‘Veluti in speculum’: The twilight of the castrato

2005 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 271-301 ◽  
Author(s):  
DAVIES
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Moment ◽  
Natural Expression

The final performances of castrato Giovanni Battista Velluti in London in the late 1820s constitute a particularly rich vantage point from which to explore why the castrato was eventually forced from the operatic stage. What does this historical moment have to say about shifts in vocal style and audience expectations? Why did the question of castration become so loaded under ‘Romantic’ conditions? This article constructs a speculative theoretical framework by bringing together recent insights in the history of vocal science, histories of gender and subjectivity, the history of listening and opera studies. Velluti's hostile reception in the London press is surveyed in detail, alongside a historically informed examination of his vocal manner. Evidence suggests that the castrato quickly became an unthinkable figure, falling from grace in the wake of embodied conceptions of vocality and ‘natural’ expression, newly dominant ideas that projected him beyond prevailing notions of human nature.

scholarly journals Tektualitas Sejarah dalam Mati Baik-Baik, Kawan

tuahtalino ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 122
Author(s):  
Yeni Yulianti
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
New Historicism ◽  
Human Right ◽  
Basic Assumptions ◽  
History Of ◽  
Post Impact

This research reviews the 1965 Tragedy in the collection of short stories Mati Baik-Baik, Kawan (MBBK) by Martin Aleida using New Historicism perspective. The New Historism allows us to answer questions of textuality of history in MBBK. New Historicism has been applied as a theoretical framework asserting that literary pieces cannot be separated from political, social, and economic praxis. The theory is based on three basic assumptions: 1) that every expressive act is embedded in a network of material practices; 2) literary and nonliterary texts circulate inseparably; 3) no discourse, imaginative or archival, gives acces to unchanging truths nor expresses inalterable human nature. The research applied parrarel reading method involving literary and nonliterary texts. Any efforts to analyze the textuality of history in the research is to assess the texts in the collection of short stories MBBK through exposure of the 1965 Tragedy. The finding of research of textuality of history of the 1965 tragedy in MBBK put stress upon post impact of G30S such as human right abuse against victims.

scholarly journals Worlds apart: Marx, Marcuse and creative engagement

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca van der Post
Keyword(s):  
Object Relations ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
Human Freedom ◽  
Creative Processes ◽  
Subject And Object ◽  
Early Account ◽  
Historical Moment

Marx’s early account of socialism as the simultaneous liberation of mankind and nature holds creativity to be mankind’s defining and trans-historical characteristic and the locus of human freedom. Yet, as I argue, Marx’s creativity is predicated upon subject-object relations of domination that engender a pathological relationship between humans and nature, thereby militating against true freedom. This paper will explore Marcuse’s attempt to rehabilitate Marx’s account and will find that Marcuse fails to resolve the crucial tension between subject and object, while his model of freedom contains the possibility for an escalation in the very violations of nature that his account seeks to overcome. Finally, I argue that creative processes and creative engagement suggest a way to resolve the tension in Marx’s account of human nature, while offering us a vantage point from which to critique and subvert the brutality of our own historical moment.

scholarly journals Worlds apart: Marx, Marcuse and creative engagement

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca van der Post
Keyword(s):  
Object Relations ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
Human Freedom ◽  
Creative Processes ◽  
Subject And Object ◽  
Early Account ◽  
Historical Moment

Marx’s early account of socialism as the simultaneous liberation of mankind and nature holds creativity to be mankind’s defining and trans-historical characteristic and the locus of human freedom. Yet, as I argue, Marx’s creativity is predicated upon subject-object relations of domination that engender a pathological relationship between humans and nature, thereby militating against true freedom. This paper will explore Marcuse’s attempt to rehabilitate Marx’s account and will find that Marcuse fails to resolve the crucial tension between subject and object, while his model of freedom contains the possibility for an escalation in the very violations of nature that his account seeks to overcome. Finally, I argue that creative processes and creative engagement suggest a way to resolve the tension in Marx’s account of human nature, while offering us a vantage point from which to critique and subvert the brutality of our own historical moment.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
George E. Dutton
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
15Th Century ◽  
The World ◽  
Catholic Mission ◽  
Historical Moment ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Main Figure

This chapter introduces the book’s main figure and situates him within the historical moment from which he emerges. It shows the degree to which global geographies shaped the European Catholic mission project. It describes the impact of the Padroado system that divided the world for evangelism between the Spanish and Portuguese crowns in the 15th century. It also argues that European clerics were drawing lines on Asian lands even before colonial regimes were established in the nineteenth century, suggesting that these earlier mapping projects were also extremely significant in shaping the lives of people in Asia. I argue for the value of telling this story from the vantage point of a Vietnamese Catholic, and thus restoring agency to a population often obscured by the lives of European missionaries.

The age of symbolic economic policies?

2015 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 245-265
Author(s):  
Peter Galbács
Keyword(s):  
Economic Policy ◽  
Theoretical Framework ◽  
Policy Tools ◽  
Economic Policies ◽  
Mainstream Economics ◽  
History Of ◽  
Theoretical Considerations ◽  
Macroeconomic Environment

This paper offers a few remarks on the so-called heterodoxy commentaries of recent times (e.g. Bod 2013, Csaba 2011). In accordance with the growing popularity of unusual economic policy actions, a set of “tools” is emerging that aims to exert its effects breaking with instrumental actions. Outlining a special framework of the history of mainstream economics, it will be argued that economic policy only gradually has become capable of applying this system. In our view, both the emergence of symbolic economic policies mentioned above and the rise of heterodoxy are on the same level, since certain governments can only operate through giving signals. Although it is not the time to formulate ultimate and eternal generalised statements, it may perhaps be stated that symbolic economic policies can make some room for manoeuvring available as a last resort. In other words, the possibility of a certain kind of economic policy “tools” can be derived from theoretical considerations, and this set has become highlighted recently by some constraining changes in the macroeconomic environment. Our theoretical framework will be filled sporadically with some episodes from the last few years of the economic policy of Hungary.

Divination and Human Nature

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter T. Struck
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Classical Antiquity ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Rich ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
Observable Fact

This book casts a new perspective on the rich tradition of ancient divination—the reading of divine signs in oracles, omens, and dreams. Popular attitudes during classical antiquity saw these readings as signs from the gods while modern scholars have treated such beliefs as primitive superstitions. The book reveals instead that such phenomena provoked an entirely different accounting from the ancient philosophers. These philosophers produced subtle studies into what was an odd but observable fact—that humans could sometimes have uncanny insights—and their work signifies an early chapter in the cognitive history of intuition. Examining the writings of Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, and the Neoplatonists, the book demonstrates that they all observed how, setting aside the charlatans and swindlers, some people had premonitions defying the typical bounds of rationality. Given the wide differences among these ancient thinkers, the book notes that they converged on seeing this surplus insight as an artifact of human nature, projections produced under specific conditions by our physiology. For the philosophers, such unexplained insights invited a speculative search for an alternative and more naturalistic system of cognition. Recovering a lost piece of an ancient tradition, this book illustrates how philosophers of the classical era interpreted the phenomena of divination as a practice closer to intuition and instinct than magic.

Creatures of Cain

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Erika Lorraine Milam
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Late Night ◽  
Hollywood Films ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
American Science ◽  
Human Exceptionalism ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Gender

After World War II, the question of how to define a universal human nature took on new urgency. This book charts the rise and precipitous fall in Cold War America of a theory that attributed man's evolutionary success to his unique capacity for murder. The book reveals how the scientists who advanced this “killer ape” theory capitalized on an expanding postwar market in intellectual paperbacks and widespread faith in the power of science to solve humanity's problems, even to answer the most fundamental questions of human identity. The killer ape theory spread quickly from colloquial science publications to late-night television, classrooms, political debates, and Hollywood films. Behind the scenes, however, scientists were sharply divided, their disagreements centering squarely on questions of race and gender. Then, in the 1970s, the theory unraveled altogether when primatologists discovered that chimpanzees also kill members of their own species. While the discovery brought an end to definitions of human exceptionalism delineated by violence, the book shows how some evolutionists began to argue for a shared chimpanzee–human history of aggression even as other scientists discredited such theories as sloppy popularizations. A wide-ranging account of a compelling episode in American science, the book argues that the legacy of the killer ape persists today in the conviction that science can resolve the essential dilemmas of human nature.

Domestic Everyday Life, Manners, and Customs in the Ancient World

1876 ◽  
Vol 4 ◽  
pp. 364-415
Author(s):  
George Harris
Keyword(s):  
Everyday Life ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Ancient World ◽  
The People ◽  
History Of

Thereis nothing which contributes more fully to throw light on the manners and habits of a people, or more forcibly to exhibit to us the tone of thought which prevailed among them, than the rites and ceremonies that they adopted connected with their religion. And the wilder and more extravagant the superstitions which in such a nation prevailed, the more strikingly do they evince the tone of thought and feeling that animated the people. Potent everywhere, and under whatever phase, as was the influence of these notions, they served in each case to develop the whole mind and character of the nation; as each passion, and emotion, and faculty, were exerted to the very utmost on a subject of such surpassing interest to them all. Imagination here, relieved from all restraint, spread her wings and soared aloft, disporting herself in her wildest mood; and the remoter the period to which the history of any particular country reaches, and the more barbarous the condition in which the people existed, the more striking, and the more extraordinary to us, appear the superstitions by which they were influenced. Human nature is by this means developed to the full, all its energies are exerted to the utmost, and the internal machinery by which its movements are impelled, is stimulated to active operation. We gaze with wonder and with awe upon the spectacle thus exhibited. However involuntarily, we respect a people—misguided and erring as they were—whose eagerness to follow whatever their conscience prompted, urged them to impose such revolting duties on themselves; while we regard, with pity and with horror, those hideous exploits which were the fruit of that misguided zeal.

Burney's The Wanderer and Early-Nineteenth-Century Commodity Fetishism

2002 ◽  
Vol 57 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrea Henderson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Social Changes ◽  
Commodity Fetishism ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Labor Theory ◽  
History Of ◽  
Theory Of Value ◽  
Historical Moment ◽  
The Wanderer

This essay explores a particular moment in the history of commodity fetishism by means of an examination of Frances Burney's The Wanderer (1814). The novel, which is explicitly concerned with the social changes facing early-nineteenth-century England, reveals that at this historical moment the commodity inspired emotions of a particular kind: it was idealized and perceived as attractively individualized, aloof, exotic, and changeable, and it elicited a passionate and sometimes even painful form of desire. In The Wanderer Burney explores the human repercussions of this new way of engaging with objects in the marketplace. She reveals, moreover, the extent to which the fetishism of the commodity reflected not just developments within the economy but also political change: under the influence of the French Revolution the charisma once generated by social status was transferred to the economic realm, where, embodied in the commodity, it gave rise to a pleasurable but masochistic reverence. Burney'sargument for the usefulness of economic independence necessarily leads her to appreciate the commodity fetishism she describes: even while she develops a labor theory of value, Burney promotes a mystification of the commodity by insisting on the aloof independence of both labor and its products. Thus, Burney uses the apparent autonomy of things——which Marx decries——as a means to argue for the autonomy of the makers of those things.

The Afterlife of Empire in Beckett’s How It Is

2021 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 88-105
Author(s):  
Anthony Cordingley
Keyword(s):  
Algerian War ◽  
Literary Representation ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
History Of ◽  
Historical Moment

Abstract Relationships of political domination in Beckett’s Comment c’ est (1961)/How It Is (1964) are typically read through a specific historical moment (the Holocaust, the Algerian War) or literary representation (Dante, Sade). This article reveals spectres in the text from the long history of the colonisation of Ireland to the legacy of Renaissance and Enlightenment humanism; it explores Beckett’s sense of complicity in the Anglo-Irish Ascendency.

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