’. But when did the ‘past’ begin? If in nineteenth-century France the French Revolution was the time of history, in Spanish America there was no consensus on when history began. The debates about national origins embedded within the nineteenth-century civic festival not only suggest how political elites viewed their Patrias but also shed light on the position of indigenous culture (usually separated hygienically from indigenous peoples themselves) within the developing national histories of post-independence Spanish America.

Visibility and security in the smart home

2021 ◽  
pp. 135485652110300
Author(s):  
Justine Humphry ◽  
Chris Chesher
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Cultural Change ◽  
Smart Home ◽  
Methodological Approach ◽  
Cultural Analysis ◽  
Security Systems ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
A Site ◽  
Over Time

Smart home, media and security systems intervene in the territory and boundaries of the home in a variety of ways. Among these are the capacity to watch the home from afar, and to record these observations over time, as well as using the home as a site of performance for those on the outside. In this paper, we map the meanings of the smart home and explore the tensions between security and visibility, adopting a cultural history and cultural analysis methodological approach. We make a contribution to the literature on the smart home, highlighting its connection to longer trajectories of media and cultural change, and to understanding the contemporary formations of technologised surveillance, with attention to practices that emerged in response to COVID-19. We focus on two aspects of our model of domestic smartification: Ludics (devices and systems for play or entertainment) and exteriorities (security and communication interfaces that remotely monitor and expose the home). We focus on these aspects relating them to ideas of haunting and the uncanny to explore the implications of making what was previously hidden visible and manipulable to others.

Antarctic Archaeology

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. Zarankin ◽  
Melisa A. Salerno
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
South Shetland Islands ◽  
Shetland Islands ◽  
The Past ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Dominant Narratives ◽  
Different Characteristics ◽  
Shed Light ◽  
Over Time

Antarctica was the last continent to be known. Human encounters with the region acquired different characteristics over time. Within the framework of dominant narratives, the early ‘exploitation’ of the territory was given less attention than late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century ‘exploration’. Nineteenth-century exploitation was especially associated with sealing on the South Shetland Islands. Dominant narratives on the period refer to the captains of sealing vessels, the discovery of geographical features, the volume of resources obtained. However, they do not consider the life of the ordinary sealers who lived and worked on the islands. This chapter aims to show the power of archaeology to shed light on these ‘invisible people’ and their forgotten stories. It holds that archaeology offers a possibility for reimagining the past of Antarctica, calling for a revision of traditional narratives.

Catherine's Retinue: Old Age, Fashion, and Historicism in the Nineteenth Century

Slavic Review ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 68 (4) ◽  
pp. 782-803
Author(s):  
Luba Golburt
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Old Age ◽  
The Body ◽  
Historical Change ◽  
Historical Knowledge ◽  
Historical Experience ◽  
The Past ◽  
Cultural Legacy ◽  
Temporal Structures ◽  
Queen Of Spades

Beside her political and cultural legacy, Catherine II bequeathed to the nineteenth century a certain striking image of the body and spirit of the eighteenth: an aging aristocratic lady, inflexible in her behavioral routines and visibly unaware of historical change. This image was codified by Aleksandr Pushkin in The Queen of Spades and, much later, satirized by Ivan Turgenev in several of his novels. Highlighting the recurrence of these copies of Catherine the Great in nineteenth-century Russian prose, Luba Golburt interprets the narrative and historical implications of fashion and aging in this period that was fascinated with historical knowledge and imagination. The persistence of the past embodied by these figures posed a challenge to the otherwise widely embraced Hegelian notions of progress, underscoring the repetitive and ritualistic rhythms of historical experience. These figures also extended the realist narrative's historical scope and made possible a range of polyphonous temporal structures.

Autoexoticism with Promotional Purposes? Samuel-Henri Berthoud and Provincial Literary Ruse in Nineteenth-Century France

PMLA ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 132 (2) ◽  
pp. 397-404 ◽  
Author(s):  
Valentina Gosetti
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary Field ◽  
Dominant Culture ◽  
Cultural Center ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
The North ◽  
Nineteenth Century France ◽  
Foreign Land ◽  
Incomplete Picture ◽  
Shed Light

“There speaks the provincial!”—Goncharov, The Same Old StoryIn nineteenth-century france, the so-called province, denoting everything outside Paris, was considered a foreign land by Parisian writers, who often constructed it as an exotic space. When we deal with this kind of provincial exoticism, however, considering this perspective alone risks painting an incomplete picture of the French literary field. Through the example of Samuel-Henri Berthoud, an author from the north of France, my intention here is to shed light on autoexoticist practices by indigenous provincial writers and to explore how they actively reclaimed, fostered, and enhanced exotic constructions about their provinces. Indeed, a wealth of evidence supports my argument that their acceptance of hegemonic constructions from the dominant culture was not passive but rather an active and creative reappropriation. This essay also challenges the idea of a stable hegemonic cultural center around which the marginal authors and literary works gravitate. Before tackling these issues, let us take a step back and briefly survey the particular value of provincial France at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

Echoes of the Guillotine: Berlioz and the French Fantastic

2010 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 168-185
Author(s):  
Marianna Ritchey
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Narrative Theory ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
Important Contributor ◽  
Political Beliefs ◽  
The Past ◽  
Nineteenth Century France ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Fantastic ◽  
The Many

Abstract The fantastic, theorized as an expression of the anxieties, fears, and political beliefs of the generation of young French writers born in the decades directly following the Revolution and Terror, has long been viewed primarily as a literary genre. Observed in light of this artistic movement, Berlioz's most famous work, Symphonie fantastique, emerges as a musical manifestation of fantastic techniques, and Berlioz himself as an important contributor to the Fantastic culture that swept nineteenth-century France. Using Tzvetan Todorov's narrative theory, I identify two techniques fantastic authors exploit that are most useful in understanding Symphonie Fantastique: an intentional ambiguity of form, and a privileging of ambiguous ““thresholds”” over teleological plot resolution. In pursuing a new explanation of the symphony's strange deviations from musical norms, I highlight the many different ways the symphony has been understood and analyzed by prominent musicologists over the past 180 years. By now, musicologists have effectively demonstrated that Berlioz was not the ““incompetent genius”” (in Charles Rosen's wry formulation) he was long considered to be; however, the fact that there is still disagreement and debate over Symphonie Fantastique's deviations from normative form and content, as well as what those deviations might mean, demonstrates the highly fraught signifying structure of the music. Locating the symphony's use of fantastic tropes and techniques demonstrates that many of its strangest aspects——those ““failures”” that have been the subject of musicological debate since 1835——come into focus when we take its title seriously and regard the work as a symphony in the fantastic genre.

scholarly journals Tendrils of Memory: A Journey through Vietnam’s Landscape

1970 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Les Horvat
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
New Approach ◽  
Creative Practice ◽  
The Past ◽  
Interdisciplinary Field ◽  
Cultural Construct ◽  
A Site ◽  
The Relationship

While the interdisciplinary field of memory studies is burgeoning, the relationship between creative practice, memory, and landscape, remains open to debate, especially when considered in terms of its validity as anthropological data for ethnographers and social scientists. This article calls for a new approach to landscape and memory that remains sensitive to the notion that photography is able to provide a relevant platform for the re-examination of lived experience. Landscape is positioned as a site for memory and forgetting, and as a cultural construct resonant with the fabric of who we are, who we have been in the past, and offering an indication of who we may be in the future. The importance of creative practice through its many forms is suggested as a well-credentialed means of interpreting lived experience, leading to the proposition that photography has an important role to play in furthering our understanding of cultural history.

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