Breaking hospitality apart: bad hosts, bad guests, and the problem of sovereignty

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/91999/1/j.1467-9655.2012.01758.x.pd

Islamophobia, religious conversion, and belonging in Europe

Being German, Becoming Muslim: Race, Religion, and conversion in the New Europe, by Esra Ozyurek, Princeton, Princeton University Press 2015, 192 pp., ISBN: 9780691162799

Chapitre 11. Une politique de « maison » dans la Jordanie des tribus : réflexions sur l’honneur, la famille et la nation dans le royaume hashémite

La politique de la « maison » : problématique Le Moyen-Orient ne peut plus être qualifié de région périphérique au regard de la théorie anthropologique, comme il le fut clairement jusque dans les années 1980. On a souvent attribué cette marginalité à la nature même de cette région, censée être trop complexe, trop lettrée, trop historique, trop religieuse ou trop politique pour se qualifier comme objet de l’ethnographie traditionnelle. Or, à mon sens, il serait plus pertinent d’évaluer cette m..

Handel and the sublime: crafting librettos, composing oratorios, and transfixing audiences in eighteenth-century England

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Boston UniversityPLEASE NOTE: Boston University Libraries did not receive an Authorization To Manage form for this thesis or dissertation. It is therefore not openly accessible, though it may be available by request. If you are the author or principal advisor of this work and would like to request open access for it, please contact us at [email protected]. Thank you.The sublime represented the height of musical achievement in mid-eighteenth-century England. It stretched the imagination and overwhelmed the mind with astonishing depictions, shocking imagery, and evocations of the infinite. Yet sweeping applications of the term sublime thwarted attempts at a logical and consistent definition in the eighteenth century and continue to discourage modern scholarly inquiries into this marker of musical excellence. This dissertation redresses the matter by examining the sublime in four oratorios composed by George Frideric Handel and premiered in the mid-1740s: Samson (1743), Semele (1744), Belshazzar (1745), and Judas Maccaboeus (1747). I correlate musical examples regarded as sublime with the contemporary usage of the term drawn from a survey of poems, novels, treatises, periodicals, literary and musical criticism, correspondence, and other primary sources. The image that emerges reveals that Handel, his librettists, and his audiences frequently agreed on what constituted the sublime, and even distinguished among classes of sublimity. I identify four sublime types--rhetorical, religious, choral, and ineffable--and dedicate a chapter to each. Handel and his librettists employed a range of literary and musical devices to elicit praise for the sublime quality of the oratorios. Librettists altered literary models through spotlighting astonishing and shocking passages, excising irrelevant descriptions, and modifying stage directions and scene descriptions. They also added content when source texts lacked sufficient sublimity, interpolating selections from other works and introducing original material. Autograph scores and revisions reveal that Handel responded to their adaptations. His repertoire of sublime gestures comprises frenetic passagework, choral outbursts, martial themes, and an array of melodic, rhythmic, harmonic, textural, and timbral devices. In sum, this dissertation illuminates the art of adapting literary content for oratorio setting. It provides a fuller perspective of Handel's compositional style, recasting the composer as a figure attuned to the sublime potential of both music and literature, and reveals the composer's coherent (albeit wide-ranging) conception of the musical sublime. More broadly, the project elucidates the sublime in its formative age, when it assumed a central place within musical aesthetics and fortified an oratorio performance tradition that continues today.2031-01-0

Nationalism and the genealogical imagination: oral history and textual authority in tribal Jordan

This book explores the transition from oral to written history now taking place in tribal Jordan, a transition that reveals the many ways in which modernity, literate historicity, and national identity are developing in the contemporary Middle East. As traditional Bedouin storytellers and literate historians lead him through a world of hidden documents, contested photographs, and meticulously reconstructed pedigrees, Andrew Shryock describes how he becomes enmeshed in historical debates, ranging from the local to the national level.The world the Bedouin inhabit is rich in oral tradition and historical argument, in subtle reflections on the nature of truth and its relationship to poetics, textuality, and power. Skillfully blending anthropology and history, Shryock discusses the substance of tribal history through the eyes of its creators - those who sustain an older tradition of authoritative oral history and those who have experimented with the first written accounts. His focus throughout is on the development of a "genealogical nationalism" as well as on the tensions that arise between tribe and state.Rich in both personal revelation and cultural implications, this book poses a provocative challenge to traditional assumptions about the way history is written