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 Saturn

Michael Ward

in Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C. S. Lewis

For the Augustans, Saturn was god of the Golden Age, and in that form he appears in certain of Lewis's early works. Soon, however, Lewis adopted the later Infortuna Major version of Saturn, treating ... More

For the Augustans, Saturn was god of the Golden Age, and in that form he appears in certain of Lewis's early works. Soon, however, Lewis adopted the later Infortuna Major version of Saturn, treating him in scholarship (where he is particularly associated with Donne), poetry, and That Hideous Strength. This grim and sour Saturn, also known as Father Time, provides the donegality of The Last Battle, a story of sorrow, disaster, treachery, coldness, ugliness, and death. But Lewis's cosmos turns out not to be Saturnocentric. For those who become patient of Saturnine constellation, who endure the cry of dereliction and become true contemplatives, there was a road to tread ‘beyond the tower of Kronos’.Less

A London Symphony

David Manning

in Vaughan Williams on Music

The title A London Symphony may suggest to some hearers a descriptive piece, but this is not the intention of the composer. A better title would perhaps be “Symphony by a Londoner,”; that is to say, ... More

The title A London Symphony may suggest to some hearers a descriptive piece, but this is not the intention of the composer. A better title would perhaps be “Symphony by a Londoner,”; that is to say, the life of London has suggested to the composer an attempt at musical expression; but it would be no help to the hearer to describe these in words. The music is intended to be self-expressive, and must stand or fall as “absolute” music. Therefore, if listeners recognize suggestions of such things as the “Westminster Chimes” or the “Lavender Cry,” they are asked to consider these as accidents, not essentials of the music. The work consists of the usual four symphonic movements: Lento, leading to allegro risoluto, Lento, Scherzo (Nocturne), Maestoso alla marcia, leading to Epilogue in which the theme of the opening Lento recurs.Less

Divine Accommodation

David Brown

in Tradition and Imagination: Revelation and Change

Explores how a kenotic understanding of the incarnation might be used to bolster the general argument. If even in the case of christology, there was only a gradual disclosure of who Jesus was, ... More

Explores how a kenotic understanding of the incarnation might be used to bolster the general argument. If even in the case of christology, there was only a gradual disclosure of who Jesus was, particularly in the light of the resurrection, it would seem reasonable to expect a similar pattern of development elsewhere. In terms of Jesus’ perfection, a number of apparent limitations on his imagination are explored, including his attitude to the law, his belief in an imminent eschatology and the cry of dereliction, and a distinction drawn between perfection and sinlessness.Less

Interrogating Tears: Some Uses of “Tag Questions” in a Child‐Protection Helpline

Alexa Hepburn and Jonathan Potter

in Why Do You Ask?: The Function of Questions in Institutional Discourse

This chapter, written by Alexa Hepburn and Jonathan Potter, examines the use of tag questions by child protection officers (CPOs) in calls to a child abuse hotline. Hepburn and Potter find that tag ... More

This chapter, written by Alexa Hepburn and Jonathan Potter, examines the use of tag questions by child protection officers (CPOs) in calls to a child abuse hotline. Hepburn and Potter find that tag questions are particularly common during crying sequences in these calls, that is, when callers are crying and having a difficult time expressing the reasons for their call. CPOs typically adopt a neutral or even skeptical stance with respect to callers and their predicaments, but during crying sequences CPOs “sympathetically acknowledge” the (upset) mental state of the callers. Combined with other features of the CPOs' turn, Hepburn and Potter argue that tag questions during crying sequences have an affiliative function and a weak response requirement. The use of this particular type of question means that callers are not held strongly accountable for answering and are thus encouraged to stay on the phone even if they fail to participate.Less

Accidents Going Somewhere to Happen: African-American Self-Definition at Mid-Century

Steven Belletto

in No Accident, Comrade: Chance and Design in Cold War American Narratives

Beginning with a discussion of Colson Whitehead’s more recent novel The Intuitionist (1999), chapter four covers a range of works, from the most influential African-American novels of mid-century, ... More

Beginning with a discussion of Colson Whitehead’s more recent novel The Intuitionist (1999), chapter four covers a range of works, from the most influential African-American novels of mid-century, Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940) and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), to less frequently discussed works such as Wright’s own second novel, The Outsider (1953), and John A. Williams’ The Man Who Cried I Am! (1967). The chapter demonstrates how African Americans writers dramatized a sense of being caught between the competing systems of control represented by Communism on the one hand, and the promise of American democratic freedom on the other. Tracing an arc from Native Son to The Man Who Cried I Am!, the chapter demonstrates the ever-changing relationship between the individual and political rhetoric by showing how the denial of chance was first attributed to Communists, who in Invisible Man simply want to control African Americans for their own purposes, and then moves finally The Man Who Cried I Am!, which shows that, from a black perspective, American democracy masks a fantasy of complete control.Less

Sound and the City

Emma Dillon

in The Sense of Sound: Musical Meaning in France, 1260-1330

This chapter explores the sound of medieval Paris as a sonic backdrop to the motet. It takes three case studies of representations of the city dating from the late thirteenth and early fourteenth ... More

This chapter explores the sound of medieval Paris as a sonic backdrop to the motet. It takes three case studies of representations of the city dating from the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century: the Vie de Saint-Denis manuscript; Guillot de Paris’s Dit des rues de Paris; Guillaume de Villeneuve’s Crieries de Paris. While previous scholars have focused on the visual representation of the city, this chapter listens to their conjuring of sound. It argues that the hubbub of the marketplace, urban clatter, and sacred chant provide an audible foil to the hubbub of the polytextual motet.Less

Performing Rebellion: Eurydice's Cry in Turkey

Serap Erincin

in Antigone on the Contemporary World Stage

Serap Erincin writes about Sahika Tekand's production Eurydice's Cry (2006), which commented on freedom and human rights in Turkey through a highly circumscribed movement vocabulary. The chorus's ... More

Serap Erincin writes about Sahika Tekand's production Eurydice's Cry (2006), which commented on freedom and human rights in Turkey through a highly circumscribed movement vocabulary. The chorus's movements consisted of a small number of repeated gestures performed at precise moments in response to text, and cued by lighting. The stationary chorus was not able to move at all on its own; their movements were dictated, so to speak, by Creon. As the play went on, the chorus became increasingly affected by Antigone's arguments, and began to take on gestures associated with her character. Thus, Antigone's effect on the chorus was visibly manifested through gesture. Eurydice, a silent character in Sophocles, finally found her voice in this production: her scream shattered the last of Creon's power. This production is ultimately triumphant: Creon is toppled by the collective movements of the chorus, and by the women who speak up.Less

The Narrow Road of Anxiety

Emmanuel Falque

in The Guide to Gethsemane: Anxiety, Suffering, Death

It is not enough just to remain fearful in the face of death, or to draw back before “the cup.” Christ, like all humankind, passed from fear to anxiety. From a recoil before what is imminent (fear), ... More

It is not enough just to remain fearful in the face of death, or to draw back before “the cup.” Christ, like all humankind, passed from fear to anxiety. From a recoil before what is imminent (fear), he goes on to pose the question of nothingness and of the possibility of meaning (anxiety). But he does not remain simply in this position of taking what is human in charge. Far from simply shutting himself up in his anxiety, he addresses the Father in a cry of dereliction. The Son is he who suffers from anxiety and passes it to the Father.Less

Back to Normal: Cultural Work in the Erasure of John Horne Burns

John Ibson

in The Mourning After: Loss and Longing among Midcentury American Men

Disrepute, then obscurity, were the eventual fate of John Horne Burns, despite the considerable acclaim that greeted The Gallery, his first published novel, in 1947. This chapter describes and ... More

Disrepute, then obscurity, were the eventual fate of John Horne Burns, despite the considerable acclaim that greeted The Gallery, his first published novel, in 1947. This chapter describes and interprets how that came about, challenging the conventional narrative regarding Burns: essentially a story of how his talent deteriorated. The Mourning After links the decline in the reputation of John Horne Burns more to postwar America’s irresolution on the issue of men’s intimacy than to a failure of Burns’s talent. Lucifer with a Book and A Cry of Children, the two novels by Burns that followed The Gallery, were not necessarily less artful than their predecessor, but did differ in their setting for male affection and sexual activity: the postwar United States, not Italy during wartime. The Mourning After maintains that the harsh treatment of Burns, who died at only 36 in 1953, was essentially a penalty for his domesticating affection and sex between men and for further developing the penetrating critique of American culture begun in The Gallery. John Horne Burns and his reputation were casualties of the era’s lavender scare, and of his criticizing so harshly basic features of modern American life.Less

Exploring Affiliation in the Reception of Conversational Complaint Stories

Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen

in Emotion in Interaction

This chapter investigates the linguistic resources deployed by recipients of conversational complaint stories to show affiliation (or not) with the teller, affiliation being understood as the display ... More

This chapter investigates the linguistic resources deployed by recipients of conversational complaint stories to show affiliation (or not) with the teller, affiliation being understood as the display of support and endorsement for a conveyed affective stance, here typically anger and/or indignation. Among the verbal means for affiliative reception are claims of understanding, congruent negative assessments and by-proxy justifications, while factual follow-up questions, minimal responses and withholdings are shown to be non-affiliative. As a rule, affiliative verbal devices are accompanied by prosodic matching or upgrading, while non-affiliative ones have prosodic downgrading. The affiliative import of response cries is shown to depend even more heavily on prosodic matching or upgrading, although the transitoriness of prosody makes verbal reinforcement a desideratum. All in all, the data discussed here present a complex picture of what it takes to come across as affiliative in response to a conversational complaint story, but one not lacking in systematicity.Less

Being Equivocal: Affective Responses Left Unspecified

Auli Hakulinen and Marja-Leena Sorjonen

in Emotion in Interaction

This chapter explores the Finnish expression /voi että/, which is used as a response cry. It lacks referential meaning but is not devoid of meaning: it has become conventionalized as an index of ... More

This chapter explores the Finnish expression /voi että/, which is used as a response cry. It lacks referential meaning but is not devoid of meaning: it has become conventionalized as an index of affect display. /Voi että/ is part of a larger paradigm of phrasal affective responses. It is the most “open” one initiated with the interjection /voi/: there is no characterizing element but the interjection is followed by /että/, used elsewhere e.g. as a subordinating connective (’that’). This response merely voices recognition of the co-participant’s prior turn as one that has made an affective response relevant and that displays attunement to that affect. The chapter argues that by deploying a response type that expresses an affective stance but does not make the stance lexically explicit, the recipient orients to the ambivalence of the sequential implications and/or affective character of the prior talk.Less

Crying and Crying Responses

Alexa Hepburn and Jonathan Potter

in Emotion in Interaction

This chapter focuses on crying as an interactional phenomenon. It overviews traditional work on crying, highlighting its limitations, and contrasts an interactional approach illustrated with material ... More

This chapter focuses on crying as an interactional phenomenon. It overviews traditional work on crying, highlighting its limitations, and contrasts an interactional approach illustrated with material from both mundane and institutional telephone calls. Crying on the telephone is characterised in terms of a collection of loosely associated and sometimes escalating practices: silences, sniffs, elevated pitch, tremulous or creaky delivery, reduced volume, increased aspiration and sobbing. This chapter documents the delicate interactional challenges involved in recognizing and responding to crying, and how these are fitted to the ongoing projects of the participants. The use of sympathy tokens, sympathetically inflected news receipts and turns that normalize the actions of the person crying are common. The complex practice of displaying empathy is discussed and its procedural and epistemic aspects highlighted.Less

Too many tears…

Ad Vingerhoets

in Why Only Humans Weep: Unravelling the mysteries of tears

This chapter specifically focuses on brain disorders and crying. A significant minority of patients with brain disorders (e.g., stroke, dementia, MS, ALS, etc.) suffers from what is called ... More

This chapter specifically focuses on brain disorders and crying. A significant minority of patients with brain disorders (e.g., stroke, dementia, MS, ALS, etc.) suffers from what is called pathological crying (or laughing). This term refers to the occurrence of crying (or laughing) spells, without any apparent reason. Some neurologists assert that there is absolutely no affect — that it is a mere motoric reaction, whereas others argue that the crying threshold is extremely low, but that there is always a, not always easily identifiable, trigger. The chapter criticizes the use of the term ‘pathological’ because this term can only be used, when one has sufficient knowledge about ‘normal’ crying and because neurologist seem to be insufficiently aware of the fact that excessive crying can also be observed in non-neurological serious diseases (heart infarction, cancer), where it reflects the suffering and struggling with the major losses. There is further attention to the social consequences of the condition and which possibilities for treatment exist.Less

The social effects of tears

Ad Vingerhoets

in Why Only Humans Weep: Unravelling the mysteries of tears

This chapter addresses how others react to tears and crying. These reactions of others can be studied at different levels and in different ways. For example, some studies have investigated brain ... More

This chapter addresses how others react to tears and crying. These reactions of others can be studied at different levels and in different ways. For example, some studies have investigated brain responses and physiological reactions to crying, whereas others have focused on feelings in the observer, his or her perceptions, and how he or she behaves. Although there is certainly evidence that tears seems to elicit social support and may reduce aggression, this is certainly not the complete story. Crying infants are at increased risk of physical abuse, in children it may elicit bullying, and the image of celebrities may be seriously damaged by public crying. This is why this chapter calls for an approach that takes into account the specific context, the perceived appropriateness of crying, how one cries, the mutual relationship between crier and observer, and further characteristics of the observer. Since no studies until now have adopted this approach, it is too early to draw any definitive conclusions, but anecdotal evidence suggests that each of these factors may be considered as a co-determinant of crying.Less

An Audible World

Hugh Epstein

in Hardy, Conrad and the Senses

The chapter opens by contrasting the human capacities for audition as opposed to vision, and the qualities conveyed by sound as opposed to those by light. Despite the general acceptance of wave ... More

The chapter opens by contrasting the human capacities for audition as opposed to vision, and the qualities conveyed by sound as opposed to those by light. Despite the general acceptance of wave theory, from the nineteenth century through to today issues of auditory location, transmission and reception remain contested. The ‘auditory scene analysis’ conducted by the novels in this study sees/hears them as participating in this ontological and epistemological uncertainty. Both The Return of the Native and ‘Heart of Darkness’ powerfully evoke densely enveloping closed systems that are examined in terms of their circulating sounds, ‘acoustic pictures’ raised upon the air by sighs in Hardy and whispers in Conrad. Whilst the discussion of ‘Heart of Darkness’ shows that it is an individual voice, and particularly its ‘cry’, which provides a guiding thread for Marlow, when the chapter moves on to sound in Nostromo it is the ambient noise of a historically evolving modernity that carries the theme of the reach of ‘material interests’. Sounds, conceived as units of shock, provide the agitated fabric of this novel of jolts and collisions.Less

Storytelling Means Dissolving Relations

Alexander Kluge

Richard Langston (ed.)

in Difference and Orientation: An Alexander Kluge Reader

This chapter explores the dialogue between Piero Salabè and Alexander Kluge wherein they talked about Kluge's book Tür an Tür mit einem anderen Leben (Next Door to Another Life, 2006). Kluge claims ... More

This chapter explores the dialogue between Piero Salabè and Alexander Kluge wherein they talked about Kluge's book Tür an Tür mit einem anderen Leben (Next Door to Another Life, 2006). Kluge claims that there are always two aspects to sadness: it isolates, but it can also bring people in contact with one another. Sadness and crying are capable of dissolving hardened relations. When asked whether he believes in progress, Kluge answered that he does not believe in linear progress because for him “the past is always coming at us from the future.” Instead, he believes in circular movement like those in whirlpools. The concept of enlightenment must begin with the real phenomenon that time does not actually pass. Kluge says that “we must continue to tell stories about problems in the world, and with storytelling we must also push back against these problems that people fail to respect.” Storytelling means dissolving in the literal sense of “analyzing.” Kluge believes that this is the great, unfinished project of enlightenment. Salabè and Kluge also discusses the individual's capacity for differentiation.Less

Ventriloquism, Kidnapping and the Carnivalesque in Marisol’s Tómbola¹

Erin K. Hogan

in The Two cines con niño: Genre and the Child Protagonist in Over Fifty Years of Spanish Film (1955-2010)

Chapter Three further elaborates ventriloquism as, firstly, an expression of Francoist anxiety of subaltern rebellion by children and colonial subjects and, secondly, as a tool for the transmission ... More

Chapter Three further elaborates ventriloquism as, firstly, an expression of Francoist anxiety of subaltern rebellion by children and colonial subjects and, secondly, as a tool for the transmission of traditional gender roles. Tómbola (Lucía 1962) is a retelling of Aesop’s ‘The Boy Who Cried Wolf’ with a sinister subtext that reveals the ideological function of the cine con niño and Francoism’s political use of children, both of which reverberate extra-diegetically in the biography of its star Marisol (Pepa Flores). This chapter explores the appropriative ventriloquism in the abduction of Marisol’s voice and body, a result of her short-lived carnivalesque resistance, followed by Pepa Flores’ star-text and its portrayal in a 2009 biopic mini-series. Marisol’s paternalism towards her Spanish-African best friend, likely from the territory of Equatorial Guinea, supports an allegorical analysis of the biopolitics of Spanish colonialism in Africa. The Two cines understands colonialism as another form of appropriation; Marisol’s sidekick María Belén is, effectively, the dummy’s dummy.Less

Reverie

Marilyn Ann Moss

in Raoul Walsh: The True Adventures of Hollywood's Legendary Director

Walsh's 1950s films reveal his psychology, although now filtered through a somewhat different lens—contemplative, more tuned in to his characters' inner lives. They may not reveal themselves verbally ... More

Walsh's 1950s films reveal his psychology, although now filtered through a somewhat different lens—contemplative, more tuned in to his characters' inner lives. They may not reveal themselves verbally at such an intense speed; now they move more slowly, act more deliberately, are far more meditative before acting than their predecessors—as if Walsh replicates in them the way he now measures and contemplates his own life, his own actions in advancing age. Walsh signed a one-picture deal with Columbia Studios to direct Gun Fury. A week after its release he was already thinking about another picture that he had signed on for at Warner Bros.: Battle Cry. It is a smorgasbord of personalities and dramatic events that intersect in 1942 as a group of young marines joins up to go into battle. Walsh also signed with Fox in February 1954 to direct his next picture, the western story The Tall Men. A sense of reverie seems to have settled on Clark Gable, and Walsh sees it.Less