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A Jamesian State: The American Scene and “the Working of Democratic Institutions”

Lisi Schoenbach

in Pragmatic Modernism

Abstract in production.

Narrative

Gary D. Rhodes and Robert Singer

in Consuming Images: Film Art and the American Television Commercial

To explore these issues in-depth, Chapter 2 covers narrative, specifically examining how television commercials operate in terms of Scene, Genre, Cross-Genre, and the Remake. This chapter contends ... More

To explore these issues in-depth, Chapter 2 covers narrative, specifically examining how television commercials operate in terms of Scene, Genre, Cross-Genre, and the Remake. This chapter contends that the narrative framework for producing the television commercial is arguably, shot by shot, second to second, as frequently creative as a full-length feature film. Some commercials utilize cinematic narrative forms of Hollywood; others diverge from the same. The product and its “message” might be realistic or wholly fantastic; nevertheless, the TV commercial is indeed a narrative, a critically substantial formation, whether it unfolds in the form of a slice-of-life story or a presentational style pitch.Less

The Émigré Walt Whitman: Songs of Mourning, 1943–1948

Lawrence Kramer

in Song Beyond the Nation: Translation, Transnationalism, Performance

Musical settings of Walt Whitman’s poetry were ‘beyond the nation’ from the very beginning. The first of them was composed in 1880 by an Alsatian immigrant to the US, Frédéric Louis Ritter, and until ... More

Musical settings of Walt Whitman’s poetry were ‘beyond the nation’ from the very beginning. The first of them was composed in 1880 by an Alsatian immigrant to the US, Frédéric Louis Ritter, and until around 1930 the majority of Whitman settings came from German and British composers. The majority of those settings, in turn, dealt with war and its aftermath in mourning. Whitman’s poetry of the American Civil War provided a template for grappling musically with later conflicts, from the Boer War to World War I to World War II. The years 1942 and 1948 saw major war-themed settings from four German and German-émigré composers: Kurt Weill and Paul Hindemith in America, and Hans Werner Henze and Karl Amadeus Hartmann in Germany. A common thread among these pieces, exemplified most explicitly in Weill’s setting of ‘Come Up from the Fields, Father’, is the question of whether and how the act of transposed mourning can make the collective trauma of war ‘livable’ – in a sense of the term derived from T. W. Adorno and Judith Butler, for whom ‘livability’ is measured by the power of publicly avowed mourning to integrate trauma into the symbolic systems on which social life depends.Less

Blowup Beijing: The City as a Twilight Zone

Paola Voci

in The New Chinese Documentary Film Movement: For the Public Record

This chapter examines the Beijing of the New Documentary Movement. Its title reflects two main traits of Beijing documentaries: their tendency ... More

This chapter examines the Beijing of the New Documentary Movement. Its title reflects two main traits of Beijing documentaries: their tendency to blow up or highlight the city's marginal inhabitants while also emphasizing their often barely visible locations. With allusions to Michelangelo Antonioni and the eponymous television series of the 1960s, the discussion examines an arguably central feature of Chinese documentaries: their tendency to highlight the barely visible locations of Beijing's marginal inhabitants. By focusing on Swing in Beijing (1999), Night Scene (2004), and Paper Airplane (2001), it analyzes the relationship between performance and dissent and the development of contested realism as the visual mode for the unfitting. Unlike the conventional images of Beijing, these films make accessible an unofficial, unconventional, and unlikely Beijing.Less

Distant Cousin Lewis Grassic Gibbon: A Scots Quair (Sunset Song, Cloud Howe and Grey Granite) and Scottish Scene

William K. Malcolm

in Lewis Grassic Gibbon

A quarter of this monograph is devoted to Gibbon’s masterpiece, the trilogy A Scots Quair, approached as a strategically integrated volume. This chapter places the book within its contemporary ... More

A quarter of this monograph is devoted to Gibbon’s masterpiece, the trilogy A Scots Quair, approached as a strategically integrated volume. This chapter places the book within its contemporary context, using original research to focus authoritatively on the aims and ideals that shaped its social, political, cultural and philosophical achievement. Sunset Song garners greatest attention for its bespoke narrative techniques and for the eclectic deployment of literary influences from Scotland and elsewhere. The nostalgic power and moral impact of this first novel as a compelling bildungsroman and an elegy for the crofting society destroyed by the war feeds into the more overtly political character of the remaining parts of the trilogy. The revolutionary political perspective at the heart of the work is convincingly based on the author’s ready identification with the subaltern classes, marking it as the highest form of littérature engagée. The Gibbon contributions to Scottish Scene are considered in relation to the central achievement of the trilogy, with the Scottish stories replicating the author’s signature style and, in ‘Forsaken’, successfully carrying it to a more sophisticated level of stylistic experimentation. The polemical essays are welcomed for shedding light on the author’s ideas and beliefs, about literature, politics, history and religion.Less

Ezra Pound's American Scenes: Henry James and the Labour of Translation

Daniel Katz

in American Modernism's Expatriate Scene: The Labour of Translation

This chapter stresses the significance of the precedent of Henry James for Ezra Pound's own insufficiently studied attempts at auto-ethnography, and for his sense of American cultural identity. ... More

This chapter stresses the significance of the precedent of Henry James for Ezra Pound's own insufficiently studied attempts at auto-ethnography, and for his sense of American cultural identity. Examining how James's The American Scene provides a model for Pound's ‘Patria Mia’, it concentrates on Pound's qualification of James's importance as lying above all in what he dubs a ‘labour of translation’ in his crucial essay devoted to the author. Pound's 1918 article ‘Henry James’, a long homage to and running commentary on the author, who had died two years previously, is well known. ‘Patria Mia’ echoes The American Scene in various ways – notably, both texts place a good deal of emphasis on New York City and its architecture, burgeoning immigration and the American fascination with business. Already in 1918, Pound saw James's fate as encapsulating the destiny he so actively courted.Less

The Hotel Auteur: The Manager’s Office

Robbie Moore

in Hotel Modernity: Corporate Space in Literature and Film

This chapter follows the rise of the hotel corporation and hotel managerialism from the turn of the twentieth century to the 1930s, through the work of Henry James (The American Scene), Arnold ... More

This chapter follows the rise of the hotel corporation and hotel managerialism from the turn of the twentieth century to the 1930s, through the work of Henry James (The American Scene), Arnold Bennett (The Grand Babylon Hotel and Imperial Palace), Sinclair Lewis (Work of Art), Henry Green (Party Going), and corporate movie studios (BIS and MGM). The chapter starts with the observation that the newly professionalised role of hotel manager gained cultural authority through the rhetoric of scientific management, even as the hotel manager in this period was repeatedly figured as a kind of artist and the hotel as a work of art. Moving from James’s figuration of the Waldorf-Astoria’s management as a shadowy rival author, to Bennett’s and Lewis’s manager-poets of the 1930s, and the managerial eye of MGM’s Grand Hotel, the chapter considers the hotel manager as a classed and gendered fantasy figure of authorial power and omniscience within corporate modernity. Henry Green’s resistance to managerial and narratorial authority in Party Going, set in the near-bankrupt Grosvenor Hotel at the end of the grand hotel era, brings the historical narrative of the book to a close.Less

The Physiology of Sensation and Literary Style: Desperate Remedies and The Rescue

Hugh Epstein

in Hardy, Conrad and the Senses

This chapter pairs two formative, but often disregarded novels, Desperate Remedies and The Rescue, on the basis of their shared interest in sensation. Also showing that sensation is a fundamental ... More

This chapter pairs two formative, but often disregarded novels, Desperate Remedies and The Rescue, on the basis of their shared interest in sensation. Also showing that sensation is a fundamental consideration in contemporary physiology, the chapter explores a correlation between popularised studies of nerve transmission and energy circulation and the way that the two novelists construct scenic events in their fiction. The enforced solipsism which Walter Pater embraces is distinguished from the necessary participation in a medium which the characters in the wider physics of the novels of Hardy and Conrad undergo. Through an examination of a number of highly sensory scenes, both novels are shown to dramatize the threat of passivity and the requirement of activity.Less

The Ascension Scene in the Apse of the Church at Dayr Qubbat al-Hawa: A Comparative Study

Mary Kupelian

in Christianity and Monasticism in Aswan and Nubia

This chapter focuses on the dominant scene that appears in the apse composition of the church of Qubbat al-Hawa at Aswan. It carefully examines this scene and compares it with similar surviving ... More

This chapter focuses on the dominant scene that appears in the apse composition of the church of Qubbat al-Hawa at Aswan. It carefully examines this scene and compares it with similar surviving scenes found in other apse compositions elsewhere. It challenges the widely held view regarding the classification of such a scene and proves that this scene is either an ‘Ascension’ scene or a ‘Second Coming’ scene rather than a ‘Christ in Majesty’ scene as commonly believed.Less

An Unlikely Bohemia

Grace Elizabeth Hale

in Cool Town: How Athens, Georgia, Launched Alternative Music and Changed American Culture

The introduction places the reader in 1980s Athens, Georgia, where young Hale lived. The author shares some of her recollections of the music scene and her ideas about a changing South. People did ... More

The introduction places the reader in 1980s Athens, Georgia, where young Hale lived. The author shares some of her recollections of the music scene and her ideas about a changing South. People did not think of Athens as a special place, and it was often dismissed by outsiders due to regional stereotypes. Hale asks, what makes something or someone cool? What is the relationship between the scene and the mainstream? What constitutes “cultural politics?” What is “Bohemian,” and is it a useful term? Hale then provides a brief summary of bohemia before concluding that the Athens, Georgia scene was one of the earliest, most important, and most lasting sources of the bohemian diaspora.Less

Hunting Divine

Grace Elizabeth Hale

in Cool Town: How Athens, Georgia, Launched Alternative Music and Changed American Culture

The conclusion offers remarks on what happened to the Athens scene, Hale, and its bands in the 1990s. The success of some bands, including R.E.M., meant locals thought they had stopped being ... More

The conclusion offers remarks on what happened to the Athens scene, Hale, and its bands in the 1990s. The success of some bands, including R.E.M., meant locals thought they had stopped being alternative acts. Athens also began to gentrify, and UGA became a much more selective school. The broader culture of Athens changed during these years due, in part, to the role played by bohemians. Athens became more liberal, more open to the LGBTQIA+ community, less white supremacist, and more generous in providing social services. Overall, Athens, and other scattered sites of indie America, played a mostly unacknowledged role in creating a new kind of place-based, cosmopolitan, and forward-looking American culture as well as a renewed interest in the local. Like America, Hale concludes, the Athens scene was a collective creation.Less

Into the Roaring Twenties: Vanity Fair and New Yorker

Robert L. Gambone

in Life on the Press: The Popular Art and Illustrations of George Benjamin Luks

This chapter narrates George Luks’s foray into publications like Vanity Fair and New Yorker. While he was still working at the Verdict, Luks found time to undertake freelance drawings for Broadway ... More

This chapter narrates George Luks’s foray into publications like Vanity Fair and New Yorker. While he was still working at the Verdict, Luks found time to undertake freelance drawings for Broadway Magazine, a popular journal laced with images of leggy chorines along with more staid reviews of dramas and interviews with leading stars. Although he only contributed three drawings, each of these three highlighted a unique aspect of his talent and gave further evidence of his abilities and wide-ranging interests. Among these drawings, the first, Night Scene in Herald Square, Broadway and Thirty-fourth Street (March 1899) remained the most interesting. This was just the beginning. The rest of the chapter narrates the events that transpired and led up to Luks increased interest in modern art and his journey into participating in its world.Less

James: Testimony without Life

Shari Goldberg

in Quiet Testimony: A Theory of Witnessing from Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Although his tendency has not often been taken seriously, Henry James persistently portrays ordinarily inanimate entities—from hotels to corpses to candles—as speaking. This chapter argues that James ... More

Although his tendency has not often been taken seriously, Henry James persistently portrays ordinarily inanimate entities—from hotels to corpses to candles—as speaking. This chapter argues that James inherits Emerson’s assumption that the world testifies, and that he develops a related premise that written images, representations, and metaphors become part of the world of expressive things. James’s images of the dead become, in turn, not simply a way of figuring death, but a conduit that ties dead to living, allowing the dead to participate in the language of life. With readings of The American Scene, The Wings of the Dove, “The Friends of the Friends,” and “The Altar of the Dead,” as well as James’s non-fiction writings on death and life after it, this chapter offers an alternative to the critical tendency to view James as primarily occupied by loss.Less

Introduction: Shared-Separation (Decision, Between, Us)

John Paul Ricco

in The Decision Between Us: Art and Ethics in the Time of Scenes

The Introduction provides an overview of the entire book and each of its chapters through a theoretical articulation of the principal terms of the book's title. In the first part, the conceptual ... More

The Introduction provides an overview of the entire book and each of its chapters through a theoretical articulation of the principal terms of the book's title. In the first part, the conceptual valences of the terms “decision,” “between,” and “us” are deconstructed by locating the force and form of shared-separation at the core of each of them. Next, the book's theorization of the inextricable relation between art and ethics is introduced, along with the post-Duchampian concept of the already-unmade (original to this study). In the third and final section, a philosophical genealogy of the notion/phrase “the time of scenes” is traced from an exchange between French philosophers Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe on the “scene,” back to Aristotle's Poetics. Descriptions of the six chapters of the book, and their relations to each other, are also presented in this section of the Introduction. Finally, Maurice Blanchot is given the last word by way of a quotation from his book, The Infinite Conversation, that provides a rather remarkable condensation of the language with which Ricco himself will theorize incommensurable and neutral forms of aesthetic and ethical interruption and separation, as the time and scene of the decision between us.Less

Picture this: Virginia Woolf in the British Good Housekeeping!? or Moving Picture This: Woolf’s London Essays and the Cinema

Leslie Kathleen Hankins

in Virginia Woolf and Her Female Contemporaries

This chapter assesses the illustrations for Virginia Woolf's London Scene essays as they were first published in the British Good Housekeeping magazine, 1920–32. Are etchings, paintings, or ... More

This chapter assesses the illustrations for Virginia Woolf's London Scene essays as they were first published in the British Good Housekeeping magazine, 1920–32. Are etchings, paintings, or photographs adequate for capturing Woolf's kinetic prose? No, but moving pictures are, such as the Wonderful London and Open Road series of cinema shorts from 1924.Less

Prologue

John Fletcher

in Freud and the Scene of Trauma

The Prologue considers two cases, from Freud’s correspondence with Wilhelm Fliess, of sexual abuse and their consequent symptoms (January 24th and December 22nd 1897) on either side of his ... More

The Prologue considers two cases, from Freud’s correspondence with Wilhelm Fliess, of sexual abuse and their consequent symptoms (January 24th and December 22nd 1897) on either side of his repudiation of is seduction theory (September 21st 1897). It considers especially the December case as the most elaborate presentation and analysis of such material in Freud’s work as a structure of scenic repetition, which compels Freud to re-affirm “the authenticity of infantile trauma” and its transmission in the face of his own previous objections. The Prologue establishes Freud’s concern with the power of scenes and his elaboration of a scenography that maps these scenes in detail.Less

Virginia Woolf and Aldous Huxley in Good Housekeeping Magazine

Saskia McCracken

in The Modern Short Story and Magazine Culture, 1880-1950

In 1931, Virginia Woolf was commissioned to write a series of six articles for Good Housekeeping, a middlebrow women’s magazine, which have typically been read by critics as five essays and a short ... More

In 1931, Virginia Woolf was commissioned to write a series of six articles for Good Housekeeping, a middlebrow women’s magazine, which have typically been read by critics as five essays and a short story. Woolf’s series takes her readers on a tour of the sites of commerce and power in London, from the Thames docks and shops of Oxford Street, to ‘Great Men’s Houses,’ abbeys, cathedrals, and the House of Commons, ending with a ‘Portrait’ of a fictitious Londoner. This chapter has three aims. First, it suggests that Woolf’s Good Housekeeping publications can be read not simply as five essays and a short story, but, considering Woolf’s ethics of the short story, as a series of short stories or, as the magazine editors introduced them, word pictures and scenes. Secondly, this chapter argues that Woolf’s Good Housekeeping series responds to, and resists the Stalinist politics of, Aldous Huxley’s series of four highbrow essays on England, published in Nash’s Pall Mall Magazine. Finally, this chapter analyses a critically neglected short story by Ambrose O’Neill, ‘The Astounding History of Albert Orange’ (February 1932), published in Good Housekeeping, which features both Woolf and Huxley as characters, and which critiques, satirises, and destabilises the boundaries of highbrow literary culture. Thus, the focus turns from highbrow writers’ short stories to a story about highbrow writing, all published in the supposedly middlebrow Good Housekeeping, demonstrating the rich complexity of the magazine, its varied politics, and its generically hybrid publications.Less