The Rhetoric of Topics and Forms

Although the question of prioritizing either the level of content or that of form has often been controversial, most contributions of this volume treat them as internally connected. They undertake analyses of motifs, metaphors, and topoi, and thereby not only prove the relevance of rhetorical and thematic study, but also contribute to flourishing fields such as literary multilingualism, literature and emotions, and ecocriticism

Cultural Techniques: Assembling Spaces, Texts & Collectives

Addressing cultural techniques from different disciplinary perspectives, this volume elaborates upon a concept originally developed in media studies. In a series of case studies, it reconstructs the basic operations of spatialization underlying more complex symbolic artefacts and articulations, which range from techniques of the body to landscapes, from paperwork to encyclopedias, from collections to collectives

Technique for the Developing Dramatic Soprano

This dissertation was inspired by a Facebook post by David L. Jones regarding common pedagogical problems in the dramatic soprano Fach. I am a dramatic soprano, who has dealt with many of the technical problems listed in his post. David L. Jones is an internationally recognized teacher and coach and has worked with some of the most well-known professional dramatic sopranos. After considering these pedagogical challenges, it was decided the best course of action was to interview professional singers, teachers, and coaches in the dramatic soprano Fach. After conducting a state of research, it was found that there was not an overwhelming amount of research specifically related to the training of dramatic sopranos. The following document is meant to be a guide for voice professionals in navigating the pedagogical problems often found in the dramatic soprano Fach, as well as offering solutions to these technical problems. Section I contains the introduction and topics include the method of research, credentials of each interviewee, types of dramatic sopranos, information related to the European Fach system, challenges in teaching dramatic sopranos, and specialized training considerations. Section II encompasses the main body of the paper specifically addressing pedagogical problems and solutions. Information concerning breathing, registration, and interpretation tools are addressed. Section III offers a brief conclusion with advice from professional singers from the past and present. The document contains three appendices, which include full transcriptions of the interviews, a performer’s guide to music specifically aimed towards dramatic sopranos, and the IRB approval letter

Obiter Dicta

"Stitched together over five years of journaling, Obiter Dicta is a commonplace book of freewheeling explorations representing the transcription of a dozen notebooks, since painstakingly reimagined for publication. Organized after Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia, this unschooled exercise in aesthetic thought—gleefully dilettantish, oftentimes dangerously close to the epigrammatic—interrogates an array of subject matter (although inescapably circling back to the curiously resemblant histories of Western visual art and instrumental music) through the lens of drive-by speculation. Erick Verran’s approach to philosophical inquiry follows the brute-force literary technique of Jacques Derrida to exhaustively favor the material grammar of a signifier over hand-me-down meaning, juxtaposing outer semblances with their buried systems and our etched-in-stone intuitions about color and illusion, shape and value, with lessons stolen from seemingly unrelatable disciplines. Interlarded with extracts of Ludwig Wittgenstein but also Wallace Stevens, Cormac McCarthy as well as Roland Barthes, this cache of incidental remarks eschews what’s granular for the biggest picture available, leaving below the hyper-specialized fields of academia for a bird’s-eye view of their crop circles. Obiter Dicta is an unapologetic experiment in intellectual dot-connecting that challenges much long-standing wisdom about everything from illuminated manuscripts to Minecraft and the evolution of European music with lyrical brevity; that is, before jumping to the next topic.

Cultural Techniques

Addressing cultural techniques from different disciplinary perspectives, this volume elaborates upon a concept originally developed in media studies. In a series of case studies, it reconstructs the basic operations of spatialization underlying more complex symbolic artefacts and articulations, which range from techniques of the body to landscapes, from paperwork to encyclopedias, from collections to collectives

The complete fool: Insights and trajectories from an ancient path

This study presents a novel and accompanying exegesis which explore the fool behind the Fool by stripping away his usual costume and arenas of power and folly to expose an essence – an impulse of potentiality – that helps explain the Fool’s perpetuity and argues his critical significance as a catalyst for creative thinking

From Putsch to Purge. A Study of the German Episodes in Richard Hughes’s The Human Predicament and their Sources

The two last novels by Richard Hughes (1900-1976), the first in his planned The Human Predicament series, are partly set in Germany in the years between the First and the Second World War. Much of the action in The Fox in the Attic (1961) takes part in and around Munich, culminating in a fictional reconstruction of the so-called Hitler Putsch on November 8-9, 1923, the future dictator's aborted early bid for power. In the sequel, The Wooden Shepherdess (1973), the time-span is wider and the places covered are more numerous. The novel's finale is a reconstruction of the so-called Röhm Purge, the internecine Nazi killings of the SA-leaders on June 30, 1934 and the following days. The present study, with its focus on Hughes's German episodes and their sources, is based on extensive research into his unpublished papers in the Lilly Library, Bloomington, Indiana, and the Reading University holdings of his correspondence with Chatto & Windus, the London publishers. In two postscripts, Hughes acknowledged some of his sources. The list is considerably extended in this study which singles out fifteen of his providers of historical material, while assessing the impact the borrowings have had on his fiction: the Bavarian von Aretin family, distantly related to him; his Welsh friend Goronwy Rees; the Prussian Ernst von Salomon; a certain Captain F. Götz; August Kubizek, Hitler's friend from their youth; three members of the Munich Hanfstaengl family: Ernst, Helene and Egon; the novelist and travel-writer Sir Philip Gibbs; the historians Sir John Wheeler-Bennett, Elizabeth Wiskemann and William Manchester; and finally three (former) Nazis: Walter Schellenberg, Kurt G. W. Ludecke and Otto Strasser. The study's narratological considerations of the interplay of fact and fiction in Hughes’s novels make use of some of Gérard Genette's distinctions (intradiegetic focalization, extradiegetic narration, etc), and the question of plagiarism (a term mentioned by Hughes himself) is briefly broached. The final chapters of the study concern Hughes and the German bookmarket, and his unfinished sequel, the torso published as The Twelve Chapters. In conclusion, Hughes's Hitler portrait and the critical response it provoked is discussed. The study quotes liberally from Richard Hughes's hitherto unpublished manuscript material