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73807 results in Boydell & Brewer

Page 1279 of 3691

  • 6 - Commemoration at a Royal College

  • Edited by John S. Lee, Christian Steer
  • Book:
    Commemoration in Medieval Cambridge
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    25 October 2019
    Print publication:
    20 September 2018, pp 106-122

  • Summary

    The commemorative practices of a college founded by Henry VI, crowned king of England in 1429 and king of France in 1431, were inevitably different to those of any other Cambridge college. They reflected the personal and express wishes of the royal founder in respect of his family and himself, and they also reflected the scale and diversity of the endowments he and his successors made to his college. The commemorative practices of other donors who wished to be associated with the royal college, and of individual members of the foundation, were in turn influenced by those of the founder. But at the same time the way in which Henry VI framed his foundation, and the statutes he gave to the college, were modelled on the practices of his own father Henry V and those of William Wykeham, the founder of Winchester College and New College, Oxford. This applied as much to commemoration as to other features of the new foundation.

    FOUNDATIONS

    The College of the Blessed Virgin Mary and St. Nicholas was the first college at Oxford or Cambridge set up by a reigning monarch. Its foundation, with that of its sister Eton College, may have been the first independent initiative by the young Henry VI. Remarkably, he decided to lay the foundation stone of his new college at Cambridge with his own hands, and the ceremony took place just ten weeks after the acquisition of the site, on Easter Sunday, 2 April 1441. The inspiration for this novel act of commemoration may have been his father Henry V's laying of the foundation stone of the Bridgettine abbey of Syon in 1415. Henry VI repeated the act of laying the foundation stone for his other college of Eton on 11 June 1441, two months later. The ceremony attending these royal foundations probably followed the liturgy laid down in pontificals like that of William Durandus written in the late thirteenth century. There would have been a blessing of the stone, with the king taking the role normally assumed by the bishop, on the analogy of a baptismal rite. The stone would then have been lowered into the foundation trench.

Commemoration in Medieval Cambridge

  • 2 - Retracing Our Steps in Edgar Allan Poe's “The Man of the Crowd”

  • Richard Kopley
  • Book:
    The Formal Center in Literature
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    14 June 2019
    Print publication:
    15 September 2018, pp 19-27

  • Summary

    I PROVIDE THREE CHAPTERS in this volume on Poe's fiction not only because I am a Poe scholar, but also because he regularly provided framed centers. Poe had a very strong sense of the symmetrical form of his fiction. I will focus in this chapter on an increasingly studied tale, one about supposed unreadability.

    Even as the mysterious “man of the crowd” wanders through London, from the “D—— Coffee-House” back to what is now called the “D—— Hotel,” we as readers wander through the 1840 tale “The Man of the Crowd,” from the German book at the beginning that “does not permit itself to be read”—“er lasst sich nicht lesen”—back to that same book at the ending and that same quotation (M 2:506–7, 515). Scholars such as Ray Mazurek, Kevin Hayes, and Brett Zimmerman have noted the symmetrical verbal pairing. Steven Rachmann notes, too, the pairing of the title and epigraph with language at the close of the tale. And William Brevda observes another pairing, the phrase “absorbed in contemplation,” appearing shortly after the beginning and shortly before the end. Demonstrating the link between beginning and end, Zimmerman, Rachman, and Brevda note the marked circularity of the story. Scholarly recognition that the story is constructed of two halves encourages our seeking the remaining symmetries. Mazurek states that the first half, the exposition, consists of the first ten paragraphs and that the second half, the pursuit, consists of the second ten paragraphs. Other scholars have also remarked on the tale's two halves.

    So, our job becomes identifying more fully the symmetrical phrasing in those two halves and thereby locating the center. We proceed through a cluster of phrases and clauses early on—“The Man of the Crowd,” “Ce grand malheur, de ne pouvoir être seul,” “er lasst sich nicht lesen,” “D—— Coffee-House,” “momently increased,” “absorbed in contemplation” (M 2:506–7)—on to “Their brows [those of the passers-by] were knit, and their eyes rolled quickly” (M 2:508) to “filthy garments” and “ragged artisans” (M 2:510) and then back through “filthy and ragged” “clothes” (M 2:511) to “his [the old man's] eyes rolled wildly from under his knit brows” (M 2:512) and finally back to a familiar cluster of phrases and clauses—“D—— Hotel,” “momently increasing,” “absorbed in contemplation,” “He refuses to be alone,” “He is the man of the crowd,” “er lasst sich nicht lesen” (M 2:515).

  • Conclusion: The Quintessential German Artist

  • April A. Eisman
  • Book:
    Bernhard Heisig and the Fight for Modern Art in East Germany
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    14 June 2019
    Print publication:
    15 September 2018, pp 161-186

  • Summary

    It will take us longer to tear down the Wall

    in our heads than any wrecking company

    will need for the Wall we can see.

    —Peter Schneider, 1982

    Between 1964 and 1969, Heisig was at the center of four controversies about art. These centered on his speech at the Fifth Congress, his murals for the Hotel Deutschland, and his Paris Commune and Brigade paintings. In each controversy, he argued—in words or pigment—that artists, not politicians, should be the ones deciding what art in Socialism should be and that there needed to be a greater openness to modern artistic styles and to the breadth of life's experiences. Pushing the boundaries of what was officially acceptable at the time—in both content and style— Heisig ultimately helped to change painting in East Germany from the realistic, heroic, and optimistic socialist realism of the early 1950s to the dialogical, modern art of the 1970s. It is these latter works, by Heisig and others, that came to represent East Germany internationally beginning in the late 1970s.

    The shift to a modern artistic style in official East German art was facilitated by the rise of Erich Honecker to power. Shortly after replacing Ulbricht as head of the East German state in 1971, Honecker gave a speech at the Fourth Congress of the SED's Central Committee, reproduced in Neues Deutschland, in which he stated that, “when one starts from a committed Socialist position, there can be … no taboos in art and literature, neither in content nor in style.” In the wake of this speech, the openness to modern art that Heisig and others had fought for throughout the 1960s became official and the debates around art ended, at least with regard to the expressionist tradition and for those committed to Socialism.

    This shift in cultural policy marked the beginning of Heisig's rise to national, later international, recognition. In 1972, he received the National Prize of the GDR (Second Class) and became chair of the VBK-L for the second time.

  • 4 - The Contentious Emergence of the “Leipzig School”

  • April A. Eisman
  • Book:
    Bernhard Heisig and the Fight for Modern Art in East Germany
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    14 June 2019
    Print publication:
    15 September 2018, pp 106-131

  • Summary

    As the debate over the Hotel Deutschland murals unfolded in the Leipziger Volkszeitung in the summer of 1965, preparations were being made for the Seventh District Art Exhibition in Leipzig. Organized by the local chapter of the Union of Visual Artists, this exhibition was, along with the opening of the hotel, one of the major cultural events in the year-long celebrations for the city's eight hundredth anniversary. Held at the Messehaus am Markt, a new building located across the square from the historic city hall in downtown Leipzig and just up the street from the Hotel Deutschland, “the Seventh” contained 759 works by 175 artists, including three paintings and a number of prints and drawings by Heisig. One of these, a large oil titled Pariser Kommune (The Paris Commune, 1965, fig. 4.1), became embroiled in controversy before the exhibition closed, Heisig's third such entanglement in less than two years.

    The controversy around The Paris Commune centered on the seeming pessimism of the work, which marked a significant change in his portrayal of the subject. The first Socialist government on European soil, the short-lived Paris Commune was considered an important precursor to the GDR by many in East Germany and was a topic that Heisig had been making prints and paintings about for several years. But whereas his paintings from 1960 and 1962 focused on the beginnings of the commune, the hopeful early days after it was first established in March 1871, the 1965 painting focused on its bloody end two months later when, in May 1871, Parisians vainly defended their newly created Socialist government against heavily armed French troops. In addition to the temporal shift to the end of the commune, the 1965 painting also marked the culmination of a stylistic change in Heisig's work that began in the wake of his controversial speech at the Fifth Congress with the Christmas Dream of the Unteachable Soldier (1964) and the Hotel Deutschland murals— away from the straightforward realism that had previously dominated his easel paintings to one that combined multiple moments and events into one complex image.

  • Introduction

  • Richard Kopley
  • Book:
    The Formal Center in Literature
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    14 June 2019
    Print publication:
    15 September 2018, pp 1-12

  • Summary

    WE MAY BEGIN with a remarkable short story from Steven Millhauser's award-winning volume, We Others: New and Selected Stories, “Getting Closer.” This story concerns a boy, Jimmy, “nine going on ten” (58), who has anticipated with pleasure a trip to Indian Cove with his family. However, once the family arrives, the boy delays going swimming because he's decided that once he enters the water, the day will begin. He wants to forestall that moment: “He wants to stay on this side of things, to hold it right here” (63). Millhauser's brilliant recovery of boyhood, glowing with faithful detail and thought, is deftly arranged with symmetrical language over the course of fourteen paragraphs.

    I first read the story naively, yieldingly, nearly remembering from my own boyhood what Millhauser has described. Then I reread, with a tentative hope, looking for a subtle symmetry that might intensify or underscore meaning. Flipping the pages back and forth between the beginning and the end, I encounter “he's ready to begin” (59) and “he steps over the line and begins his day” (64). Checking within that frame, I discover “they passed the wooden sign with the words INDIAN COVE and the outline of a tomahawk” (59) and “what he wants is to go back to the wooden sign with the tomahawk” (63). I notice within that pair “this is it” (59) and “The river is it” (62). I'm encouraged, and I press on, reading closer to the center: “His father once told him the Housatonic's a tidal river” (60) and “He can see ripples there, like very small waves: a tidal river” (62). Pleased to see the design emerging, I then observe, “Julia [his sister] throws herself in, begins swimming out to the barrels” (60) and “Julia's looking at him from where she's resting against a barrel” (61). Sliding closer toward the center, I detect, “Then he begins rolling it [the inner tube] bumpily over the grass around the end of the picnic table toward the pine where Grandma's sitting” (60) and “Behind him's Grandma in her chair, the floor of pine needles, the picnic table” (61). With growing anticipation, I see, near the center, in the seventh of the fourteen paragraphs: “Grandma's chair isn't the heavy long one from the porch, with adjustable positions, no, she's got the small one with a straight back that unfolds with one easy pull” (60).

  • 13 - The Ridge of the Domino in Patricia Highsmith's Strangers on a Train

  • Richard Kopley
  • Book:
    The Formal Center in Literature
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    14 June 2019
    Print publication:
    15 September 2018, pp 107-115

  • Summary

    WRITING THE SCREENPLAY for Patricia Highsmith's 1950 novel Strangers on a Train, Raymond Chandler was challenged by the fact that the potential hero acted as he did, including murdering a man he didn't know, who had done him no harm. Chandler wrote to director Alfred Hitchcock, “The great difficulty of the story always was to make it credible to an audience that Guy should behave in the damnfool way in which he did behave.” Accordingly, Chandler modified the story so that Guy does not kill Bruno's father. But by strengthening the novel's credibility, Chandler diminished its formal balance. Evidently unwilling to suspend disbelief, the screenwriter suspended an element of symmetry. And even as the novel Strangers on a Train has a symmetry of plot, it also has a rough symmetry of language and a significant center. For a fuller understanding of Highsmith's nowclassic work, we should attend to its structure. I will begin with the story itself and then focus on the symmetry of plot and language and the center that they frame. I will also explore a vital classical allusion, which relates to the work's structure.

    Highsmith had the idea for the story—two men exchange murders to eliminate any incriminating motive—in Hastings-on-Hudson in late 1945. She began writing the novel in June 1947, continuing with the project at Yaddo, in Saratoga Springs, New York, in May through July 1948, and later in New York City; the book was published by Harper & Brothers in March 1950. A brief plot summary may be helpful here.

    Guy Haines, a young architect, and Charles A. Bruno, a bored, alcoholic, young ne'er-do-well—perhaps insane, certainly without conscience— meet on a train headed west through Texas. In his train compartment, Bruno confides to Guy (as Highsmith calls the characters) his hatred of his father and prompts Guy to reveal his efforts to divorce his unfaithful wife, Miriam, who may be reluctant to grant the divorce and might stand in the way of an important commission. To solve both their problems, Bruno proposes what he terms “the idea of my life”—that he kill Guy's wife and that Guy kill Bruno's father. They'll get away with it, he argues, because of the absence of motive.

  • 8 - Table as Text in James Joyce's “The Dead”

  • Richard Kopley
  • Book:
    The Formal Center in Literature
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    14 June 2019
    Print publication:
    15 September 2018, pp 69-74

  • Summary

    GOING FROM LEWIS CARROLL's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland to James Joyce's short story “The Dead”—the celebrated final work in his 1914 collection Dubliners—we step from one quadrille to another. Indeed, Martin Gardner comments, “‘Lobster Quadrille’ could be an intended play on ‘Lancers Quadrille’” (100–101n1), and the “Lancers Quadrille” is the one that Gabriel Conroy and Molly Ivors dance in “The Dead.” Garry Leonard has suggested that “The hyper-symmetrical action and reaction of the dance acts as an ironic counterpoint to the frightening misrecognition that occurs between Gabriel and Molly Ivors.” However, it should be added that the dance's very symmetry may hint at the story's symmetry. We may be attentive especially to a symmetry of language—as Clive Hart has observed, “there are unmistakable signs at least as early as ‘The Dead’ of the deliberate use of verbal motifs for structural and tonal effects.” But that symmetry must be sought—it is not the case that, as Peter J. Rabinowitz maintains, “The narrative's formal design, after all, is fairly straightforward.” Joyce's presentation of a holiday party and its aftermath in Dublin—revealing the protagonist Gabriel Conroy's growing self-doubt, culminating in his eventual chastening and epiphany— does indeed involve a subtle verbal symmetry, framing a significant center in the second section of the story's three sections. And, I will argue, that center—the laden supper table—serves as a mise en abyme, a deft representation of the story itself.

    Our identifying the symmetry may be gently encouraged by the narrator's stating of the piano performance of Gabriel's cousin, “He [Gabriel] knew that Mary Jane must be near the end of her piece for she was playing again the opening melody” (187). And scholars have noted pairings, which turn out to be symmetrical. For instance, John V. Kelleher has mentioned “Cab windows rattling” (180) and “a cab … its rattling noise” and “old rattling box” (214). John Wyse Jackson and Bernard McGinley have mentioned that “the crow … makes its second appearance in the story” (“crow to pluck” [187] and “hoarse as a crow” [211]). Several scholars comment on the parallel scenes involving Gabriel's reverie about the Dublin cityscape.

  • 7 - The Mythological Centers of Lewis Carroll's Alice Books

  • Richard Kopley
  • Book:
    The Formal Center in Literature
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    14 June 2019
    Print publication:
    15 September 2018, pp 62-68

  • Summary

    ALICE SAYS TO HER CAT at the end of Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, “Tell me, Dinah, did you turn to Humpty Dumpty? I think you did—however, you'd better not mention it to your friends, just yet, for I'm not sure.” Martin Gardner asks at the end of his edition of the Alice books, The Annotated Alice, “Why did Alice think Humpty was Dinah?” He cites what he terms “an ingenious theory”—that even as Humpty Dumpty spoke to a king, a cat may look at a king. He also mentions an essay that observes that the name “Dinah” begins and ends with the initials of Humpty Dumpty reversed (271n2). Still, the question remains an open one.

    I will offer an answer, applying the center-centered approach that has already been advanced here. I will provide a new reading of the Alice books, one complementary to other readings, including analyses of Carroll's life (such as Morton N. Cohen's biography and elsewhere) and considerations of Carroll's reading (such as Ronald Reichertz's study and in other works). As in previous chapters, I will curve around from the whole to a part to the whole—or from a part to the whole to a part—the hermeneutic circle. A circle, it will be seen, is a singularly appropriate image for reading the Alice books. And the hermeneutic circle will take us on another adventure in Wonderland, one that will lead to a new key.

    The Alice books are works of delicacy and whimsy—but they are also works of sturdy structure, of singular symmetry. We may consider first Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, proceeding from the outside in. An overview of that classic reveals repeated framing. We see in the opening poem about Carroll's first telling the story, four stanzas into the seven, the three Liddell sisters “In friendly chat with bird or beast— / And half believe it [“the tale”] true” (7). Then we see in the closing four paragraphs about Alice's sister's dream, at the beginning of the third paragraph, “So she sat on, with closed eyes, and half believed herself in Wonderland” (126). The word “half” in both cases—occurring half-way through the relevant passage—encourages the reader to think in terms of halves. The symmetrical phrasing in the two passages—“half believe” and “half believed”—confirms the evident framing.

  • 6 - Chiasmus in Henry David Thoreau's Walden

  • Richard Kopley
  • Book:
    The Formal Center in Literature
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    14 June 2019
    Print publication:
    15 September 2018, pp 55-61

  • Summary

    MY STUDENTS WERE often amused to learn that Henry David Thoreau had switched the order of his first and second names—he had been born David Henry Thoreau. I think the students enjoyed the simple early suggestion of defiance. However, one adult student, a mother, was not amused—she wrote about him with his original name, out of respect for his parents. My mentioning the name change was a lively way to begin classroom discussion—and it led to an important point: inversion was a critical literary technique of the writer Thoreau. Indeed, in Walden, a work renowned for its fine patterning, the deft use of chiastic inversion is one more measure of Henry David Thoreau's artistry. Chiasmus is varied in its resonance in Walden—sometimes it conveys defiance, sometimes balance. And the critical central chiasmus of the work furnishes the ultimate balance— and a vital allusion, as well.

    “And when the farmer has got his house, he may not be the richer but the poorer for it, and it be the house that has got him,” Thoreau states in “Economy.” Providing another reversal of our common understanding of owned and owning, he makes a similar point about livestock later in the same chapter: “I am wont to think that men are not so much the keepers of herds as herds are the keepers of men” (56). Pursuing his aesthetic of antithesis once more in “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For,” Thoreau quips, “We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us” (92).

    Other instances of chiastic reversal in Walden underscore Thoreau's claim to authority, his view of the individual's primacy over society:

  • • I discovered many a site for a house not likely to be soon improved, which some might have thought too far from the village, but to my eyes the village was too far from it. [“Where I Lived, and What I Lived For,” 81]

  • • It is true, I might have resisted forcibly with more or less effect, might have run “amok” against society; but I preferred that society should run “amok” against me. [“The Village,” 171, concerning Thoreau's imprisonment]

  • • It was not lonely, but made all the earth lonely beneath it. [“Spring,” 317, describing the soaring nighthawk]

    • Here, as elsewhere, Thoreau uses chiastic reversal to celebrate the unencumbered individual as he sets himself apart from society.

  • Introduction: Why Heisig Matters

  • April A. Eisman
  • Book:
    Bernhard Heisig and the Fight for Modern Art in East Germany
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    14 June 2019
    Print publication:
    15 September 2018, pp 1-17

  • Summary

    They paint more German in the GDR.

    —Günter Grass, 1982

    In 1997, Bernhard Heisig (1925–2011) was commissioned to create a painting for the Reichstag building in Berlin. One of East Germany's most successful artists, Heisig had seemed a natural choice for inclusion in what is now the Bundestag's permanent art collection, a veritable w ho's who of contemporary German artists, including Joseph Beuys, Anselm Kiefer, and Gerhard Richter. In the 1980s, Heisig had been highly praised on both sides of the Berlin Wall for his artistic commitment to the German tradition and especially to Adolph Menzel, Lovis Corinth, Max Beckmann, and Otto Dix. He regularly exhibited prints and paintings in major international art exhibitions such as documenta and the Venice Biennale as well as in numerous exhibitions in West Germany. He also painted the official portrait of the West German chancellor Helmut Schmidt for the German Chancellery in 1986. Three years later, when the Berlin Wall fell, much of Heisig's work was already in the West in a large retrospective exhibition that had opened to praise at the Martin-Gropius-Bau in West Berlin on September 30. It was the first—and ultimately only—major solo exhibition of a contemporary East German artist to be organized in a joint effort by curators from both Germanys.

    But the choice to include a work by Heisig in the Reichstag building just a few years after the Berlin Wall fell was heavily contested in the press. In February 1998, the eastern German art critic Christoph Tannert (b. 1955) published a letter in several newspapers arguing that to give Heisig the commission was “not only an art historical mistake, but also a political lack of instinct.” The problem, he stated, was Heisig's “cooperation with the GDR regime,” which Tannert saw as standing “in crass opposition to a democratic horizon of values.” Fifty-eight cultural and political figures signed the letter, including a number of eastern German artists from the alternative scene.

  • 11 - Balance in Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon

  • Richard Kopley
  • Book:
    The Formal Center in Literature
    Published by:
    Boydell & Brewer
    Published online:
    14 June 2019
    Print publication:
    15 September 2018, pp 92-98

  • Summary

    HAVING WORKED FOR Pinkerton's National Detective Service for six years (1915–21) and then written detective fiction for Black Mask for another six (1922–28)—leading to Red Harvest (1929) and The Dain Curse (1929)—Dashiell Hammett was well prepared to write the five serial installments that became the 1930 novel The Maltese Falcon. If, as Dorothy Parker wrote in 1931, “there is entirely too little screaming about the work of Dashiell Hammett,” the screaming certainly grew, and Christopher Metress could rightly state in 2005 that The Maltese Falcon is “now counted among the masterpieces of American literature.”

    Yet there remains a question about the nature of its structure. We may seem forewarned: Hammett wrote in 1934 at the beginning of his introduction to the Modern Library Edition of the novel, “If this book had been written with the help of an outline or notes or even a clearly defined plot-idea in my head I might now be able to say how it came to be written and why it took the shape it did.” James Guetti later contended, regarding the novel, that “Everything is strange in this story because everything is laid out in pieces.” William Marling responded to Guetti that the difficulty with reading The Maltese Falcon is that we have lost its context, “the mediation by the Victorian of the modern.” He adds, “There is no way to press the novel, as Guetti implies, and wrest the ‘mystery’ from its resisting details.” I do not wish to “press the novel,” but I do believe that the novel may press us. Without outline, notes, or plot-idea, Hammett nonetheless created what Richard Layman rightly termed “a unified novel.” This critic declared, “It is written with a mature sense of dramatic structure” —and, I would add, it is written with a keen sense of verbal structure, as well. Symmetry need not be wholly planned out; it may develop organically. That the pieces of The Maltese Falcon form a distinct whole becomes clearer if we investigate the novel with attention to roughly symmetrical language framing a significant center. The symmetry and the center will become evident, and they help reveal Hammett's abiding concern in The Maltese Falcon with balance.

Page 1279 of 3691