scholarly journals White Noise: Composition, Colonization, and Colour

2013 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 66-83 ◽  
Author(s):  
Geraldine Finn

This paper examines the links between Western music, Western metaphysics, and Western imperialism. Taking Derrida's reading of "White Mythology" and "Violence and Metaphysics" as its point of departure, the paper explores the relationship between the theories and practices of musical composition formalized in Europe in the eighteenth and finalized in the nineteenth century, and the theories and practices of race, racial differentiation, and empire that coincide(d) with it.

2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 197-216
Author(s):  
Sarah Irving-Stonebraker

Through an examination of the extensive papers, manuscripts and correspondence of American physician Benjamin Rush and his friends, this article argues that it is possible to map a network of Scottish-trained physicians in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Atlantic world. These physicians, whose members included Benjamin Rush, John Redman, John Morgan, Adam Kuhn, and others, not only brought the Edinburgh model for medical pedagogy across the Atlantic, but also disseminated Scottish stadial theories of development, which they applied to their study of the natural history and medical practices of Native Americans and slaves. In doing so, these physicians developed theories about the relationship between civilization, historical progress and the practice of medicine. Exploring this network deepens our understanding of the transnational intellectual geography of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century British World. This article develops, in relation to Scotland, a current strand of scholarship that maps the colonial and global contexts of Enlightenment thought.


Romanticism ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 203-215
Author(s):  
Alex Broadhead

In 2009, Damian Walford Davies called for a counterfactual turn in Romantic studies, a move reflective of a wider growth of critical interest in the relationship between Romanticism and counterfactual historiography. In contrast to these more recent developments, the lives of the Romantics have provided a consistent source of speculation for authors of popular alternate history since the nineteenth century. Yet the aims of alternate history as a genre differ markedly from those of its more scholarly cousin, counterfactual historiography. How, then, might such works fit in to the proposed counterfactual turn? This article makes a case for the critical as well as the creative value of alternate histories featuring the Romantics. By exploring how these narratives differ from works of counterfactual historiography, it seeks to explain why the Romantics continue to inspire authors of alternate history and to illuminate the forking paths that Davies's counterfactual turn might take.


2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-135
Author(s):  
Giles Whiteley

Walter Pater's late-nineteenth-century literary genre of the imaginary portrait has received relatively little critical attention. Conceived of as something of a continuum between his role as an art critic and his fictional pursuits, this essay probes the liminal space of the imaginary portraits, focusing on the role of the parergon, or frame, in his portraits. Guided by Pater's reading of Kant, who distinguishes between the work (ergon) and that which lies outside of the work (the parergon), between inside and outside, and contextualised alongside the analysis of Derrida, who shows how such distinctions have always already deconstructed themselves, I demonstrate a similar operation at work in the portraits. By closely analysing the parerga of two of Pater's portraits, ‘Duke Carl of Rosenmold’ (1887) and ‘Apollo in Picardy’ (1893), focusing on his partial quotation of Goethe in the former, and his playful autocitation and impersonation of Heine in the latter, I argue that Pater's parerga seek to destabilise the relationship between text and context so that the parerga do not lie outside the text but are implicated throughout in their reading, changing the portraits constitutively. As such, the formal structure of the parergon in Pater's portraits is also a theoretical fulcrum in his aesthetic criticism and marks that space where the limits of, and distinctions between, art and life become blurred.


2016 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mathias Herup Nielsen ◽  
Niklas Andreas Andersen

Studier, der analyserer det sociale med inspiration fra Foucaults tanker om governmentality, kritiseres i stigende omfang for at afskære sig fra at analysere de praktiske relationer, som politisk styring konkret indlejres i. I artiklen tager vi afsæt i denne kritik og viser, med et studie af forholdet mellem et kommunalt jobcenter og et lokalt beskæftigelsesråd, hvordan governmental magtanalyse kan indfange styringens uforudsigelige, mangefacetterede og immanente karakter ved at fokusere på styringsintentionernes møde med den praktiske virkelighed, der søges styret. Formelt er rådet nedsat til at overvåge og kontrollere jobcentret, men i den praktiske relation er det snarere jobcentret, som overvåger og kontrollerer rådet. Artiklen viser, hvordan dette er muligt ved at analysere jobcentrets arbejde med rådet ved hjælp af en række centrale begreber fra Foucaults forfatterskab. Empirisk trækker studiet foruden formelle myndighedsdokumenter, der beskriver rådets tiltænkte rolle, på praksisinformerende empiri i form af kvalitative interviews og mødereferater over en fire-årig periode. ENGELSK ABSTRACT: Mathias Herup Nielsen and Niklas Andreas Andersen: When Praxis Challenges the Ambitions of Governing. Analyzing the Space between the Intentions of Governing and Situational Praxis Studies working with the Foucauldian concept of ”governmentality” are frequently criticized for their apparent disregard of empirical reality. This article takes this critique as its point of departure and demonstrates the application of the concept of governmentality in a concrete empirical case study in order to grasp the unpredictable and multifaceted nature of modern day power. The case investigated here is the relationship between a Danish Jobcentre and a so-called local employment council (LBR). The latter was created to ”control” and ”monitor” the former organization. However, in practice, it is rather the other way around – the Jobcentre is controlling and monitoring the members of the LBR. This article draws on a number of well-known Foucauldian concepts to show how this relation of power is practically structured. Empirically the article draws on documents from central authorities as well as on a number of qualitative interviews with the actors involved – hence, the article attempts to meet with the dominant overall critique of the governmentality perspective for disregarding empirical reality. Keywords: governmentality, Michel Foucault, unemployment policy, jobcentre.


Author(s):  
Elaine Auyoung

The conclusion of this book calls attention to the relationship between comprehending realist fiction and Aristotle’s claim that mimetic representation provides a form of aesthetic pleasure distinct from our response to what is represented. It also argues that, by demonstrating how much nineteenth-century novelists depend on the knowledge and abilities that readers bring to a text, cognitive research on reading helps us revisit long-standing theoretical assumptions in literary studies. Because the felt experience of reading is so distinct from the mental acts underlying it, knowing more about the basic architecture of reading can help literary critics refine their claims about what novels can and cannot do to their readers.


Author(s):  
Ritchie Robertson

Ritchie Robertson situates Lessing’s text within debates over the proper depiction of extreme suffering in art, focusing on Goethe’s essay on the Laocoon group (1798), as well as other late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century works on the representation of pain. The issue of suffering in art was of utmost significance to Goethe’s ideology of the classical, Robertson explains; more than that, the themes introduced in Lessing’s essay—above all, its concerns with how suffering can be depicted in words and images—proved pivotal within Goethe’s prescriptions about the relationship between idealism and individuality (or ‘the characteristic’) in art. As part of a larger campaign against what he called ‘naturalism’ in art, Goethe argued that the ancients did not share the false notion that art must imitate nature. For Goethe, responding to Lessing, the power of the Laocoon group lay precisely in its depiction of bodily suffering as something not just beautiful, but also anmutig (‘sensuously pleasing’).


Author(s):  
Isaac Land

This chapter is central to the volume’s chronological contentions, as its argument accounts for the specialized, one-dimensional Dibdin of ‘Tom Bowling’ that has endured into recent scholarship. Focusing on Dibdin’s posthumous reception, it examines the moral and rhetorical difficulties of repackaging Dibdin’s works for a Victorian sensibility; it explores the specifics of mid-century concert culture previously highlighted by Derek Scott and William Weber as central to changes in nineteenth-century taste and programming; and it develops the theme of nostalgia into a revelatory consideration of the relationship between new naval technologies, national pride, and military training, and the songs, people, and language of a remembered Napoleonic ‘golden age’—to which Dibdin proves to have been as central, in the Victorian imagination, as Nelson.


Author(s):  
Marko Marinčič

The point of departure for this chapter is a little known work by Jožef Šubic, whose translation of Virgil’s Georgics, published in 1863, although largely unknown outside scholarly circles, nonetheless offers an important background to the Slovenian school of translation of Greek and Latin texts and of classics in general. Marinčič argues that this text, written in a hybrid metrical pattern, is by no means a literary masterpiece, but it is a groundbreaking work reflecting the contemporary debates concerning the use of classical metrical forms and implicitly opposing the Romantic ideology of agricultural self-sufficiency, which, in the course of the nineteenth century, resulted in a widespread prejudice against translation of world literature.


Author(s):  
Chris Jones

This introductory chapter contextualizes the philological study of language during the nineteenth century as a branch of the evolutionary sciences. It sketches in outline the two phases of poetic Anglo-Saxonism for which the rest of the book will subsequently argue in more detail. Moreover, the relationship between Anglo-Saxonism and nineteenth-century medievalism more generally is articulated, and historical analogies are drawn between nineteenth-century Anglo-Saxonism and more recent political events in the Anglophone world. Finally, the scholarly contribution of Fossil Poetry itself is contextualized within English Studies; it is argued that ‘reception’ is one of the primary objects of Anglo-Saxon or Old English studies, and not merely a secondary object of that field’s study.


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