Category Archives: Essays

Children’s Opera as Political Education

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Brecht for Children: Shaping the Ideal GDR Citizen Through Opera Education

by Anicia Timberlake

The essay begins:

In the spring of 1969, students from the fifth through seventh grades at the Käthe Kollwitz Secondary School of Greifswald took the stage to perform the new children’s opera The Nightingale, an adaptation of the fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen. The performance was well received: reviewer Gudrun Hillemann praised the music’s “simple melodic and memorable rhythmic Gestalt” and concluded that, overall, “theatrical performance with music is excellently suited for aesthetic education and for supporting the artistic [musisch] climate at a school.” Although the piece was not new to local music circles, Manfred Vetter, a professor at the Institute for Music Education in Greifswald, raised a stink a few days after the secondary-school performance. How was it possible that the librettist Hella Brock, a progressive socialist, a member of the Socialist Unity Party, and Vetter’s own colleague at the institute, had chosen a fairy tale in which an emperor, the head of a feudal society, was moved—and redeemed—by music? The opera portrayed the emperor far too sympathetically and conveyed the wrong idea about the progress of history. When other faculty members endorsed Vetter’s opinion, further performances of the opera were canceled. Several months later, after the summer vacation, the secretary of the local party organization announced that the decision had been revoked, and the opera could be performed again. But it was too late: the children were half a year older, their voices had begun to change, and they had already put the disappointment of the canceled performance behind them. Brock suffered a nervous breakdown as a result of the incident and in 1972 left Greifswald to become a professor at the Karl Marx University, Leipzig.

kurt-schwaen-the-horatians-and-the-curiatiansOn one level, this was simply an example in miniature of the kind of late-stage attack common in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), as well as in the Soviet Union. Performances often made it through planning and rehearsals only to be savaged after the premiere. The classic Soviet example is Dmitry Shostakovich’s immensely successful opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, which premiered in January 1934 and was denounced by Stalin two years later. Similarly, Bertolt Brecht and Paul Dessau’s opera The Trial of Lucullus was suppressed on ideological grounds in the GDR in 1951 due to accusations of musical “formalism.” Where these famous cases demonstrate the arbitrary cruelty of official censorship, the silencing of The Nightingale shows how an individual, supposedly acting in the interests of the state, could transmute personal convictions about ideology and representation into official dictates on cultural policy. But even more, Vetter’s attack against a children’s opera—surely the most harmless and charming of performances—reveals the unsteady foundations of GDR citizen formation through music education. If we look a little more closely at the educational theories and practices that underpinned this incident, the idea of a coherent or unified GDR cultural and educational policy begins to unravel in disorienting and fascinating ways. In this article, I focus on children’s operas as a site of political education. The surviving documentation around the operas for children created and performed between 1950 and 1979, and policies and debates on children’s music education more generally, reveal considerable confusion about how best to mobilize German cultural heritage for a socialist purpose. These sources show educators drawing from diverse prewar pedagogical traditions to develop techniques they employed in addition to those that state policy had mandated for use in schools. As we shall see in the article’s final sections, Brechtian dramatic theory was an important element of these performances, and the study of the rehearsal process for a Brecht Lehrstück with which this article concludes shows how the theory of estrangement sometimes proved irreconcilable with older convictions about how children felt, moved, and behaved. What is more, the vicissitudes of pedagogy and rehearsal in the staging of Brecht’s The Horatians and the Curiatians make a revealing case study of what East German musicians, educators, and performers thought Brecht’s (vexed concept of) gestus actually was, and how it might function through music. Continue reading …

East German music educators developed new children’s operas on the model of Brechtian Lehrstücke to teach critical, “dialectical” thinking, a skill they considered essential for young socialists. This essay examines how the operas offered an alternative political education to the GDR’s official program of state-loyal patriotism and explores the conflicts that arose when Brecht’s theories of gestus and estrangement came into contact with the fairy tale tradition long thought to be the center of German children’s culture.

ANICIA TIMBERLAKE works on the politics of children’s music education in the German Democratic Republic. She is a C3: Creating Connections Consortium Postdoctoral Fellow at Williams College.

Quirk Historicism: A Special Forum, Representations 132

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In the wake of New Historicism, eight music scholars reflect on the recent tendency to use objets trouvés and historical micronarratives for interpretation. The editors of the forum, Nicholas Mathew and Mary Ann Smart, introduce the thread of the quirk historicist phenomenon and contemplate its implications.

ELEPHANTS IN THE MUSIC ROOM: THE FUTURE OF QUIRK HISTORICISM

This introduction begins (free download):

hans-and-maguerite

Jean Pierre Louis Laurent Houël: ‘‘Les eléphants représentes dans l’instant de premières caresses qu’ils se sont faites après qu’on leur a fait entendre de la musique,” in Histoire Naturelle des deux Elephants, male et femelle, du Muséum de Paris (Paris, 1803).

Despite a suffix that suggests kinship with taxonomic enterprises such as zoology or the earliest phases of anthropology, musicology may rank as one of the most permissive of humanistic fields. In journals and at conferences, philological research and source studies rub shoulders with work on the philosophy of music, close readings, reception history, and microhistory. Yet, as in literary studies, one central question has troubled the field for at least a quarter-century: that of the status of the “texts” (musical works, as notated or performed) whose interpretation and explanation traditionally anchored much musicological writing. As both the canon of works that merited this type of attention and the analytical tools used to explicate them were destabilized, scholarly energies turned toward narrating historical accounts of musical environments. In the wake of this suspicion of close reading, many musicologists became collectors of curiosities, assembling and scrutinizing disparate objects, events, and documents in order to understand how past communities of listeners and practitioners used music, why they created and cared about the kinds of music they did.

Before this collecting impulse took hold, history often meant “context.” Musical works could be enriched, but at the same time shown to be functional and contingent, by accounts that placed them in ready-made historical frames supplied by the locations in which art was produced or by big-picture histories—the French Revolution, the Third Reich, the Napoleonic Wars. And like most such cross-disciplinary borrowings, the imported concepts were sometimes flattened out, as if they had passed through the brain’s “abstract thought” region, as imagined in the Pixar movie Inside Out. As the kinds of history practiced by music historians have become more fine-grained and more material, there is a temptation to look down on earlier approaches as schematic or simplistic; but it is worth remembering that those contextual dyads (“music and . . . ”) were welcome and necessary excuses to talk about music—even instrumental music, symphonies and the like—in relation to categories such as gender, race, and nation, whose admission into musicological thought was long overdue.

Once musicologists began to take notice of New Historicism, any such tidy or schematic versions of history quickly fell by the wayside. New Historicism’s trademark deployment of the anecdote upended the apparent clarity and coherence of context and blurred the distinction between texts and contexts, dispersing both into more complex discursive constellations. The kinds of historical material potentially available to the music scholar thus became nearly endless, the relevance of any particular detail depending mainly on the ingenuity and persuasive gifts of the writer. Such a précis could, with a few adjustments, apply to almost any humanistic discipline in the 1990s and 2000s. But in musicology, the objets trouvés and historical micronarratives that once obediently fell into contextual patterns or acted as isolated anecdotes have staged a kind of mutiny, multiplying in the service of a narrative logic that overwhelms and even supplants any larger critical goals. It is this tendency that we are calling quirk historicism. Continue reading … (free download)

FORUM CONTENTS

JAMES Q. DAVIES
On Being Moved/Against Objectivity

EMILY I. DOLAN
Musicology in the Garden

ELLEN LOCKHART
Pygmalion and the Music of Mere Interest

AOIFE MONKS
Bad Art, Quirky Modernism

BENJAMIN PIEKUT
Pigeons

BENJAMIN WALTON
Quirk Shame

NICHOLAS MATHEW is Associate Professor of Music at the University of California,  Berkeley. He is the author of Political Beethoven (Cambridge, 2013) and co-editor, with Benjamin Walton, of the collection The Invention of Beethoven and Rossini.

MARY ANN SMART also teaches in the Music Department of UC Berkeley. She is the author of Mimomania: Music and Gesture in Nineteenth-Century Opera and editor of Siren Songs: Representations of Gender and Sexuality in Opera. Her new book, Waiting for Verdi, will be published by the University of California Press in 2016.

Nietzsche on Education

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How the Philologist Became a Physician of Modernity: Nietzsche’s Lectures on German Education

by Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon

The essay begins:

In January of 1869, Friedrich Nietzsche was offered a peach of a job—a professorship in classical philology at the University of Basel. Nietzsche was just twenty-four and far from completing his dissertation, but the university’s standards for employment were looser than those of its German counterparts. Nietzsche was delighted, so much so that upon learning the good news, he broke into song: he spent the rest of the day singing melodies from Tannhäuser, his favorite opera. The position, to be sure, had what some scholars might have considered a drawback. On top of teaching eight hours a week at the University, Nietzsche would be required to give an additional six hours of instruction at a local Gymnasium But this wouldn’t be a problem, Nietzsche had told his Doktorvater, Friedrich Ritschl, one of Germany’s most renowned classicists. Ritschl passed that message on to the hiring committee, along with his imprimatur, and the appointment was made.

nietzsche-musicWhen Nietzsche set off for Basel, then, Ritschl likely felt confident that he had helped launch another brilliant academic career. Yet only a year later, Nietzsche had begun to move away from the kind of work—studies of Diogenes Laërtius, contributions to an Aeschylus lexicon, analyses of Roman and Greek meter—that had so enthused his mentor, prompting him to tout Nietzsche as the most precocious student he had ever seen. Nietzsche had also begun to show signs of deep disillusionment. Indeed, he pledged to a friend that he would “publicly expose” the whole Prussian system of education.

Nietzsche soon made good on his promise through a series of lectures titled On the Future of Our Educational Institutions, which were held at Basel’s city museum between January and March of 1872. In these presentations, Nietzsche took aim at all of Germany’s chief institutions of postprimary learning: the Realschule, the Gymnasium, and the university. He also attacked individual academic specializations, including his own field. Philology, he maintained, was both a key symptom and a cause of a larger process of cultural decline. Nietzsche’s Basel lectures are notable for a number of reasons, including the new urgency and depth gained by Nietzsche’s early reckoning with his discipline and the German educational system as a whole. When situated within the conditions and debates to which they respond, the lectures reveal how Nietzsche the philologist became the physician of modernity and its ills. Continue reading …

This article makes the case that the lecture series On the Future of Our Educational Institutions, which Friedrich Nietzsche held in 1872 and scholars have long neglected, marks a crucial point in the development of the philosopher’s outlook. In doing so, the article shows that Nietzsche’s lectures resonate in suggestive ways with twenty-first-century debates about higher education.

PAUL REITTER is the director of the Humanities Institute at Ohio State University, where he also teaches in the German Department. His most recent book is Bambi’s Jewish Roots and Other Essays on German-Jewish Culture (Bloomsbury, 2015).

CHAD WELLMON is an associate Professor of German at the University of Virginia and author, most recently, of Organizing Enlightenment: Information Overload and the Invention of the Modern Research University (Johns Hopkins, 2015). His  “Touching Books: Diderot, Novalis, and the Encyclopedia of the Future” appeared in Representations 114 (Spring 2011).

James Davies presents “Romantic Anatomies of Performance”

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Davies_book_Oct_chatJames Q. Davies, Associate Professor of Music Scholarship at UC Berkeley, will present a talk at UC Berkeley entitled “Romantic Anatomies of Performance.” Part of the Berkeley Book Chats series sponsored by the Townsend Center for the Humanities, the event will take place on Wednesday, October 14, from noon to 1pm in the Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall.

Davies’s essay, “On Being Moved/Against Objectivity,” is forthcoming in Representations 132. Part of a special forum on “Quirk Historicism,” the essay identifies the ‘‘soft modernist’’ provenance of recent scholarship through an account of musical rocks named and mythologized in the nineteenth century.

 

Rebel Animals: John Gower’s Visio Anglie

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Gower and the Peasants’ Revolt

by Ian Cornelius

 

The essay begins:

In June of 1381 the English government briefly lost control of significant portions of the realm. Sometimes called the Peasants’ Revolt, this concatenation of local insurrections was the largest rebellion of unenfranchised people in medieval England. It began as a tax rebellion: the first violent incident was against a royal commission investigating tax evasion in Essex and seeking to raise missing sums. In the following days, coalitions of peasants, laborers, and artisans in towns and villages across southeastern England organized themselves into a new authority directly opposed to the authority of the landlords and royal government. Properties belonging to the king’s hated councilors were destroyed; legal documents were seized from landlords and county officers, carried to town squares, and publicly burned; prisons were broken open and prisoners released. Many of the insurgents’ victims were directly involved in tax collection; others were well known as prominent officials of the county government. As news of the insurrection spread to neighboring counties, so too did insurrection itself. Meanwhile, detachments from Kent and Essex converged on London, where they hoped to present their grievances to the young king. When Richard retreated into the Tower and declined to hear the accusations against his councilors, the rebels struck out on their own. On June 14, at Tower Hill, the king’s chancellor and his treasurer were summarily executed as traitors to the realm. The murder of these two men belonged to the same series as the first events of the rising: the chancellor had presented the government’s enormous subsidy request at the Northampton Parliament the previous November; the treasurer had presided over collection of the tax. However, motives and grievances had now generalized well beyond matters of taxation. The demands that the rebels made to the bunkered king in London included regularization of terms of land tenure throughout the realm, removal of protective restrictions on the sale of agricultural produce, removal of the statutory prohibitions against free negotiation of wages, and abolition of serfdom.

The insurrection was broken almost as quickly as it arose, though with greater loss of life. Soon afterwards, the London poet John Gower wrote a new poem. A lawyer and rentier, Gower was distinguished from the principal targets of the rebels’ violence by his physical remove from the peasants whose surplus he extracted, and by his apparent abstention from government service. In 1381, Gower may already have been living in the Augustine priory of St. Mary Overie, situated at the southern end of London Bridge, over which the Kentish rebels crossed into the city on June 13. Gower’s poem on these events is named Visio Anglie in recent scholarship. It joins the Anonimalle Chronicle, the Westminster Chronicle, and the chronicle histories of Thomas Walsingham, Henry Knighton, and Jean Froissart as the most substantial literary treatments of the largest popular rebellion in premodern England. Visio Anglie is distinguished from these chronicles, however, by Gower’s unbridled fictive imagination, beside which the inventions of Walsingham and Froissart appear tame. In a different way, the fictive imagination of this poem distinguishes it from Gower’s own previous compositions. The poem on the rising is a vertiginous dream vision in Latin elegiac couplets. At the beginning, the Gower persona imagines he has taken a stroll into the fields to collect flowers on a pleasant summer day. He reaches the green space of aristocratic pleasure, only to find that “diverse hostile types of ordinary people were loitering in the fields in innumerable bands” (Diuersas plebis sortes vulgaris iniquas / Innumeris turmis ire per arua vagas). The dreamer is dazzled by fear and contempt. God’s curse falls upon the ordinary people and transforms them into animals. A second divine intervention causes each of the animals to abandon its own nature and take on the most homicidal qualities of wild, mythical, and scriptural beasts. They viciously presume to the status of noble animals, that is, of animals cultivated by nobility. They become fire-breathing, God-denying, property-thieving monsters. The rebel-animal-monsters unite under the leadership of a garrulous jay (the rebel leader Wat Tyler in Gower’s roman à clef) and storm the walls of Troy (that is, London). The great city is betrayed; chaos and devastation ensue. The defeated aristocrats entrust themselves to a ship representing the Tower of London. It floats out to sea, now pursued by the rebellion in the form of an ocean gale. Against that final incarnation of rebellion all defenses are futile, excepting only prayer.

194xpkry7xofhjpg As even this brief sketch demonstrates, Visio Anglie delivers an intoxicating blend of topicality and fictionality. Modern understanding of the poem has been advanced by a distinguished series of studies bearing on three interrelated compositional features. First, Gower’s depiction of rebels as deranged beasts has received astute commentary, clarifying the ideological work performed in that representational choice. The poet lingers over the braying, mooing, grunting, barking, howling, and screeching of the assembled rebel-animals (Visio, 799–830); he renders their political intentions utterly incoherent. A second node of scholarship, subtly qualifying the first, has attended to Gower’s borrowings from earlier Latin poetry. Gower routinely derived metrical phrases and whole lines from earlier poetry, especially Ovid. The poem is a dense texture of borrowed and repurposed language. Once scorned as “school-boy plagiarism,” these procedures are now understood to activate alternate and expanded contexts for the poem’s reported action. The metamorphosis of persons into beasts remains a judgment about the character of the rebels; but attendant allusions to Ovid’s Metamorphoses (inter alia) displace the whole represented action into a literary domain. The storehouse of Latin poetry accordingly attains an unlikely importance: it figures in Gower’s poem as the mental equipment necessary for a proper understanding of contemporary events. The result is that the insurgents are again denied any possibility of self-understanding: for them, meaning is simply foreclosed. More significantly, Gower’s citational procedures would seem to place limiting conditions on even the most qualified readers. The meaning of the rising will emerge only through and within an exercise in literary interpretation. Any such exercise would presumably need to account for the poem’s violent transgressions of literary decorum as well, and this brings us to the third major line of inquiry in recent scholarship. Thomme, Symme, Bette, and Iakke do not belong in a Latin poem in classical measures; their appearance in this one (Visio, 783–92) expresses, at the level of prosody, the offense committed by English laborers who forced their way into the homes and into the thoughts of their social superiors in June of 1381. The poem’s mash-up of earlier Latin poetry; its surrealistic shifts in character, setting, and generic mode; its extravagant mélange of Christian and pagan allusion; and even the first-person speaker’s bathetic indignity may all be read along similar lines: rarefied literary language resorts to self-harm at the limits of representation. Continue reading …

This essay examines the moral and political thought of John Gower’s poem on the English Rising of 1381, situating it within three contrastive fields: Gower’s moral project, his Virgilian intertext, and the practices of moral community employed by the rebels of 1381.

IAN CORNELIUS is Assistant Professor of English at Yale University. His work is focused on the literature and culture of late medieval England.

The Shape of the Modern Week

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Hebdomadal Form: Diaries, News, and the Shape of the Modern Week

by David Henkin

The essay begins:

On a September Saturday in 1846, Alabama medical student Charles Hentz scrambled to account for lost time in his diary. “As I have been negligent for another week, in keeping up my journal,” he wrote, he resolved to revisit the events of the past seven days. “I must make a kind of Hebdomary.” The following May, Hentz again referred to his “regular hebdomary,” excusing his failure to live up to the diary-keeping habits he had undertaken a year earlier with a distinctive lexical diversion and a common practical refrain. “So many things occupy me during the week, that I find it impossible to be regular in my journal.” Hentz was hardly alone among nineteenth-century American diarists in noting that weekly intervals often separated the entries in a book defined around the norm of daily regularity. The diary genre reckoned and homogenized days, but users habitually inscribed additional temporal patterns in their pages.

diaryThe particular weekly pattern that Hentz observed in his own handling of the diary impulse evokes a familiar modern temporality of retrospective accounting. It is utterly commonplace to consider the week in review, to take stock of our lives in seven-day inventories. But the power of that accounting practice reflects a larger and generally overlooked development in the history of timekeeping in the West over the past few centuries. As saints’ days, market days, informal festivity, seasonal rhythms, and other systems and strategies of calendrical differentiation declined in Western Europe, North America, and elsewhere, the regularity of the seven-day week became more conspicuous.

The historical significance of this development remains clouded by the week’s status as an anomalous institution in the history of modern time reckoning. The week is in one sense an ancient regime, often invoked by traditional cultural critics as a bulwark against the encroachments of modernity. But it is also a mechanical tracking device, indifferent to natural rhythms, that has proven especially congenial to market relations, capitalist reorganization of labor, the demands of long-distance communication, and the cultural logics of impersonal society—including the oft-cited homogeneity of time associated with the industrial era. The ostensibly homogeneous days of industrializing America, for example, conformed to a rigorously observed seven-day cycle and were marked in complex ways by their placement in that cycle. Even as the image of daily repetition enshrined itself in modern consciousness as a compelling symbol of ordinary activity and uneventful occurrence (expressed in metaphorical invocations of the quotidian and the everyday), seven-day rhythms and seven-day intervals helped organize the modern regime of the day. Modern weekly rhythms are complex historical artifacts, rooted in long histories of liturgy and labor. But they are also entrained in literary practice and encoded in texts. It is worth considering how proliferating habits of reading and writing may have helped confer weekly form upon daily order. Continue reading …

The spread and intensification of seven-day regimes remains a remarkable and understudied feature of the making of modernity. This essay explores the role of written form in that historical process in the United States during the first half of the nineteenth century, arguing that diaries and newspapers, two literary genres associated with the construction of the day as a measure of temporal significance, also registered and reinforced awareness of the week as a structuring rhythm in ordinary life.

DAVID HENKIN, Professor of History at UC Berkeley, is the author of City Reading, The Postal Age, and (with Rebecca McLennan) Becoming America.

From Death Mask to Portrait Bust

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A Case of Corporate Identity: The Multiplied Face of Saint Antonino of Florence

by Urte Krass

The essay begins:

Strolling through an Italian diocesan museum or an exhibition on the art of the Italian Renaissance, a visitor will inevitably encounter many images of saints, alone or in groups, presenting themselves and their attributes to viewers inside and outside the picture within which they are framed. After a while, any reasonably observant viewer will notice that there is one face that stands out from the crowd of painted saints: that of Saint Bernardino of Siena, the Franciscan preacher and vicar general who died in 1444 and was canonized only six years later. One of the innumerable examples of this uniquely recognizable face is Antonio Colantonio’s Saint Francis Giving the Rule to His Disciples in the Museo di Capodimonte in Naples (fig. 1). In the group of men on the left, the saints have been given individual faces by the careful artist. But Bernardino’s face seems markedly different; it seems to stem from our own world, whereas the individualization of the neighboring saints reminds us more of faces in the medieval sample books used in workshops. The beholder’s gaze is compelled by Bernardino’s authentic, emaciated, recognizable features, which are in stark contrast to the other saints’ obviously fictive faces.

KrassPrintFig1

Figure 1

Bernardino of Siena is the first saint whose face, that is, its recognizable physiognomy, is his most important attribute, and the first saint who, thus, can always be recognized even without other identifying characteristics. This is explained mainly by the fact that he was the first Christian saint whose death mask left its traces in further representations of him. Painters and sculptors would copy this mask when they wanted to represent the venerated mendicant friar. As a result, in fifteenth-century Italy, a new visual medium was invented for representing the saints: the veristic saint’s portrait bust, modeled after—or even directly from—the death mask. Continue reading …

This article focuses on the development of portrait busts of saints beginning in the early Renaissance. The category of the portrait bust, which emerged slightly before 1440, is characterized by its reference to—and at times even integration of—the death mask of the recently deceased saint. As such, these images must be seen in close relation to traditional head and bust reliquaries. The particular group of busts showing the features of the Florentine archbishop Antonino Pierozzi is here analyzed through hitherto obscure written sources, and the proliferation of Pierozzi’s bust is then related to that of other saints.

URTE KRASS works as Assistant Professor at the Institute for Art History of the Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich. Her research focuses on saints’ images from icon to photography, on early artistic theory in the Italian novelle of the fourteenth century, and, more recently, on the political use of images in Portugal and its overseas empire in the early modern period.

 

Novel Ethics

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Reflexive Realism and Kinetic Ethics: The Case of Murakami Haruki’s 1Q84

by Christopher Weinberger

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The essay begins:

In Anglo-European scholarship, theories of ethics in the novel over the last hundred years have drawn predominantly on the work of realist writers who, like Henry James (1843–1916) and Joseph Conrad (1857–1924), envelop verisimilar worlds in a literary haze, the multivalent ethos of which promises to resolve into real-life ethics under the right conceptual pressure. In Japanese scholarship, ethical criticism has similarly favored realist texts, bringing cultural studies approaches to the work of writers … who experiment with the capacity of literary language to represent the ambivalence and complexity of contemporaneous social experience. Despite methodological differences, ethical criticism in both Anglo-European and Japanese traditions of the novel has traditionally emphasized the mimetic capacity of the genre. This proclivity, in combination with the relative stagnation of studies on metafiction, has prevented recognition of an ethically driven reflexivity in the work of Murakami Haruki (1949–) and others.

Murakami has won international audiences and prizes, including the Jerusalem Prize and the Franz Kafka Prize, for novels describing how immersion in fictional worlds transforms the lives of characters. The Japanese literary community (bundan), however, has severely critiqued the ethics of his writing. Continue reading …

The recent metafictional novel 1Q84, by Japanese writer Murakami Haruki, has come under fire from literary critics for its apparent solipsism and misogyny. This essay argues that the novel makes a counterintuitive case for the continued relevance of novel ethics by pointing to the very real pressures that manifestly fictional beings—never mistaken for autonomous others and therefore never fully apprehensible as objects of empathetic identification—can place on characters and readers.

CHRISTOPHER WEINBERGER is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Comparative and World Literature at San Francisco State University. He is currently finishing a book manuscript, Triangulating an Ethos: Ethics of Self-Consciousness in Modern Japanese Prose Fiction. The manuscript examines formal experimentation, especially reflexive practices of self-critique, in Japanese prose fiction from the turn of the twentieth century in order to address critical issues in contemporary theories of novel ethics.

Representations essay awarded Donald Gray Prize

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Cannon+Schmitt_photo

Congratulations to Cannon Schmitt, Professor of English at the University of Toronto, who has received the Donald Gray Prize for best essay published in the field of Victorian Studies. The essay, “Technical Maturity in Robert Louis Stevenson,” appeared in “Denotatively, Technically, Literally,” a special issue of Representations 125 (Winter 2014).

Technical language in novels, rare in itself, is still more rarely interpreted. Focusing on Robert Louis Stevenson’s bildungsromans, in this essay Cannon Schmitt argues that a technical maritime lexicon marks their protagonists’ accession to maturity. But that lexicon and the love for the world it attests to and demands also forces a redefinition of what it means to be mature, offering an open, adventurous, never-to-be completed Bildung that refuses the stasis of marriage or a settled profession.

schmitt_bellrock500

“Progress of the Bell Rock Works,” engraving by William Miller, Figure ix, An Account of the Bell Rock Lighthouse by Robert Stevenson (Edinburgh and London, 1824)

The Donald Gray Prize is awarded annually by the North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA). The prize has previously been awarded to other Representations articles, including Sue Zemka’s “The Death of Nancy ‘Sikes’” (2010), Sarah Winter’s “Darwin’s Saussure: Biosemiotics and Race in Expression” (2009), Andrew Miller’s “Lives Unled in Victorian Fiction” (2007), and Herbert Tucker’s “Rossetti’s Goblin Marketing: Sweet to Tongue and Sound to Eye” (2003).

History’s Skin: Bazin and Archival Film

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Film as the “Skin of History”: André Bazin and the Specter of the Archive and Death in Nicole Védrès’s Paris 1900 (1947)

by Paula Amad

The essay begins:

About two thirds of the way through Nicole Védrès’s Paris 1900 (1947), a feature-length documentary that combines fragments of nonfiction and fiction footage with a view to delivering a new, cinematic type of history, an old newsreel sequence violently interrupts the otherwise sedate, audiovisual chronicle of the Belle Epoque. The six-shot sequence begins with a full shot of a man, whom the voice-over commentator labels a “modern Icarus,” outfitted in a winged parachute-type suit, making a slow full circle for the cameraman, followed by a distant tilt shot that moves up the length of the Eiffel Tower. In the third and longer shot, the birdman, in the company of two other men, spreads the now unfurled, winglike sections of his outfit (fig. 1) and readies himself for what feels like an interminable fifteen seconds on the balcony edge of the tower’s first tier before finally, after a moment’s hesitation, jumping. We then cut to a distant shot aimed at the first level of the tower and tilt down as the second camera follows the birdman’s descent, his flying suit trailing ineffectually before a small puff of dust is released from the Champ de Mars as his body hits the ground. The sequence ends with a close shot of hands measuring the “six-inch” deep impact of the fallen Icarus, followed by a brief final shot of his corpse being carried away.

The birdman footage appears after a long audiovisual roll call of now celebrated turn-of-the-century figures from the fields of politics (Léon Blum, Charles Maurras), theater (Sarah Bernhardt), opera (Nellie Melba, Victor Caruso), art (Auguste Rodin, Pierre Renoir, Claude Monet), and literature (Willy, Colette, André Gide, Paul Valéry, Jean Cocteau). Yet like so much of Paris 1900’s footage, the birdman’s image appears to carry minimal historical import except as macabre evidence of the era’s aviation mania, elsewhere more playfully or soberly documented with footage of a couple performing an aerial dance and Charles Blériot’s record-breaking 1909 Channel crossing. Conscious of the seemingly trivial remains of history then preserved in film archives, Védrès admitted that “scarcely one percent [of the footage she found] referred to important events.” In light of the minor status of the birdman event historically, we might read the fragment as simply more of the dead skin of film sloughed off by the incessantly updated screens of twentieth-century news media, a phenomenon described by André Bazin, arguably the preeminent film critic and theorist of the past century. Or the fragment might be read as the “accidental accumulation” of tabloid-like evidence that Sir Arthur Elton, a key producer-director in the British documentary film movement, feared the newsreels of the early twentieth century bequeathed to later historians. Or, to take an earlier example, it might be read as the “anecdotal” history of the everyday that Bolesław Matuszewski, a Polish newsreel cameraman, claimed the cinema was destined to archive. To be sure, the birdman sequence shifts the tone of the film from a lighthearted nostalgic skip through the Belle Epoque to a bleak forewarning of the abyss of the Great War into which Europe would soon plunge (the commentator clearly provides the 1912 date of the footage). Yet the fragment still retains an uneasy relation to any straightforward attempt to mobilize archival film as historical evidence. Although it feels significant, it’s hard to say what the image of the birdman’s fall at last means. What might this disturbing early example of a subject dying (to be) on film have to do with film’s, and more specifically the archival compilation film’s, peculiar temporal and ethical registers? Continue reading …

In this essay, Paula Amad asks why the notoriously antimontage film theorist André Bazin championed Nicole Védrès’s Paris 1900 (1947), a kaleidoscopic film de montage compiled from scraps of archival film, including footage of a death recorded live. How did archival films and death on film together mediate for Bazin the fatal coupling of “total war” and “total History,” and why were archival films seen by others to raise urgent questions of historical philosophy? She explores here the intensified historical consciousness that developed around archival films and the representability of death after the Second World War. Reinserting documentary as the missing key to Bazin’s so-called realist film theory, she argues that Bazin found in Paris 1900 a new archive-inflected and essayistic model of film’s historicity whose full potential continues to be realized in the explosion of archival filmmaking today.

PAULA AMAD is an Associate Professor in the Department of Cinematic Arts at the University of Iowa. She is currently at work on a book dealing with the history of aerial vision from the perspective of motion pictures shot from above.