Playing the Angles: Finding Shylock and Gratiano

Written by one of the only members of Compagnia de Colombari who worked on Coonrod’s Merchant in all of its iterations, this chapter gives a jobbing actor’s account of the 2016 production from its pre-life to its afterlife. For Sorab Wadia, the most daunting challenge was to double Shylock, the dignified Venetian moneylender in the opening scene, with Gratiano, the spitting Jew-baiter of the rest of the play. He could not reconcile the two parts, but he found, in rehearsing and performing them, how they – and the play – needed each other. Being in this play, he thinks, is like finding yourself in a George Braque painting.

“This Ticking Noise in My Head”

This study tested the role of the audio soundtrack in the opening scene of Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil (Orson Welles and Albert Zugsmith, 1958) in supporting a predictive inference that a time bomb will explode, as the filmmakers intended. We designed two experiments and interpreted their results using the Scene Perception and Event Comprehension Theory (SPECT). Across both experiments, viewers watched the scene, we manipulated their knowledge of the bomb, and they made a predictive inference just before the bomb would explode. Experiment 1 found that the likelihood of predicting the explosion decreased when the soundtrack was absent. Experiment 2 showed that individual differences in working memory accounted for variability in generating the prediction when the soundtrack was absent. We explore the implications for filmmaking in general.

Slender Self-Knowledge

This essay argues that King Lear’s tragedy is largely brought about by Lear’s lack of self-knowledge, a character defect that long precedes the foolish decisions he makes in King Lear’s opening scene and which precipitates his own death and the deaths of those he loves. Lear’s lack of self-knowledge encourages Shakespeare’s audience to have sympathy for Goneril and Regan and to recognize that Lear’s beautiful progress of redemption is mitigated by his failure to ever recognize his longstanding wrongdoing against his elder daughters. By contrast, in Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth Bennet’s humble choice to learn and be humbled by Darcy’s letter empowers Elizabeth to achieve self-knowledge at a youthful age even as it brings happiness and numerous redemptive benefits to herself and to those whom she loves.

Ignis Fatuus

Returning to the opening scene of the book, this chapter explains the factors that led Laura Clay to resign from KERA and to oppose ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. By 1916, the National American Woman Suffrage Association had endorsed Carrie Chapman Catt's “Winning Plan,” pledging to pursue a federal amendment as its key goal and demanding that states shelve their own plans in favor of national goals. Clay lined up with many southern “states' rights suffragists” such as Kate Gordon and continued to advocate for a state route to the ballot.

Uncertainty as a Poetic Principle: A Reading of the Opening Scene in Joseph Ben Zabara’s The Book of Delight

This article proposes a new reading of the opening scene of Joseph Ben Meir Ibn Zabara’s twelfth century (at the latest: 1209) The Book of Delight. This reading derives from the hypothesis that this art of storytelling is based on a poetic principle of uncertainty, and is therefore associated with the various forms of the ambiguous and the ambivalent (the grotesque, the uncanny, the ironic, etc.). As I have argued elsewhere about other rhymed Hebrew stories, this approach is appropriate, in my view, to the character of some of the most fascinating rhymed stories produced in medieval Hebrew literature. In the present study I suggest yet another demonstration of the poetic benefit that can accrue from the adoption of this approach.

Tragedy and the Gaze of the Living Dead

The chapter describes how harmonic functional cycles flow strongly in the music of Richard Strauss, demonstrable in the opening scene of Elektra, the harmonies of which surge in an ever-tonicward direction. The chapter further re-examines the concept of hysteria, refuting its applicability to Strauss’s opera, opting for a more detailed Lacanian reading. Strauss’s harmonic progressions support the author’s psychodynamic reading, employing a dynamic in which one octatonic cycle controls a separate cycle. The chapter also examines this from an ethical position, following Lacan’s model of Aristotelean catharsis (in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis), and shows how these functional cycles come to a head in the final dance of death that, like Wagner’s Isolde, shuttles to and fro between the cycles as they are completely dismantled.

Del narratore e di altre figure nel ciclo di Nane Oca

The reading of the four novels that constitute the cycle of Nane Oca (1992-2019) allows to understand the fusion of story and tale realised by Giuliano Scabia: the fabulous adventures of the main character, Giovanni, alternate with the iteration of the opening scene where (through the character of Guido il Puliero) the process of narration starts. Listeners (and, in perspective, readers) join the narrator and gradually become collective authors, in the tradition of the folk storytelling.