How would our understanding of the history of literary theory change if we focused on the seminal essays, rather than the monumental books and monographs? It would surely seem more variegated and provisional, less finished and definitive, more of a process of trying out ideas and defending interests, more motley, confusing, and elusive, a bit like the essay form itself. This chapter examines the rise and fall of theory in the UK inside and outside the academy, beginning with its origins in the British New Left, which looked to continental Europe for intellectual sustenance. It traces the institutional influences and pressures exerted on the essay form as it migrates across the Channel, arguing that while critique could be amenable to the norms of tough-minded knowledge acquisition, the more oblique and personal voice that we associate with essayism has, until recently, often been eschewed in universities.

Following the Franco-Prussian War, Paris regained its former position as an important international cultural centre. This chapter addresses Debussy’s cultural position in relation to the historical framework of the Franco-Russian Cultural Alliance. Within this context, many Russians had already come to Paris around the time of the Exposition Universelle of 1889, including Glazunov, Scriabin, Fokine, Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, Stravinsky, and others. The first French concerts of Mussorgsky’s music occurred at the 1878 Exposition Universelle. By 1890, the influence of the Russian ‘Mighty Five’ can be traced in the pentatonic/diatonic modalities of Russian folk music in Debussy’s compositions. The Russian impact is apparent in Debussy’s piano music and it. The chapter offers a relational study of how Debussy’s life and works were connected to the broader web of Parisian and French interactions with the world, with a specific focus on Franco-Russian and Franco-Spanish exchanges.

Chapter 2 brings to light a dozen desertion-themed plays and operas that followed in the wake of Le Siège de Calais. These works, which were performed during the Old Regime’s twilight, are analyzed alongside recent scholarship on military and early modern masculinities to tease out the theatricalization of an emerging martial culture that drew on emotional brotherhood and feminine exclusion. This chapter includes a comparative analysis of two versions of one play, Le Déserteur, a sentimental anti-war drame by Louis-Sébastien Mercier and an alternative version of the play that was dramaturgically “militarized” by Joseph Patrat for soldiers and sailors at the navy’s theater in Brest (Le Théâtre de la Marine). A close reading of variants, edits, and both textual and cultural manipulation presents war drama as a site of conflict in a larger intellectual battle where different factions in French society argued about reform cultures inside military and theatrical circles.

This chapter is an account of my experiences as a member of the faculty in different universities. I taught at Caltech where I was a member of an interdisciplinary group of faculty in the humanities and social sciences and came to know prominent humanists in other fields as well as scientists such as Richard Feynman, Murray Gel Man, and Max Delbruck. I then moved to the University of Michigan where I joined an active group of interdisciplinary scholars, encountered the attractions and problems of cultural studies, and then began to do institutional work by creating a new interdepartmental PhD program in Anthropology and History. Because of the success of that program, I was invited to Columbia University to chair the Anthropology Department and become the Franz Boas Professor at Columbia.

The conclusion starts with a look back at literary critic Leslie Fiedler’s defense of comics during a nationwide campaign that led to the self-censorship of the so-called Comics Code. Half a century later, the rise of the graphic novel has dispelled most of the prejudices against comics but often at the price of an unduly narrow understanding of the medium. Critiquing the blindspots of existing scholarship on the graphic novel, the author discusses how the digital humanities can contribute to a more expansive conception of this genre. Drawing on important interventions by Stuart Hall and Raymond Williams, this chapter emphasizes the need to analyze the interplay of socioeconomic factors and formal elements. Thus, the conclusion looks at the technical and methodological limitations that characterize the digital humanities at present and envisions future directions for research at the intersection of literary and visual studies.

During the last decade of the twentieth century, Latin American literary criticism completely redesigned its function. The cultural changes in the local and global scenes allowed this reconfiguration in the frame of neoliberal politics and economic crisis. Among the new conditions of the critical practice, we can mention the changes in the idea of literature and the new writing practices; the demands of professionalization in the universities; the emergence of cultural studies in the Anglo-Saxon academy; the crisis of the humanities; and a paradoxical proliferation of new journals and publishing houses. This chapter explores those changes, focusing on the institutional processes. In the context of globalization, the literary critic’s role was radically transformed. It also studies the local contexts of production of knowledge and the new forms of circulation of ideas, knowledges, and cultural practices. The introduction traces the links with the critical tradition of the 1960s in Latin America. The chapter then focuses on the dialogues that literary criticism – now transformed in cultural critique – establishes with different local cultural practices and exchanges with international theoretical thought.

In the 1820s, a stable company of Italian singers was in charge of the operatic performances staged at the Imperial Theatre in Rio de Janeiro. Working together with a French ballet troupe, those soloists joined forces to present their repertoire before a heterogeneous audience. Works by Rossini and his contemporaries were sung in the original language, subscriptions were sold for annual seasons and Italian masterpieces crowned the theatrical festivities offered to the Emperor. The chapter examines this recently independent country’s attraction for foreign singers and looks at how these artists were able to pursue their careers in a totally different milieu to that to which they had been accustomed, living in a city that offered great opportunities, but also considerable challenges to newcomers. A small group of Italian singers were employed by a local impresario, with the aim of making opera a viable cultural activity at an Imperial Court that was proud of its connections with Europe, yet they also struggled with economic difficulties and the country’s political instability. The press assumed a central role in negotiating the relationship between artists and their audiences, revealing a growing public interest in opera, its backstage and the lives of its protagonists.

The introduction examines the concept of italianità within its historical and cross-disciplinary context. Since the eighteenth century, music and especially opera have frequently been used as signifiers of national identity. Rousseau’s writings, and the responses they received, were particularly influential in associating music with national styles, reflecting linguistic conditions as well as the development of musical and operatic genres. These ideas resonated in debates on music, but also in travel writing and political thought, as exemplified in the works of de Staël, Stendhal and Goethe, but also Byron and Dickens. During the nineteenth century, often narrowly described as an age of nationalism, drawing connections between music and national character assumed a new dimension in political and aesthetic debates, partly due to the idea of reading opera as a contribution to processes of political emancipation. Especially in the non-European world, ideas about music were negotiated in relation to colonial and postcolonial experiences. But they also contributed to new notions of cosmopolitanism and a universal sense of belonging. The extent to which opera was intended to take a position within the political battles of national movements and global conflicts remains a matter of debate among opera scholars and historians.

This chapter takes up the ways Marxist cultural theory has explored the intensified mechanization or automation of labor. It suggests that the relationship between labor-saving industrial technology and cultural transformation has been central to twentieth-century Marxist thought, from Frankfurt School theorists Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno; to mid-century forebearers of cultural studies like Antonio Gramsci and Herbert Marcuse; to activist thinkers C. L. R. James, Raya Dunayevskaya, and James Boggs; to the Italian autonomists. Despite and often alongside their persistent interest in consumption and the commodity, these thinkers have also explored the ways transformations in the “instruments of labor” affect productive workers themselves. The chapter concludes by drawing attention to the genre of the workers' inquiry, which yokes structural analysis of capital accumulation to a careful rendering of workers’ own experiences, and by calling for future workers inquiries exploring technology and the exploitation of university labor.

Though modernism has traditionally been associated with aesthetic autonomy and thus has often been considered in isolation from any political, social, or cultural context, much of what is now thought of as the new modernist studies was anticipated by developments in earlier years. Marxist political criticism, feminist scholarship, restorative work on writers of color, even the sort of textual study that went into new editions, all helped to connect modernist literature to the larger world of which it was a part. Still, modernist cultural studies was a late variant of cultural studies in general, its development retarded by the prestige of postmodernism, which had established itself against a modernism defined as disengaged and elitist. Thus, it was the decline of postmodernism as an influential category that opened the way for a new modernist cultural studies.

This book compares the rights and social inclusion of two racialized minority groups: Roma in Central and Southeast Europe (CSEE), and African Americans in the United States (U.S.), primarily in the American South. We couch those attempts loosely in the frameworks of Roma rights and civil rights, though we will focus mainly on Roma rights in post-Communist CSEE (from 1991 until the present) and civil rights during the U.S. Civil Rights movement (roughly 1954–1968).