scholarly journals Ruthless polyphony and audible silences : musico-dramatic narrative in Otakar Zich's Vina

Theatralia ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 62-80
Author(s):  
Brian S. Locke
Keyword(s):  
Dramatic Narrative

‘The greatest irregular’

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth Scurr
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Historical Record ◽  
Thomas Carlyle ◽  
History Of ◽  
Dramatic Narrative ◽  
The French Revolution ◽  
The Revolution

Thomas Carlyle claimed that his history of the French Revolution was ‘a wild savage book, itself a kind of French Revolution …’. This chapter considers his stylistic approaches to creating the illusion of immediacy: his presentation of seemingly unmediated fact through the transformation of memoir and other kinds of historical record into a compelling dramatic narrative. Closely examining the ways in which he worked biographical anecdote into the fabric of his text raises questions about Carlyle’s wider historical purposes. Pressing the question of what it means to think through style, or to distinguish expressive emotive writing from abstract understanding, is an opportunity to reconsider Carlyle’s relation to his predecessors and contemporaries writing on the Revolution in English.

Guiding Grief: Liturgical Poetry and Ritual Lamentation in Early Byzantium

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Ashbrook Harvey
Keyword(s):  
Church Leaders ◽  
Social Significance ◽  
Classical Drama ◽  
Dramatic Narrative ◽  
Byzantine Church ◽  
And Performance ◽  
Early Byzantine

Early Byzantine church leaders regularly admonished against grief as a Christian response to death. Yet, mourning practices continued unabated, and church leaders also participated in the lavish mourning that attended the funerals of beloved church figures, whether bishops or holy men or women. Amidst such contradictory discourses, liturgical piety appears to have provided a constructive manner of engaging grief and negotiating such tensions. Early Byzantine liturgies in both Greek and Syriac abound in hymns and homilies that retold biblical stories in dramatic fashion. Often, these included searing depictions of anguish, grief, and lamentation over loss or death for biblical characters. The accounts show strong similarities with traditions from classical drama, with imagined speeches as well as dramatic narrative that linger closely on postures, gestures, and lyrical expressions of sorrow. This chapter argues that these presentations took on particular social significance in the context of liturgical setting and performance. Embedded within liturgy itself as an overarching narrative, such stories took on resolution within a higher process of grief turned to restoration. Biblical tragedy, articulated in homilies and hymns, offered congregations typological expressions of their own sorrows, even as people were ritually guided from bereavement to consolation.

Good Shepherd, Bumpkin Shepherd

2018 ◽  
pp. 31-49
Author(s):  
K. Meira Goldberg
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Spanish Empire ◽  
Christian Doctrine ◽  
Spanish Society ◽  
National Symbol ◽  
Dramatic Narrative

In Christmas pageants staged throughout the Spanish Empire, the pastor bobo (foolish shepherd) asked rude and impertinent questions, making Christian doctrine comprehensible to the humblest audiences. The bobo’s comic confusion—Will he or won’t he see the light of Christ?—was danced with obscene gambols and cacophonous footwork, manifesting the perilous invisible stain of impure blood. Yet these sharp-tongued dramatizations of redemption simultaneously undermined the determinative dogma of blood purity which governed Spanish society. Aristocrats thus asserted their status, enacting the post-epiphany bobo by refining transgressive gambols into virtuosic caprioles. Ironically, eighteenth-century Spaniards adopted the imaginary Gitano—an outlaw Other which inherits the bobo’s dramatic narrative of redemption—as a national symbol. Spain’s identification with this figure, often described euphemistically as a proto-romantic “orientalization,” is in fact a racialized downgrade. With the advent of the fandango, Spain, reduced to performing itself for tourists, came to dance Blackness for Europe.

“I Am the One:” A Monist Looks at the Double Death and Life of Rabba bar Naḥmani

2020 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-50
Author(s):  
Michael Baris
Keyword(s):  
Human Action ◽  
Dual System ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The World ◽  
Mode Of Transmission ◽  
Way Of Thinking ◽  
Dramatic Narrative ◽  
The One

Abstract The rabbis portray two arenas in which Torah is studied. Above the terrestrial academy of the sages, the Rabbis posit a transcendent, celestial yeshiva. This dual system seems central to the rabbinic doctrine of retribution in a sequential afterlife. In contrast to the standard dualist reading and accepted dogma, I propose a monist’s reading of these aggadic texts, which sees a single arena of human action and endeavor, with multivalent significance. My starting point is the dramatic narrative of the persecution, flight, and ultimate death of one of the leading Talmudic sages, Rabba bar Naḥmani. These esoteric stories go beyond familiar taxonomies as modes of concealment. Not cyphers to be cracked, they offer a nuanced way of thinking about the world, accessible through narrative as an adaptive mode of transmission.

scholarly journals Actors and Structures in Machiavelli’s Istorie Fiorentine

2007 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 45-87
Author(s):  
Sverre Bagge
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Thirteenth Century ◽  
Class Structure ◽  
Gradual Decline ◽  
Structural Forces ◽  
History Of ◽  
Individual Achievement ◽  
Dramatic Narrative ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The City

This article examines Machiavelli's understanding of the relationship between actors and structures in the history of Florence through a study of five selected episodes in the Istorie Fiorentine. Together, these episodes show the gradual decline of virtue in the city, from the relatively healthy conditions of the late thirteenth century to the pathetic incompetence of the Pazzi rebellion in 1478. These episodes also show that the main cause of this decline was not internal struggles, as stated in the preface, but the decline of military virtue which in turn was caused by changes in the class structure. In expressing these conclusions in the form of dramatic narrative and not only explicit reasoning, Machiavelli brings out tension between actors and structures, showing the limits the structural forces set to individual achievement as well as the possibilities for individuals to assert themselves under particular conditions. Generally, the scope for individual achievement increases as a result of the decline from the thirteenth-century republic, dominated by collective forces, to the fifteenth-century oligarchy dominated by the Medici family.

scholarly journals Dramaturgiczna funkcja muzyki w Demiurgosie Juliusza Łuciuka

Schulz/Forum ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Piotr Józef Maksymowicz
Keyword(s):  
New Meanings ◽  
Close Relationship ◽  
Dramatic Narrative ◽  
Bruno Schulz

So far the first opera inspired by the work of Bruno Schulz, Demiurgos by Juliusz Łuciuk, has been performed only as a concert. Its libretto is based on the selected fragments of Schulz’s fiction which, in combination with music, acquires new meanings. As a result, apparently unrelated scenes contribute to a coherent dramatic narrative. Such a close relationship between the literary and the musical material calls for an analysis of relations of the language of literature and the asemantic idiom of music, which let the audience respond to the meanings imposed on music by fiction. As it turns out, the musical narration is the most important for the dramatic quality of the opera as a coherent narrative presented on stage. The music not only comments and illustrates, but also creates dramatic suspense. Thanks to various techniques of composing, a unique dialog between the word and the music results in a new narrative rooted in the reality of Schulz’s stories.

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