Division I Faculty Publications

Photographic Ambivalence and Historical Consciousness

Michael S. Roth — Fri, 26 Oct 2012 12:11:28 PDT

This essay focuses on three topics that arose at the Photography and Historical Interpretation conference: photography’s incapacity to conceive duration; photography and the “rim of ontological uncertainty;” photography’s “anthropological revolution.” In the late nineteenth century, blindness to duration was conceptualized as the cost of photographic precision. Since the late twentieth century, blindness to our own desires, or inauthenticity, has been underlined as the price of photographic ubiquity. These forms of blindness, however, are not so much disabilities to be overcome as they are aspects of modern consciousness to be acknowledged. The engagement with photography’s impact on historical consciousness gives rise to reconsiderations of temporal extension and to the difficulties of acknowledging one’s desires in an increasingly open and fractured social field. Photography’s indexicality combined with its reproducibility gives rise to photographic ambivalence. As with other forms of ambivalence, we should be less concerned with diluting its constitutive tensions than with learning to live with its conflicted possibilities.

The Real Hound, the Real Knight: Tom Stoppard Reads Nabokov

Priscilla Meyer — Fri, 26 Oct 2012 12:11:27 PDT

Preston Sturges’ Sullivan’s Travels and Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment

Priscilla Meyer — Fri, 26 Oct 2012 12:11:26 PDT

Nabokov and the Spirits: Dolorous Haze--Hazel Shade

Priscilla Meyer — Fri, 26 Oct 2012 12:11:25 PDT

Dostoevsky, ‘Mister Prokharchin,’ and Naturalist Poetics

Priscilla Meyer — Fri, 26 Oct 2012 12:11:24 PDT

The Liquid Life: Money and the Circulation of Success after Franklin

Matthew Garrett — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 10:16:39 PDT

What happens when the money form becomes a model for selfhood and social success? Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography posits a reciprocal relationship between the circulation of money and self. Self is expressed in Franklin’s memoirs in the form of money, through a formal configuration of narrative episodes modelled on Franklin’s own conception of the circulation of money. Through this representation, Franklin produces a historically novel way of formally accommodating the antagonisms of social inequality through narrative, of reconstituting conflict as controlled and industrious experiential diversity. Through a consideration of Franklin’s writings on credit and money, and an analysis of the narrative form of his autobiography, this article assesses the origins and persistence of the money-self nexus in modern times.

Review of Schumann’s Dichterliebe and Early Romantic Poetics: Fragmentation of Desire by Beate Julia Perrey

Yonatan Malin — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 11:34:45 PST

Metric Displacement Dissonance and Romantic Longing in the German Lied

Yonatan Malin — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 11:34:41 PST

This article seeks to explore the hermeneutics of metric dissonance by examining the association between displacement or syncopation-type conflicts and Romantic longing (Sehnsucht) in the German Lied. It includes close readings of music-text relations in four specific songs: The 'Wandrers Nachtlied II' (Goethe/Schubert); 'Intermezzo' (Eichendorff/Schumann); 'Immer leiser wird mein Schlummer' (Lingg/Brahms); and 'Unterm Schutz' (Geroge/Schoenberg). The primary methodology for the process of metric analysis derives from the work of Harald Krebs.

The article as a whole traces changes both in the use of displacement dissonance, and in the nature of Sehnsucht, as well as correlations between the two over the course of the 'long nineteenth century'. The four analyses as a group outline an historical progression of 'introduction' (in Schubert), 'intensification' (in Schumann), 'complication' (in Brahms) and 'refraction' (in Schoenberg). The study thereby combines a history of metric dissonance - one of the recurring elements of nineteenth-century style - with that of Sehnsucht - one of the most prominent features of Romantic consciousness.

Interdisciplinary Studies at a Crossroads

Ethan Kleinberg — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 07:49:58 PDT

Consummatum Est: A Reassessment of Thomas Eakins's Crucifixion of 1880

Elizabeth Milroy — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 08:06:55 PST

The Public Career of Emma Stebbins: Work in Marble

Elizabeth Milroy — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 08:06:54 PST

The Public Career of Emma Stebbins: Work in Bronze

Elizabeth Milroy — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 08:06:53 PST

For the like Uses, as the Moore-Fields’: The Politics of Penn’s Squares

Elizabeth Milroy — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 08:06:52 PST

A Muslim Shaman of Afghan Turkestan

Mark Slobin — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 08:40:18 PST

Music in the Culture of Northern Afghanistan

Mark Slobin — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 08:08:52 PST

Musical Multiplicity: Emerging Thoughts

Mark Slobin — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 08:05:12 PDT

A Faith in Ends: Sam Harris and the Gospel of Neo-Atheism

Mary-Jane Rubenstein — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 08:26:10 PDT

Interdisciplinary Studies at a Crossroads

Ethan Kleinberg — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 08:47:53 PDT

This article seeks to address the challenges facing interdisciplinary departments and programs at universities and colleges in the current academic climate.

Dionysius, Derrida, and the Critique of Ontotheology

Mary-Jane Rubenstein — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 08:47:52 PDT

A Certain Disavowal: The Pathos and Politics of Wonder

Mary-Jane Rubenstein — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 08:47:51 PDT