It is entirely understandable that English-speaking readers with theological interests who pick up the first volume of The Glory of the Lord should feel that they are about to enter a somewhat inhospitable land. It may be discomforting for them to think that this is followed by six more, equally generous, volumes in the same series, or by fourteen further volumes if we are to include the Theo-Drama and Theo-Logic, which together make up Balthasar's project as a whole. Use of a tape measure or weighing scales will confirm that this is a very Germanic way of 'doing theology'. Readers will also quickly note that multi-volume works of this kind have to be read in their own particular way. Much of what is included is intended to exemplify the key ideas and does not need to be scrutinized with the same attentiveness as those passages or sections which set out the governing ideas of the entire project. The skill of reading a multi-volume work of this kind, then, is to identify as quickly as possible the guideline passages which are decisive for reading the whole. Many of these can be found in the first volume, Seeing the Form, and in the fifth volume (of the English edition) on modern metaphysics, although it is part of Balthasar's method to scatter highly judicious and insightful theoretical passages in the interstices of lengthy historical discussions.

In the solemnly promulgated teachings of the Second Vatican Council, the Church defines herself as 'an instrument for the redemption of all, sent forth into the whole world as the light of the world and the salt of the earth'. But the Church also defines herself as the 'sacrament [efficacious sign; embodied form] by which Christ's mission is extended to include the whole of man, body and soul, and through that totality the whole of nature created by God'. As the mystical body of Christ, the Church thus is the instrument for God's plan to gather 'all things' (Eph. 1:10) in Christ, as well as the eschatological form of redeemed creation. In other words, the Church is indeed a tool, but also (at least by anticipation) that for which the tool is used: she is paradoxically both means and end - however provisionally that end is to be understood. But even provisionally, she embodies the end above all in her celebration of the Eucharist. For in the gift of the Eucharist, Christ endows the Church with the 'real presence' of his body and blood together with an inner participation in his mission to the world. If the mission of the Son is to redeem creation by means of an exchange (admirabile commercium) in which he offers himself eucharistically to the world and receives the world as gift from the Father, then the Church is called to enter into Christ's life and mission by eucharistically receiving creation in its entirety as a gift that mediates and expresses the triune life - thereby confirming and fulfilling God's original plan for the world.

EXPOSITION

For Hans Urs von Balthasar a fundamental truth about being human is the limit imposed on human nature by the polarity of sexual difference: one is born either male or female (TD3, 283). To be human is to be not simply one but one of two, a dyad, with one sex opposite to or over against the 'other'. 'Man only exists in the opposition of the sexes, in the dependence of both forms of humanity, the one on the other.' There has never been a universal, sexually neutral person, no original 'androgynous primal being' or 'sexless first man' (TD3, 290):

INTRODUCTION

From the earliest years of Christianity, mention of Mary in the Gospels and creeds has ensured that whenever the Good News of Jesus Christ is proclaimed, the name of his Mother, Mary, has also been heard. For that reason, the earliest doctrinal debates nearly always included reflections upon this woman's significance as part of the early Church's efforts to come to terms with the significance and uniqueness of how God was acting in Christ. But in later Christianity, theology and devotion have not always reflected on the place of Mary when considering the person and work of Christ, with the result that the Blessed Mother began to take on a certain quasi-independent role in Catholic theology while she receded far into the background in Protestant theology and devotion.

One of the more curious passages by Harriet Beecher Stowe appears in a novel by someone else. In August 1857 she contributed a “Preface” for the second novel by an African-American author, Frank J. Webb's The Garies and Their Friends. After acknowledging violence against free black people and abolitionists in the north, especially virulent in the 1830s and a matter central to the novel, Stowe claimed that “this spirit was subdued, and the right of free inquiry established . . .” Had she concluded there, this might simply be an example of a northerner congratulating her section on its moral superiority to the south. She added, however, that “the question [of freedom for African Americans], so far from being dangerous in the Free States, is now begun to be allowed in the slave States . . .” Stowe must have known how wrong this was. Her second anti-slavery novel, Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856), appeared a year before The Garies and a large part of its plot revolved around southern suppression, often violent, of anti-slavery speeches and publications.

The key to understanding how someone who went to great lengths to defend her accuracy could be so misguided is in the final words of the paragraph. “[T]here are,” she wrote, “some subjects the mere discussion of which is a half-victory.” Stowe was less interested in southern openness to antislavery views – which hostile southern responses to her novels should have led her to doubt – than in defending the power of words to change individuals and, through them, society. As she put it in her 1854 “Appeal to the Women of the Free States,” “there is not a woman in the United States, when the question [of slavery] is fairly put before her, who thinks these things are right.”

Two views on the nature and derivation of Bruckner's orchestral practices have predominated. In the early part of the twentieth century, the prevailing attitude styled Bruckner as a Wagnerian symphonist, and thus characterized his orchestration as a (more or less successful) imitation of Wagner's instrumental textures. With the publication in the 1930s and 1940s of the complete edition under Robert Haas, this view proved hard to sustain, relying as it did on the first published editions, the orchestration of which was often changed, to overtly Wagnerian ends, and without Bruckner's consent. The Wagnerian interpretation consequently ceded to an ‘organistic’ conception: orchestral technique was conditioned above all by the composer's long association with the organ loft.

Opinions on this matter crystallized in the mid-1930s, in a debate between Max Auer, then president of the Bruckner Gesellschaft, and the theorist and analyst Alfred Lorenz. Auer presented perhaps the classic formulation of the organistic view. The basis of his attitude was a belief in the importance of formative musical experience: whatever subsequent influences Bruckner accrued, his aural imagination was crucially formed during his period of employment at the monastery of St. Florian, and afterwards as organist of Linz Cathedral. His concept of orchestration was therefore predicated on the soundworld of the organ and its technical possibilities. The link between the organ and orchestration was located in the resemblance of Bruckner's way of constructing orchestral texture to the technique of organ registration, a connection mediated by the composer's predilection for keyboard improvisation.

In memoríam Eugene K.Wolf (1939–2002)

There is something sphinx-like about Bruckner's musical forms. They can seem neat and traditional at one moment, but at the next appear free and unconventional. This duality is evident in the rather disparate interpretations, ranging from the accusation of ‘formlessness’ to the claim that Bruckner's symphonies represent a pinnacle in the evolution of musical form, that have been offered, discussed, and elaborated from the nineteenth century onward.

A prevalent early judgement found Bruckner's music ‘formless’. This concern was first raised after the composer conducted the Second Symphony on 26 October 1873. A. W. Ambros, staking out what was to become a familiar position, wrote that instead of exhibiting, as expected, a ‘firmly joined musical structure [festgefügte musikalische Tektonik]’ the symphony drove the listener to ‘breathlessness’ by presenting a series of ‘tonal shapes [Tongebilde] wilfully strung one after another’. Throughout the 1880s the notion that Bruckner's symphonies were chaotic in form percolated through antagonistic reviews, most importantly in those by Hanslick, Kalbeck, and Gustav Dömpke. Dömpke, for example, opened his review of the Viennese premiére of the Seventh Symphony with the assertion ‘Bruckner lacks the feel for the primary elements of musical formal shape, for the coherence of a series of melodic and harmonic component parts.’ Even observers sympathetic to Bruckner's music were occasionally puzzled by his forms; Hugo Wolf referred to a certain ‘formlessness’ that haunted the symphonies despite their ‘originality, grandeur, power, imagination and invention’.

Before readers can begin to address the general question of Harriet Beecher Stowe's relation to regionalism, the category itself requires an introduction. Certainly Stowe wrote “regional” fiction throughout her writing life, even in Uncle Tom's Cabin, if in using that adjective we mean to highlight the way she locates her fiction in geographical places. However, literary regionalism from its origins in the nineteenth century does more than name place; it also locates the social and cultural perspectives of the regional characters who live and speak in its pages in ways these characters would recognize as their own, and it does so without holding them up to ridicule or allowing them to serve as yardsticks of the queer which then enable readers outside the place or from urban centers to assert the measure of their own normality.

Critics and literary historians have described a variety of fictional modes that depicted regional characters in the nineteenth century. The “humorists of the Old Southwest” began writing as early as 1831 for the sporting magazine, Spirit of the Times, in imitation ofWashington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” However, in the works of these humorists, written for an audience of “the wealthy slaveholding sportsmen and their friends and allies,” narrators encourage readers to derive “humor” from cruelty to characters in the tales, especially to white women, Negroes, lower-class white men, and sometimes animals, especially horses. While regionalism may contain elements of humor, which we find as early as the young Harriet Beecher’s first significant fiction, her 1834 “A New England sketch” (later renamed “Uncle Lot”), Stowe is clearly suggesting an alternative to the kind of literary regional material characteristic of the “humorists of the Old Southwest.” In Stowe’s work, and later in the work of regionalists more generally, regional characters receive respectful and even empathic treatment, and narrators do not earn humor at their characters’ expense.

At first glance, the phrase “postmodernism and performance” seems straightforward: a critical rubric that designates the postmodernist practices within a specific cluster of cultural categories. Yet even when touched upon lightly, this rubric shatters into a multitude of related yet distinct shards, each a different facet of the relationship it describes. I shall attempt in this chapter to outline some of those facets. I shall not survey the field; rather, I shall discuss selected works and figures that exemplify particular issues and practices. I shall also focus on the performance scene in the United States, simply because it is the one I know best. Although I shall discuss several types of performance, I shall focus largely on questions concerning postmodernism and theatre because the particularly problematic relationship between those terms raises provocative questions. The complexities and difficulties of thinking through the conjuncture of theatre and postmodernism are worth discussing for the ways they point to issues involved in locating postmodernism within the history and practices of particular art forms.

Shortly after the US publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin on March 20, 1852, and following the publication of the novel in serial form, an employee at the New York publishing house of Putnam's mailed a two-volume set of Uncle Tom's Cabin to a contact in England. With no transatlantic copyright law to hinder them, British publishers began to bring out their own editions of the novel as early as July 8, 1852. And after “lying dormant on the bookshelves for several weeks,” the novel “exploded into favour.” Various British periodicals record the momentous nature of the success of Uncle Tom's Cabin: the Morning Chronicle writes “of illustrated editions, and newspaper printed editions, and editions in parts and numbers, ” concluding that Uncle Tom's Cabin is “the book of the day” and its “circulation . . . a thing unparalleled in bookselling annals.” The Eclectic Review records the novel's “marvellous popularity”: “its sale has vastly exceeded that of any other work in any other age or country”; Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine describes the sale of Uncle Tom's Cabin as “the most marvellous literary phenomenon that the world has witnessed.”

This is the end

Postmodernist thinking has typically reacted with suspicion to the notion of origins. As first cause or foundation, an origin - a transcendental ground to which all subsequent phenomena must pay obeisance - resurrects the deity that the “death of God” supposedly vanquished. This resistance to origins is matched by a much messier obsession with “ends.” Postmodernist endings are not so neat as the term suggests, however. They are thorny and recalcitrant, at the very least placing certain practices or instruments of thought off-limits; at most, the latter are rendered fallacious, untenable, “no longer possible.”

An abiding example of this temper is the seemingly suicidal declamation of the end of philosophy. Where philosophy has engaged directly with postmodernism – let us call the result, for the moment, post-Nietzschean continental philosophy – it has produced a kind of thinking that cleaves to the shadow of its own mortality, compulsively rehearsing its own demise. But unlike other postmodernist annulments – the “ends” of authorial presence and ideology, for example – philosophy’s reprieve was granted in the same breath as its death sentence was pronounced. Which is to say, accompanying the termination was the possibility of renewal, ways of finding new uses for philosophical thinking. In fixating upon the conditions of its own abolition, then, philosophy turned those conditions into a kind of negative capability.