Abstract
Starting with Rolf Tarot’s article on the edition of early modern texts in the volume
Texte und Varianten
(
Texts and Variants
, 1971) and the subsequent process of reaching an understanding ...about the practical handling of texts from the period between 1500 and 1750, an overview of the evolution of this discussion from the 1970s to the present is given. On the one hand, the medial development from the conventional transcription to the reprint and the availability of digitized texts is retraced. On the other hand, the influence of the availability of scans on the research process is discussed, as well as the challenges this poses for current editorial projects of early modern texts. These lie less in the area of textual constitution, but rather in the commentary-based analysis and reconstruction of historical textual networks.
At the end of October this year, philologist, historian of religion and translator Marju Lepajõe (28 October 1962 – 4 July 2019) would have turned 60. Thinking of Marju with gratitude, we publish her ...presentation "The birth of evening philology" on this occasion.
This paper looks at British home décor to analyse its distinct features from the perspective of a specific national identity. It also examines the impact of the upper class’ taste dictating the norms ...for the rest of society despite having a different cultural capital. The BBC programme, The Great Interior Design Challenge, is examined as a good example of the British tendency to seek advice from authorities in a field who are the arbiters of taste. The specific competitive scheme and aim of this TV programme present a telling body of information to examine which features are favoured among the winners and which are condemned in failed projects. As a result, the programme captures and reflects the preferred national British taste. The concepts and prescriptions of cultural capital as well as media and authorities as the source of taste are visible in this society. The members of the lower social classes, being instructed by the professionals, strive to follow the upper-class’ taste. However, their choices are determined by the education they received and people by whom they are surrounded. The upper classes are more accustomed to art due to their families’ art collections and art education, so their taste is more sophisticated and informed. Moreover, the study of the programme pays attention to the presence of certain distinctive national features of British society visible in its home décor.
Podcasting is an increasingly popular audio-only, on-demand narrative form that draws millions of listeners, both within the U.S. and worldwide. While podcast scholars are excited about podcasts’ ...potential to create content that finds no place in the mainstream media, they have not yet investigated how contemporary fictional podcasts can create societal critiques. This paper investigates the political potential of critical news platform The Intercept’s special feature audio play Evening at the Talk House (2018) by analyzing its content, form, and funding model. I will argue that Evening at the Talk House effectively uses the affordances of both the podcast and the dystopian narrative mode to expose the U.S. empire for American citizens by collapsing the distinction between the ‘good’ and safe homeland and the evil ‘other’ abroad. Evening at the Talk House, thus, raises questions about the complicity of regular citizens in enabling ‘murder programs’ (e.g. drone strikes, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan) as citizens actively take part in and become the victims of imperial violence. However, consistent with The Intercept’s daily reporting, Talk House fails to address a major motivation of the U.S. empire: establishing and maintaining global capitalism. This neglect can be explained by considering how the platform was established, as tech billionaire Pierre Omidyar provided its funding.
This article explores the American television series Zoo (CBS, 2015–2017). The show’s convoluted narrative revolves around mutations that are put into motion by genetic engineering. These mutations ...first affect animals and later humans The article argues that the biotechnological control of life, which takes center stage narratively, is mirrored in the television show’s use of digital visual effects to create animals. More importantly, Zoo suggests that this control of life is nothing but an illusion, as the mutation quickly gets out of hand and leads to unexpected consequences. Thus, the television series reflects the Anthropocene condition, which is characterized by the emergence of humankind as a planetary force; however, the planetary effects of anthropogenic activities have been largely unwanted. While Zoo seems to expose these processes of our age, the article also stresses that as a television show, Zoo must reach a broad audience. Thus, the critique of human fantasies of planetary control are, somewhat paradoxically, accompanied by an anthropocentrism which arguably undermines the show’s ecological subtexts.
INTERVIEW: DANIEL O’GORMAN O’Gorman, Daniel
Studia Universitatis Babeș-Bolyai. Philologia,
09/2022, Letnik:
67, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Q: Literary history, be it national, local, or regional, is perhaps the most conservative form of literary study, with many claiming that the method is outmoded. What can literary histories do to ...overcome both the risk of obsolescence and their inherent conservatism?A: I would not describe myself as a literary historian and have at times actively resisted this approach in my own work, in line with influential recent arguments made by the likes of Eric Hayot and Susan Stanford Friedman, both of whom I have discussed with my students in class. Having said that, I don’t think that literary histories are necessarily inherently conservative. What the recent, period-sceptic approaches to historical scholarship have shown, crucially, is that there are other ways of organising literary study that produce different insights and enable access to different forms of knowledge, including insights into forms of knowledge and experience that would have been marginalised by traditional forms of literary history (hence the perception that literary history is an outmoded and politically conservative form).
INTERVIEW: MIHAI IOVĂNEL Iovănel, Mihai
Studia Universitatis Babeș-Bolyai. Philologia,
09/2022, Letnik:
67, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Q: Literary history, be it national, local, or regional, is perhaps the most conservative form of literary study, with many claiming that the method is outmoded. What can literary histories do to ...overcome both the risk of obsolescence and their inherent conservatism?A: I do not believe conservatism is intrinsic to literary historiography. Eugen Lovinescu’s literary histories (1926-1929)—to invoke the most important Romanian contributions—are far from conservative. Directed against the fetishization of tradition, their theoretical starting points are still hard to assimilate by some Romanian cultural institutions to this day. The Romanian Academy is one such institution despite its eagerness to appoint Lovinescu as Member of Honor within its ranks after the 1989 regime change. Nonetheless, it is true that literary history oftentimes ends up playing a conservative role on account of its own history, which is longer and more indebted to the past than that of other forms of literary research. After all, as is well known, what is initially fresh and innovative becomes the object of consecration once it has been ratified and canonized by cultural structures and institutions.
INTERVIEW: PATRICK O’DONNELL O’donnell, Patrick
Studia Universitatis Babeș-Bolyai. Philologia,
09/2022, Letnik:
67, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Q: Literary history, be it national, local, or regional, is perhaps the most conservative form of literary study, with many claiming that the method is outmoded. What can literary histories do to ...overcome both the risk of obsolescence and their inherent conservatism?A: The first thing to recall in addressing this matter is the wide recognition amongst historians that any historical account is a narrative, with specific and identifiable narrative investments and agendas. When it comes to literary history, the question of method is an interesting one, since encounters between history and romance, or the imagined and the factual are foundational elements of the very subject being considered; there is no escaping the “meta” dimension (a narrative about narratives) of literary history. What might be perceived as the anachronistic bent of many older literary histories may be due to a reliance on “methods” that simply replicate received canonical investments instead of challenging them. But this, I suggest, is an incorrect perception: even fairly traditional literary histories, such as the multivolume Oxford History of English Literature—those large tomes that proceeded century by century through eight hundred years of literary production in national space that changed considerably over that time—did not merely repeat canonical history, for in many cases, they in fact made the canon as they unearthed heretofore ignored works or promoted a specific set of works as being more important than others. And there are shelves-full of literary histories and anthologies which purposely set out to radically reshape the canon as received through the likes of the Oxford History. The issue then, for me, is not whether a literary history is conservative or not—it is inevitably conservative in that it is engaging in some form of canon-formation, even if it is a new one—but whether or not it openly engages with its equally inherent radicality in actively reshaping the canon and recognizing its own historical investments and agendas.
INTERVIEW: EVE PATTEN Patten, Eve
Studia Universitatis Babeș-Bolyai. Philologia,
09/2022, Letnik:
67, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Q: Literary history, be it national, local, or regional, is perhaps the most conservative form of literary study, with many claiming that the method is outmoded. What can literary histories do to ...overcome both the risk of obsolescence and their inherent conservatism?A: At the high point of its evolution, say at the end of the nineteenth century when George Saintsbury published A Short History of English Literature (which of course, was anything but short), the genre of the literary history was unashamedly conservative, dedicated to the bolstering of national identity, political outlook, culture and tradition, in a mode that defined the thinking of most European nations. Literary history was ‘monumental’, in Nietzsche’s sense of that term: it was dedicated to the solidification of the past and its enshrinement in the narratives of the present. And rightly, this kind of monumentalism has been challenged, not just in our own time but throughout the twentieth century. Rene Wellek and Austin Warren were writing about ‘the fall of literary history’ back in the early 1940s (Theory of Literature, 1942), as the devastation of the Second World War undermined any sense of a collective or shared European narrative of cultural progress. At that time, many critics would have agreed, I expect, that this critical method would not survive the aesthetic and geo-political reorientations of the post-war decades.
INTERVIEW: ANDREI TERIAN Terian, Andrei
Studia Universitatis Babeș-Bolyai. Philologia,
09/2022, Letnik:
67, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Q: Literary history, be it national, local, or regional, is perhaps the most conservative form of literary study, with many claiming that the method is outmoded. What can literary histories do to ...overcome both the risk of obsolescence and their inherent conservatism?A: If by “literary history” we refer to the traditional—and hence somewhat canonical—form of literary historiography as genre, i.e., the study of literature from an evolutionary, teleological, and ethnocentric standpoint, for which works authored between 1830 and 1945 serve as models (from, let’s say, Georg Gottfried Gervinus to Albert Thibaudet), then this form has undoubtedly been one of the most conservative in the entire history of modern literary criticism, considering the fact that it has almost entirely refused to alter its goals, methodology, and rhetoric for over a century. But I do not consider this to hold true for the literary histories published after the Second World War as well. On the contrary, following a “crisis” lasting for nearly half a century, during which all its theoretical building blocks have been scrutinized and questioned, literary history seems to have made a powerful comeback in the past decades, both as discipline and as genre. Moreover, I tend to believe that it currently represents the most innovative segment in literary studies—, that it is in any case more innovative than individual articles, or monographs, the main source of critical innovation in the second half of the 20th century. And this fact is quite understandable: the very skepticism that had plagued it for decades on end made it so that literary history became one of the most experimental genres within literary studies after the year 2000. Past the threshold of the new millennium, it tested not only its object of study (extending the very definition of “literature” and offering numerous alternatives to the insistent predilection for the “national”) and its methodology beyond every conceivable limit (going through all contemporary theories, frameworks, and analytical procedures, from computational criticism and intermedial studies to feminism and postcolonial studies), but also what seemed to be its core determinant: the factor of time (thereby replacing chronology with other ways of arranging its material, such as the geographic/ spatial one). Therefore, in the 21st century, literary history is nothing short of a revolutionary genre—and this seems to be the most convincing retort the old discipline could have made to her detractors.
