Historicism

Eine „glückliche Anwendung historischer Resultate auf die Oper“? Zur Verwendung alter Musik in Adolf Sandbergers Oper Ludwig der Springer (1895)

by Christian Thomas Leitmeir

Mozart im Zentrum. Festschrift zum 60. Geburtstag von Manfred Hermann Schmid, edited by Klaus Aringer & Ann-Katrin Zimmermann (Tutzing, 2010), 381–407

Adolf Sandberger's first opera Ludwig der Springer (1895) displayed the synergy between musicology and composition,... more Adolf Sandberger's first opera Ludwig der Springer (1895) displayed the synergy between musicology and composition, which was hailed by critics as a 'successful application of historical research to opera'.
In two places Sandberger incorporated old music into the otherwise Wagnerian adaptation of a medieval Thuringian legend: a troubadour song by Guillaume of Aquitaine (II/1) and a work modelled after Lassus (III/1).Ascertaining the sources for these allegedly historicising elements, the essay disproves Sandberger's claims of music-historical veracity and establishes the deeper reasons behind the curious discrepancy between historicist posture and Wagnerian music drama.

Aesthetic historicism in Shakespeare's Sonnets

by Carlton Fleenor

This is my answer to an exam question from my British Literature 1 class this past semester. We were given a passage,... more This is my answer to an exam question from my British Literature 1 class this past semester. We were given a passage, asked to guess who wrote it from the authors we had studied, and justify our decision through an analysis of the passage.

Review of Andreas Gotzmann and Christian Wiese, eds., Modern Judaism and Historical Consciousness: Identities, Encounters, Perspectives. Leiden: Brill, 2007. xxii, 658 pp.

by Claire Sufrin

Türkiye Uluslararası İlişkiler Yazınında Tarihsel Olguculuk ile Disiplinlerarasıcılığın Analitik Yaklaşıma Etkisi ve Türkiye Uygulaması

by Uluslararası İlişkiler

Erol Kurubaş, " Türkiye Uluslararası İlişkiler Yazınında Tarihsel Olguculuk ile Disiplinlerarasıcılığın Analitik Yaklaşıma Etkisi ve Türkiye Uygulaması ", Uluslararası İlişkiler, Cilt 5, Sayı 17 (Bahar), 2008

Bu çalışma, Türkiye’de Uluslararası İlişkileri kendi kuramsal perspektifi olan özerk bir disiplin haline getirme... more Bu çalışma, Türkiye’de Uluslararası İlişkileri kendi kuramsal perspektifi olan özerk bir disiplin haline getirme çabalarını etkilediği düşünülen iki konuyu sorgulamaktadır: Tarihsel olguculuk ve disiplinlerarasıcılık. Uluslararası İlişkiler çalışmalarında son derece önemli ve vazgeçilmez olan bu iki konuya değinirken hedeflenen, iki unsurun yerlerinin ve sınırlarının iyi belirlenmediği takdirde Uluslararası İlişkiler disiplininin bilimselliğini ve kendine özgü kavram ve kuram geliştirme çabalarını olumsuz etkileyebileceğine dikkat çekmektir. Ayrıca, tarih ile kuramın epistemolojik ve metodolojik farklılıklarına değinilerek, bunların iki ayrı bilgi üretme biçimi olduğu vurgulanmaktadır. Bununla beraber, gerek tarihin, gerekse disiplinlerarası çalışmaların Uluslararası İlişkilere nasıl katkı sağlayabileceği de tartışılmaktadır.

Policante, A. “War against Biopower: Timely Reflections on an Historicist Foucault", Theory & Event, 13.1 March 2010.

by Amedeo Policante

Is war an appropriate metaphor for understanding politics? What is at stake in any particular understanding of the... more Is war an appropriate metaphor for understanding politics? What is at stake in any particular understanding of the relationship between war and politics? What happens when war is banned, excluded, removed from the political sphere? The following article will try to sketch three fundamental junctures of Foucault’s analysis of power in relation with the question of war. In the first part, I will try to draw a general synthesis of Foucault’s understanding of power relations and their relationship with war, with particular reference to his extended engagement with the bellicose discourse of modern historicism. In the second part it will be necessary to confront historicism with the combined challenges posed by the “discourse of sovereignty” and by “dialectical materialism”. Finally, we will consider the meaning of the demise of historicism and the challenge posed by the rise of an “age of neutralizations” behind which the old “race war” take a new and threatening form under the aegis of biopower and modern racism. So far as previous discussions of Society must be defended have either rejected or marginalized the radical endorsement of historicism that Foucault performed throughout these lectures, this might be a valuable contribution aimed at reinstating the value of a particular form of counter-knowledge defined as perspectival, bellicose and irreducibly partisan .

Towards a New Digital Historicism? Doing History in the Age of Abundance

by Andreas Fickers

This article argues that the contemporary hype in digitization and dissemination of our cultural heritage – especially... more This article argues that the contemporary hype in digitization and dissemination of our cultural heritage – especially of audiovisual sources – is comparable to the boom of critical source editions in the late 19th century. But while the dramatic rise of accessibility to and availability of sources in the 19th century went hand in hand with the development of new scholarly skills of source interpretation and was paralleled by the institutionalization of history as an academic profession, a similar trend of an emerging digital historicism today seems absent. This essay aims at reflecting on the challenges and chances that the discipline of history – and the field of television history in particular – is actually facing. It offers some thoughts and ideas on how the digitization of sources and their online availability affects the established practices of source criticism.

Chivalry and romance in the eighteenth century: Richard Hurd and the disenchantment of the Faerie Queene

by Kristine Haugen

Prose Studies 23,2 (2000): 45-60

Richard Hurd’s ‘Letters on Chivalry and Romance’ (1762) are generally treated as a key installment in the rise of... more Richard Hurd’s ‘Letters on Chivalry and Romance’ (1762) are generally treated as a key installment in the rise of gothic aesthetics, but more empirically considered, they are an idiosyncratic discussion of Spenser’s ‘Faerie Queene’ and its putative sources. It’s argued here that Hurd applies a specifically 18th-century mode of historically contextualizing reading to Spenser’s unsuspecting poem: as a consequence, we can learn from this eccentric work about the difficulties that beset both historical thought and the reading of literature in particular during the Enlightenment. To begin with, Hurd rejected the classic method of seeking out textual parallels to a poem’s words, whether drawn from classical, Biblical, or earlier English literature. His ambitions were greater, specifically, to identify the source of the ‘Faerie Queene’ with medieval life taken as a concrete whole and unmediated by texts. (Hurd’s own confessed distaste for reading medieval primary sources must have shaped this model: he preferred to lift his information from the 18th-century medievalist J.-B. de la Curne de Ste.-Palaye.) Considering the poetic material at hand, the result was more than perverse: the ‘Faerie Queene’ was no fantasy at all, but real and historical, and the elements in it that even Hurd was forced to take as allegorical were not medieval in their flavor but unfortunate concessions to the degenerate taste of Spenser’s Elizabethan contemporaries. Hurd’s jarring deflation or debunking of Spenser’s allegorical epic recalls similar intellectual maneuvers emanating from English churchmen in the earlier Enlightenment -- for example, William Warburton’s argument that the Egyptian hieroglyphs had no mystical origin but had been invented for practical and commercial purposes, or Richard Bentley’s exposure of the forgery of the letters of Phalaris. By implication, this study contributes to the growing consensus that members of the institutional church deeply shaped England’s literary and intellectual culture during the 18th century.

A French Jesuit's lectures on Vergil, 1582-1583: Jacques Sirmond between literature, history, and myth

by Kristine Haugen

Sixteenth Century Journal 30,4 (1999): 967-85

An unstudied manuscript in Princeton contains lectures delivered by the youthful Jacques Sirmond at the Jesuit college... more An unstudied manuscript in Princeton contains lectures delivered by the youthful Jacques Sirmond at the Jesuit college of Pont-a-Mousson. In contrast to the received pictures of Jesuit pedagogues as devoted rhetoricians, Sirmond explained 'Aeneid' books 3 and 12 in a self-consciously historical way, concentrating especially on Roman law and religion and their interaction. His concerns are discussed in light of sixteenth-century scholarship on ancient Rome, contemporary Virgil commentary, humanist interest in the history of culture as a hermeneutic tool, and Sirmond's own later career as a philologist and ecclesiastical historian. Sirmond's comments on 'Aeneid' 12 in particular show how he used religious and legal information in an unusual ethical reading of Virgil's text. Like some other early modern readers, Sirmond read Virgil's poem, other ancient literary texts, and Roman historical texts and documents as equivalent and interchangeable sources of information.

Traditionalizing Philosophical Hermeneutics: Gadamer and Ricoeur on Textual Interpretation

by Jens Olesen

Introduction to the draft chapter. Comments welcome.

Mixing economics and ethics: Carl Menger vs Gustav von Schmoller

by Markus Haller

La « seconde » ecole de Vienne et les sciences sociales

by Ian Verstegen

Céline Trautmann-Waller, ed., L'ecole viennoise d'histoire de l'art [Special Issue, Austriaca: Cahiers universitaires d’information sur l’Autriche] 26 (2011): 159-187.

Mon argumentation est organisee en trois parties. La premiere eclaircit trois groupes de concepts utilises en histoire... more Mon argumentation est organisee en trois parties. La premiere eclaircit trois groupes de concepts utilises en histoire : holisme et speculation, abstraction contre developpement, conscience/indeterminisme contre inconscience et determinisme. La deuxieme partie analyse les points de vue des trois premieres elaborations du Kunstwollen: celles de Riegl, Dvorcik et Sedlmayr. Enfin, je reviendrai sur les questions soulevees dans la premiere partie afin de proposer une interpretation defendable des doctrines viennoises fondees sur la clarification de la structure societale, et du Kunstwollen comme deterministe et fonctionnel (non-directionnel ou teIeologique).

Essay zu: "Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historie für das Leben" von Friedrich Nietzsche (A reading of Friedrich Nietzsche's "On the Use and Abuse of History for Life", in German)

by Daniel Rotstein

Vasari's Progressive (but non-historicist) Renaissance

by Ian Verstegen

Journal of Art Historiography 5 (2011).

Today’s scholarly understanding of Giorgio Vasari is richer than it has ever been yet still conflicted. While on the... more Today’s scholarly understanding of Giorgio Vasari is richer than it has ever been yet still conflicted. While on the one hand the sophistication of his Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects (Le vite de più eccellenti architetti, pittori, et scultori) published in 1550 and revised again in 1568, has been amply documented, including the possibility of multiple authorship, it is not clear to what degree he is a ‘modern’ writer. A number of works have increasingly appeared that stress the precociousness of Renaissance notions of historical difference and relativity.1 On the other hand, a largely medieval textual approach has been detected in his work, for example in the demonstration that the structure of the Lives is basically the form of a medieval chronicle, and most startlingly Gerd Blum’s detection of numerology in the page numbers.

‘Eclectic Visions and Elevated Ideals: Museums and Galleries in nineteenth-century Britain’ in G. Brandwood (ed.), Living, Leisure and Law: Eight Building Types in England, 1800-1914 (London: Spire Books, 2010).

by Barbara Lasic

Why Historical Distance is not a Problem

by Mark Bevir

History and Theory, Volume 50, Issue 4, pages 24–37, December 2011

This essay argues that concerns about historical distance arose along with modernist historicism, and they disappear... more This essay argues that concerns about historical distance arose along with modernist historicism, and they disappear with postfoundationalism. The developmental historicism of the nineteenth century appealed to narrative principles to establish continuity between past and present and to guide selections among facts. In the twentieth century, modernist historicists rejected such principles, thereby raising the specter of historical distance: that is, the distorting effects of the present on accounts of the past, the chasm between facts and narrative. The modernist problem became: how can historians avoid anachronism and develop accurate representations of the past? Instead of using narrative principles to select facts, modernist historicists appealed to atomized facts to validate narratives. However, in the late twentieth century, postmodernists (Frank Ankersmit and Hayden White) argued that there was no way to close the distance between facts and narratives. The postmodern problem became: how should historians conceive of their writing given the ineluctable distance between facts and narratives? Today, postfoundationalism dispels both modernist and postmodernist concerns with historical distance; it implies that all concepts (not just historical ones) fuse fact and theory, and it dissolves issues of conceptual relativism, textual meaning, and re-enactment.

Theories of Creativity in a Historical Lens

by Vimala Pasupathi

Co-authored with Monisha Pasupathi and Benjamin
Armintor, in Clio’s Psyche 18 (2011): 281–284.

James Cameron’s Titanic, the French New Wave and Postmodern Historicity

by Danielle Marquez

This was my last essay for my Film History class.

This essay discusses James Cameron as an auteur. While writing this paper, I was very inspired by my Philosophy class,... more This essay discusses James Cameron as an auteur. While writing this paper, I was very inspired by my Philosophy class, and might have taken it a little too seriously. :))

Time Out of Memory

by Jeffrey Cohen

What Is Critical Integral Theory?

by Daniel Gustav Anderson

This is an essay iin response to a request to summarize what I have done, where I think needs to be redone or reconsidered, and where I intend to go with this work, published at Frank Visser's Integral World website. Find it here: http://www.integralworld.net/anderson9.html

Review of Madhavi Menon, _Unhistorical Shakespeare: Queer Theory in Shakespearean Literature and Film'

by Ryan Singh Paul