Representations最新文献

{"title":"Through English, Densely","authors":"A. Ben-yishai","doi":"10.1525/rep.2021.155.6.139","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/rep.2021.155.6.139","url":null,"abstract":"Starting with some reflections on her experiences teaching a seminar on the Anglophone literature of the 1947 South Asian Partition to Jewish-Israeli and Palestinian students in the English Department at Haifa, Professor Ben-Yishai argues for a critical and pedagogic practice that reinvests Anglophone texts with their historical, political and formal density while raising important questions about comparative methodologies.","PeriodicalId":47353,"journal":{"name":"Representations","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-08-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47751272","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Certain Loves for Opera","authors":"Carolyn Abbate","doi":"10.1525/REP.2021.154.5.47","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/REP.2021.154.5.47","url":null,"abstract":"The attraction of objects has motivated a swerve within the humanities—a move away from texts and exegesis, linguistics, and semiotics; a move toward the body, the senses, materiality, and physiology. A musical instrument, a scientific artifact, a collection of sounds, an antique postcard: yes, all these objects are expressive and sometimes aesthetically pleasing, and in being so they can be understood to embody an epistemology, with theories and realms of knowledge written into their every contour. Or they can be understood as traces of global exchange and displacement. But what if the object is not very good, not loveable at all? Crumbling, toxic paper or banal images, with no exit from a strange historical or cultural space, perhaps an uncomfortable space to which you feel averse (or at least, feel you should disdain, as beneath contempt)? Or what if the object is misdirecting? What if it is ephemeral, like sound, something that cannot be held? These questions are woven in this essay into a reflection on the forms taken by certain loves for opera, a reflection centered on some nineteenth-century material objects that relate to act 4 of Giacomo Meyerbeer’s opera Les Huguenots (1836).","PeriodicalId":47353,"journal":{"name":"Representations","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47081240","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Michel Leiris and the Secret Language of Song","authors":"M. Smart","doi":"10.1525/REP.2021.154.7.87","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/REP.2021.154.7.87","url":null,"abstract":"Best known for his reminiscences of artistic and intellectual life in midcentury Paris and for his chronicle of the 1931 Dakar-Djibouti mission, L’Afrique fantôme (1934), Michel Leiris also wrote obsessively about music, turning to imperfectly recalled fragments of song and opera to evoke key moments of early childhood and to explore affective relationships. This article focuses on two episodes from Leiris’s writings to demonstrate that his highly emotional and anecdotal mode of writing about music anticipates, and quite possibly influenced, the more systematic theories of voice, sound, and language of Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida. Derrida engaged directly with Leiris in his essay “Tympan” (in The Margins of Philosophy), which quotes at length a text by Leiris on the cognitive and relational dimensions of hearing and writing. Leiris’s experience in the 1930s and 40s developing a lexicon and grammar for the ritual language of the Dogon people of Mali, I argue, fundamentally shaped his conviction that both music and language are most communicative when they permeate and destabilize each other.","PeriodicalId":47353,"journal":{"name":"Representations","volume":"154 1","pages":"87-98"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43529739","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Vico Signifying Nothing","authors":"D. Casadei","doi":"10.1525/REP.2021.154.10.129","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/REP.2021.154.10.129","url":null,"abstract":"This essay offers a reconsideration of Giambattista Vico’s work for scholars interested in history, sound, and aurality. It takes as its point of departure the chronological table that stands at the opening of The New Science, homing in on its blind spots, raw absences, and tangled claims to objectivity. Vico’s understanding of history relies—this essay goes on to argue—on a lively world of aural metaphors involved in the act of its writing: imaginary sounds, meaningless speech, false listenings, along with invented onomatopoeic etymologies. Such unruly sounds lead us to a crucial paradox of Viconian history, one that must confront all historians invested in retrieving and rewriting the stories of those who are lost, erased, and unrepresented: what role does imagination play in the writing of history? Can human invention, imagination, and even falsehood lead us toward new historical findings? The essay closes with a gloss of Vico’s nascent theory of the physical and aural phenomenon of laughter, presented in the Vici vindiciae as a complex pathway between humanity and animality and, what’s more, as a historical interface between incommensurable stages of creaturely life.","PeriodicalId":47353,"journal":{"name":"Representations","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47780395","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Butterflies on Sweet Land? Reflections on Opera at the Edges of History","authors":"G. Kreuzer","doi":"10.1525/REP.2021.154.6.69","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/REP.2021.154.6.69","url":null,"abstract":"Taking inspiration from Kalle Pihlainen’s philosophy of historical representation, this essay explores some of the ways in which operatic performance can harness the ambiguity between the genre’s historicist and presentist implications to mobilize not just the difference of the past from the present but also their connection. The essay focuses on two recent examples—Heartbeat Opera’s Butterfly (New York, 2017) and The Industry’s Sweet Land (Los Angeles, 2020)—whose unconventional presentations critically engage such temporal complexity. Moving beyond the proscenium and crucially involving the music in their directorial visions, both couch history’s grip on the present in terms of the consequences of past actions. By self-staging their differences from mainstream opera-house productions, moreover, both explore whether opera can still aspire to sociopolitical relevance today. Though Butterfly tackles a controversial repertory staple, while the immersive and site-specific Sweet Land enlists the operatic genre itself to probe various modes of historical imagination, both expose continuities of historical racism in contemporary US culture. Their blurring of lines between past and present prevents audiences from confining racist positions to the operas’ allegedly historical plots: instead of presenting past alterity, the productions reveal transhistorical semblance. Opera thus becomes a medium for performing the multidimensionality and open-endedness of history.","PeriodicalId":47353,"journal":{"name":"Representations","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43950238","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Music Histories from the Edge","authors":"M. Feldman, Nicholas Mathew","doi":"10.1525/REP.2021.154.1.1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/REP.2021.154.1.1","url":null,"abstract":"LA T E L Y, A C R O S S T HE HU M A NI T I E S , H I S T O R I C I S M in its many guises has been in retreat—a retreat that music studies has in some respects hastened. This collection of essays asks why sound and music appear to induce exhaustion with history and historical method and how a renewed focus on musical practices might motivate fresh histories and novel forms of history writing. Such questions were the premise of a multidisciplinary Mellon-funded collaboration between Yale University, the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Chicago, and King’s College London that met from 2016 to 2018. Charged with rethinking the relation of music to history, the participants ultimately wondered why scholars, musicological and non-, have so frequently deployed music to disrupt or delimit historical projects—indeed whether music itself tends to elicit or even cause such disruptions and delimitations. The ironies here are patent. Not long ago, musicologists would regularly posit history as the most efficacious cure for what ailed their discipline. The study of music, so it was thought, always risked having its head in the clouds, especially the vapors of German idealism. To write music history was to place music’s feet on secure ground—to resituate, rematerialize, and re-embody in ways that checked the transcendental and formalist tendencies of old. ‘‘History,’’ by this reckoning, also designated a place, one where values are produced, where things are exchanged, where bodies move, where politics is played out. And yet, as many have observed, music has never been an entirely convincing occupant of this place, whose solidity is specious at best. Vibrational, ephemeral, footloose, politically mobile, and semiotically uncertain, music forever raises the specter of old philosophical anxieties—about the relation of the aesthetic to the historical, of sensuous experience to rational knowledge, of political orthodoxies to the undercommons of insurgency and resistance, of the vivid present to the absent past. Small wonder that so many theories of music’s historicity have treated musics of all kinds as strange and exceptional historical actors, even improbable bearers of special historical insight. ‘‘Janis Joplin, Bob Dylan, and Jimi Hendrix say","PeriodicalId":47353,"journal":{"name":"Representations","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44056411","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"On the Beach","authors":"M. Stokes","doi":"10.1525/REP.2021.154.4.35","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/REP.2021.154.4.35","url":null,"abstract":"How has “the migrant crisis” affected musicology? What “edges” now appear, with what implications for musicology’s persistent call to historicize? This article suggests these have been more persistent questions than the current language of “crisis” might suggest. Taking some examples with the ongoing Syrian war as a backdrop, the implications of Mieke Bal’s injunction to “remember with” are explored as a route to thinking through the dilemmas of activism and compassion.","PeriodicalId":47353,"journal":{"name":"Representations","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49033695","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Listening(s) Past","authors":"Nicholas Mathew","doi":"10.1525/REP.2021.154.11.143","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/REP.2021.154.11.143","url":null,"abstract":"This essay is about the long-standing and tenacious audile technique of listening past—that is, the discrimination of music, musical performances, and even sound amid the ostensibly broader range of vibrations conveyed by any media form. For some time, an assortment of musicians, sound artists, and theoreticians have lined up to maintain that this cognitive-discursive technique, which suppresses or diminishes the processes of mediation, is in some sense ideological: illusory, contingent, and even exclusionary. Cagean theories of sound, feminist valorizations of embodiment and presence, ecological ethics of the soundscape, tech-focused philosophies of mediation, ethnographic conceptions of aurality, and Deleuzian vibrational ontologies—all are united in their foundational skepticism. Centered on digital transfer of an early electric recording of a performance of Beethoven’s Sixth from 1927 conducted by Felix Weingartner, this essay seeks to reevaluate the political implications of listening past by drawing out its submerged relationships to the traditional historicist project of recovering what I call past listenings—lost modes of listening that are supposedly indivisible from particular spaces, historical moments, and radically situated subjectivities.","PeriodicalId":47353,"journal":{"name":"Representations","volume":"154 1","pages":"143-155"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42463686","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Sugar, Sound, Speed","authors":"Jessica Swanston Baker","doi":"10.1525/REP.2021.154.3.23","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/REP.2021.154.3.23","url":null,"abstract":"This essay presents the song “Area Code 869,” an example of a Caribbean genre known as “wilders” or “pep,” as a form of what Kodwo Eshun calls “sonic fiction.” By focusing on sonic bodies as “bodies touched by sound,” the essay suggests that “869” offers a reimagination of the historical relationship between sugar, sound, and speed in the Eastern Caribbean island of St. Kitts, a former British sugar colony.","PeriodicalId":47353,"journal":{"name":"Representations","volume":"154 1","pages":"23-34"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49180430","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Honoré de Balzac, Henry James, and Seraphic Devotions","authors":"Amy M. Hollywood","doi":"10.1525/REP.2021.153.8.127","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1525/REP.2021.153.8.127","url":null,"abstract":"Reading Henry James’s late novel The Wings of the Dove with Honoré de Balzac’s Seraphita, this essay argues that James performs through his novel an act of secular devotion, a memorialization of lost others through which he enables himself to continue to live.","PeriodicalId":47353,"journal":{"name":"Representations","volume":"153 1","pages":"127-143"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2021-02-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"66929623","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}