This volume considers the influential revival of ancient philosophical skepticism in the 16th and early 17th centuries and investigates, from a comparative perspective, its reception in early modern English, Spanish and French drama, dedicating detailed readings to plays by Shakespeare, Calderón, Lope de Vega, Rotrou, Desfontaines, and Cervantes. While all the plays employ similar dramatic devices for "putting skepticism on stage", the study explores how these dramas, however, give different "answers" to the challenges posed by skepticism in relation to their respective historico-cultural and "ideological" contexts.
Analyzes audio recordings of interwar Hebrew plays, providing a new model for the use of sound in theater studies.
Possessed Voices tells the intriguing story of a largely unknown collection of audio recordings, a valuable tool for understanding historical theater, which preserve performances of modernist interwar Hebrew plays. Seldom used in scholarship, Ruthie Abeliovich focuses on four recordings: a 1931 recording of The Eternal Jew (1919), a 1965 recording of The Dybbuk (1922), a 1961 radio play of The Golem (1925), and a 1952 radio play of Yaakov and Rachel (1928). Abeliovich traces the spoken language of modernist Hebrew theater as grounded in multiple modalities of expressive practices, including spoken Hebrew, Jewish liturgical sensibilities supplemented by Yiddish intonation and other vernacular accents, and in relation to prevalent theatrical forms. The book shows how these performances provided Jewish immigrants from Europe with a venue for lamenting the decline of their home communities and for connecting their memories to the present. Analyzing sonic material against the backdrop of its artistic, cultural, and ideological contexts, Abeliovich develops a critical framework for the study of sound as a discipline in its own right in theater scholarship.
“The author’s focus on historicizing and analyzing sound recordings and radio plays as a means to tackle the pervasive ephemerality problem in theater studies is a novel and valuable approach that represents a significant intervention in the field. These types of sources have had scant attention in theater studies to date, but Abeliovich makes a compelling argument that they belong at the center.” — Debra Caplan, author of Yiddish Empire: The Vilna Troupe, Jewish Theater, and the Art of Itinerancy
In Esoteric Images: Decoding the Late Herat School of Painting Tawfiq Daʿadli decodes the pictorial language which flourished in the city of Herat, modern Afghanistan, under the rule of the last Timurid ruler, Sultan Husayn Bayqara (r.1469-1506). This study focuses on one illustrated manuscript of a poem entitled Khamsa by the Persian poet Nizami Ganjavi, kept in the British Library under code Or.6810. Tawfiq Daʿadli decodes the paintings, reveals the syntax behind them and thus deciphers the message of the whole manuscript. The book combines scholarly efforts to interpret theological-political lessons embedded in one of the foremost Persian schools of art against the background of the court dynamic of an influential medieval power in its final years.
In Esoteric Images: Decoding the Late Herat School of Painting Tawfiq Daʿadli decodes the pictorial language which flourished in the city of Herat, modern Afghanistan, under the rule of the last Timurid ruler, Sultan Husayn Bayqara (r.1469-1506). This study focuses on one illustrated manuscript of a poem entitled Khamsa by the Persian poet Nizami Ganjavi, kept in the British Library under code Or.6810. Tawfiq Daʿadli decodes the paintings, reveals the syntax behind them and thus deciphers the message of the whole manuscript. The book combines scholarly efforts to interpret theological-political lessons embedded in one of the foremost Persian schools of art against the background of the court dynamic of an influential medieval power in its final years.
The Family of Man is one of the most famous photo exhibitions of all times. Since 1994, the last remaining original is exhibited publicly in Luxemburg. Whereas scholars have dismissed The Family of Man for decades as sentimental and stereotypical, teachers embraced it early on for its potential to instruct visual literacy. This article presents a set of three courses about The Family of Man, including a seminar, a practical tutorial, and an excursion to the exhibition in Clervaux, Luxemburg. It argues that The Family of Man is nowadays still important for teaching visual literacy at the intersection of photo history, photo theory, and exhibition design.
Issue 3/2019: Israel, Palestine and German Contemporary History; ed. by Evelyn Runge and Annette Vowinckel. Geographically and culturally the Middle East seems to be far away from Germany. From a historical point of view, this is a fallacy, because the virulent conflicts there today are closely interwoven with German and European colonial history, the history of National Socialism and German post-war history. The Middle East conflict is also present in many ways in contemporary German everyday life: while the media repeatedly report on anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist attacks, the restaurant »Kanaan« in Prenzlauer Berg, jointly run by a Jewish and an Arab Israeli, serves »Hummus for International Understanding«. Berlin and Jerusalem are connected on a completely different level by the presence of walls in the cityscape: from 1948 to 1967 Jerusalem was a divided city, Berlin from 1961 to 1989, since 2002 a wall separates parts of East Jerusalem from the Palestinian autonomous territories.Some of the contributions in this issue are devoted to the various effects of the Middle East conflict on German society, such as the presence of Palestinian and Israeli groups in the Federal Republic. Others focus on German-Israeli phenomena such as the reception of Ephraim Kishon's books or the Federal Republic's arms exports to Israel in the 1970s. The aim is to document and discuss how closely German contemporary history is linked to that of Israel and Palestine to this day.
Issue 3/2019: Israel, Palestine and German Contemporary History. ed. by Evelyn Runge and Annette Vowinckel. Geographically and culturally the Middle East seems to be far away from Germany. From a historical point of view, this is a fallacy, because the virulent conflicts there today are closely interwoven with German and European colonial history, the history of National Socialism and German post-war history. The Middle East conflict is also present in many ways in contemporary German everyday life: while the media repeatedly report on anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist attacks, the restaurant »Kanaan« in Prenzlauer Berg, jointly run by a Jewish and an Arab Israeli, serves »Hummus for International Understanding«. Berlin and Jerusalem are connected on a completely different level by the presence of walls in the cityscape: from 1948 to 1967 Jerusalem was a divided city, Berlin from 1961 to 1989, since 2002 a wall separates parts of East Jerusalem from the Palestinian autonomous territories.Some of the contributions in this issue are devoted to the various effects of the Middle East conflict on German society, such as the presence of Palestinian and Israeli groups in the Federal Republic. Others focus on German-Israeli phenomena such as the reception of Ephraim Kishon's books or the Federal Republic's arms exports to Israel in the 1970s. The aim is to document and discuss how closely German contemporary history is linked to that of Israel and Palestine to this day.
