Symbolism and National Identity in Carl Durheim’s Photographic Work

In this article I explore the work of Carl Durheim (1810-1890) as a production of highly symbolic imagery geared toward the visual creation of the Swiss national identity in the wake of the establishment of the Confederation in 1848. After providing some background about Durheim and the early history of photography in Switzerland I focus on Durheim’s pictures of the so-called Heimatlose (vagabonds), which were commissioned by the Police and Justice Department in Bern. I argue that these pictures cannot be interpreted merely as mug shots taken in order to reproduce the identity of the depicted subjects; rather, using the rhetorical force of photography, these images projected onto the Heimatlose the ideal of the new Swiss society, based on bourgeois values and clearly demarcated from everything foreign through an idealized operation of drawing geographical and social borders.

“The First Swallow”: Avian Metaphors in Nikita Khrushchev’s Political Discourse

Birds are a rich source for metaphors in paremias that are known to be a significant rhetorical force in various modes of communication. This article deals with the repertoire of ornithological proverbial texts utilized in the Soviet leader’s public speeches and memoirs, as well as in their English translations. The metaphor human is bird, in which there are various grounds of comparison, is explored. The peculiarities of using avian metaphors in the context of the original and the ways of their translation into English are scrutinized as well. The analysis of the material shows that the main features, shared by the Target (human) and the Source (bird species), are grounded on physiological characteristics and behavioral traits, having a negative slant. The equivalent and literal translations are applied as the main methods of rendition. Of particular interest are the metaphorical “animalistic metamorphoses” found in translation.

Punishment the Easy Way

Some argue against coercive preventive measures on the grounds that they amount to cloaked forms of punishment. Others offer a qualified defence of such measures on the grounds that such measures have substantively different goals and purposes from punishment. Focusing on the case of civil preventive injunctions, I clear the ground and provide reasons for a third logical possibility: that coercive preventive measures are relevantly similar to punishment, but this does not itself give us a reason to oppose them. ‘Punishment’ has a great deal of rhetorical force, and it thereby distracts us from the justificatory work that we need to do to specify proper restrictions on the state’s coercive powers. Whereas many commentators have proposed that legal theory provides grounds for challenging civil preventive orders, I argue for the opposite view. If we understand properly the function of civil preventive orders, we will endorse them at least in principle, and will come to rethink some central ideas in the grounding of the criminal justice processes.

Jesus in the Book of Revelation

The portrayal of Jesus as an executed lamb is both pervasive and central to the book of Revelation. This chapter presents the book’s high Christology as distinctive in the New Testament. Understanding the rhetorical force of the lamb in the Apocalypse is crucial to understanding the book as a whole, particularly images of violence elsewhere in the book, which are in any case muted and transformed. Apparent ambiguities and inconsistencies are partially resolved if the lamb Christology serves as the primary lens through which to interpret the rest of the narrative. Revelation’s anti-imperial Christology is designed to inform and empower the Asian believers’ own faithful witness in the form of consistent nonviolent resistance to local pressures in Asia to participate in the emperor cult. Instead, believers in Asia are to conquer by worshiping God alone, and the lamb.

Religion as Collective Right

This chapter considers efforts to legislate Native American religious freedom in the American Indian Religious Freedom Act (AIRFA, 1978). Where courts and even common sense have seen AIRFA as a religious freedom statute—as an extension of the legal protections of the First Amendment into the distinctive terrain of Native American traditions—the chapter suggests a different view. If the legal force of “religious freedom” discourse has been only dimly effective for Native sacred claims in courts, this chapter is the one that most pointedly shows how Native peoples drew on the rhetorical power of the sacred and religious freedom to win significant legislative protections specific to Native peoples. It does so through interviews with Suzan Shown Harjo. These interviews show how the remarkable legislative accomplishment of AIRFA and, later, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (1990), carry the rhetorical force of religious freedom into the legal shape of federal Indian law, with its recognition of treaty-based collective rights and the United States' nation-to-nation relationship with Native peoples.

The Tyrant’s Vein: Misrule and Popularity in the Elizabethan Playhouse

The fashion for tyrants on the Elizabethan stage reflected a sort of affinity between tyranny and theatre. How did the two things fit together? A tyrant is not a true king, but only seems to be one, and so is like an actor playing a king. Because he has no right to the throne, he must assert his rule by personal and rhetorical force—the actor’s resources. Moreover, a tyrant is understood to be a figure in whom appetite conquers reason, self-control gives way to desire—as happens (according to hostile accounts) in the theatre. This logic applies particularly to popular theatre, where the tyrant is sustained by his dynamic relationship with the audience. In comparison with the tyrants of academic or humanist drama, who are uneasy and isolated, the tyrant on the common stage is energetic and happy amid the crowd. He is the imagined monarch of the theatre’s populace—their representative, their creature, affiliated to them not by political forms but by the symbolic repertoire of festivity: misrule, inversion, masquerade. In this way, people without rights recognize themselves in the unrighteous ruler: arguably, that is how tyranny works in reality.

Modernist Music for Children

On several occasions in the midcentury United States, the music of Anton Webern was reimagined as music for children. In 1936 conductor and musicologist Nicolas Slonimsky published the score of Webern’s op. 10/4 on the children’s page of the Christian Science Monitor. In 1958 Webern’s op. 6/3 was featured in a New York Philharmonic Young People’s Concert, the first conducted by Leonard Bernstein. Eight years later, Webern’s Kinderstück (Children’s Piece) received its posthumous premiere at Lincoln Center, performed by a nine-year-old pianist. In each case children served as a marker of accessibility, meant to render Webern’s music more palatable to adult audiences; thus was Webern’s music subsumed within the middlebrow circulation of classical music. Although recent scholarship has considered the intersections between modernist music and middlebrow culture, Webern’s music has remained absent from these discussions. Indeed, Webern’s terse, abstract, and severe compositions might at first appear ill suited to middlebrow contexts. Yet, as these three historical moments make clear, children served as a potent rhetorical force that could be used to market even this music to a broad audience of adults.

“LET THIS CUP PASS FROM ME”: TRANSLATED MESSAGES OF NIKITA KHRUSHCHEV’S POLITICAL DISCOURSE

Paremias are known to be a significant rhetorical force in various modes of communication. They serve well in oral speech and in writing, coming to mind almost automatically as prefabricated verbal units. The article aims to take a look at how the proverbial texts with the symbolic component “cup” employed in Nikita Khrushchev’s political speeches, as well as in his memoirs, have been rendered into English. The corpus linguistics methodology is used to identify the expressions containing the word “cup.” In analyzing the selected idioms, Conceptual Metaphor Theory is employed as a theoretical framework. The research contributes to the study of phraseology and translation as it provides an insight into challenges caused by linguistic and cultural differences while transferring metaphorical expressions from one language and culture to another.

Poetry as Antidote to Toxic Certainty

In examining the discursive environment surrounding the Great War (1914-1918), one finds a familiar reduction of reality into flat and mutually exclusive binaries written in what Robert Graves called "Newspaper Language." In this article, I suggest such discursive flattening to be both unproductive and dehumanizing, employing the term "toxic certainty" to refer to language used by a given partisan over and against the perceived other, where the rhetorical force of an assertion is taken to be the proof of that assertion. To counter dehumanizing discourse both in and out of the pulpit, I suggest a remedy in an alternate reading of James 1:22, where preachers can aspire to be "poets of the word," rather than just self-deceiving hearers. This idea is developed through an examination of the poetic efforts to humanize the full reality of the Great War undertaken by Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon.