9th Annual International Congress of the Mediterranean
Studies Association
Università di Genova
May 24-27, 2006
1A. “Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s
Day?” Writing the Encounter of Old World and New World
Chair: Susan L.
Rosenstreich, Dowling College, Oakdale, New York
“Mapping the New World Body: Early Transpositions
of Medieval Monstrosity”
Lynn
Ramey, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee
This paper will consider how ideas of monstrosity were transposed onto early conceptions of autochthonous inhabitants of the New World.
“Piri Reis’
New World: Columbus, the Mediterranean and the Ottomans”
Pascale Barthe, University of
North Carolina at Wilmington
This paper will consider Ottoman contributions to the European conception of the New World.
“German
in Early Modern Transatlantic Studies”
Dwight E. Raak Ten Huisen,
Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan
This paper considers the role of German expeditions to explore the New World. The author has studied Hans Staden’s journals.
1B. Medieval
History I
Chair: Jo Ann McNamara, Hunter College, New York
“Ibn Khaldun and the
Mediterranean World: Mediterranean North/Mediterranean South?”
Clara Estow, University of
Massachusetts Boston
On the occasion of the 600th anniversary of the life of the Muslim thinker Ibn Khaldun, (1332–1406) it is appropriate to examine his views on the role of the Mediterranean in the development of his theories about the rise and fall of empires. He has been rightly acknowledged as one of the precursors of what eventually became the “social sciences” (economics, sociology, political science and historiography, among them). His insights about the role of, among others, geography, natural resources, trade, population movements, accumulation of wealth, and political conflicts in the fate of empires tell us much about the Mediterranean world at the close of the 14th century.
At the same time, it is now commonplace treat the Mediterranean as made up of two distinct areas, North and South. In many interesting ways, this distinction has become a convenient suitable euphemism to distinguish between Europe and Africa, if not to separate them further.
This
paper seeks to reflect on the extent to which Ibn Khaldun’s understanding of
the Mediterranean world anticipated (or not) this phenomenon.
“Cross-Cutting Circles: Medieval Mediterranean
Muslim Minorities”
Brian A. Catlos, University of California, Santa
Cruz
This paper examines the experiences
of several Muslim minority populations in and around the Mediterranean, namely
the mudéjares of the Crown of Aragon, Norman Sicily and the Kingdom of
Hungary. In the late twelfth century each of these communities was apparently
stable and reasonably secure under Christian dominion, yet by the end of the
thirteenth century only one of these remained. The varying experiences of three
populations cannot be accounted for simply by shifting attitudes to minorities
in the Latin West, whether these resulted as a reaction to Muslim victories in
the Crusader East, the new legalistic and reactionary spirit of the clergy or
the chauvinistic dictates of the Papacy. It seems, rather, that it was the
integration of minority members in majority societies which was reflected in
their respective fates. Drawing on the sociological theories of Simmel, Bendix,
and Blau and Schwarz, this paper suggests that “crosscutting
social circles” were a key factor in sustaining Muslim minorities in the
Christian dominated Mediterranean of the Middle Ages.
“Genoese-Mallorcan Relation in
the Thirteenth Century”
Larry
J. Simon, Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo
The Genoese relationship with Islamic Mallorca in the twelfth century has been well documented, and the two extant bilingual trade agreements much studied. The antagonism and rivalry between Genoa and the Catalans in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is well known if not yet studied, and can be gleaned from statements by chroniclers such as Ramon Muntaner—”the crimes of the Genoese are so great that you could not record them on all the paper of Jativa.” But the relationship in the thirteenth century was much more ambiguous, full of rivalry and antagonism, but also of cooperation and interaction, with a surprising Genoese presence on the island. My paper, based on archival material from notary registers in Genoa’s Archivio di Stato, scattered parchments in the Arxiu del Regne de Mallorca, the Archivo de la Catedral de Mallorca, and the Archivo Historico Nacional in Madrid, and the published text of the Genoese Lay Christian (Inghetto Contardo)-Jewish Disputation of Mallorca, will explore the nature of these relations.
“Discourses
on Money and Monetary Management in the Late Medieval and Early Modern
Mediterranean: A Comparative Study of Islamic and Latin Scholars”
Olivia
Orozco, European University Institute, Florence
The paper will
advance the last results of my Ph.D. research, which examines money and
monetary changes in the works of Islamic and Latin scholars in the late
medieval and early modern Mediterranean. During that period, scholars, economic
and political agents’ perceptions of monetary issues were changing along with
the transformations that Mediterranean societies and economies were undergoing
at that time. These changing perceptions, in particular concerning the
functions and value of money, the use of money, the issue of debasement, the
control of petty change, and the relation between money and prices, form the
main focus of my inquiry. A varied set of works by scholars from both the
Islamic and the Latin traditions has been selected in order to examine their
different views on those monetary issues (among others: al-Ghazali, Ibn Rushd,
Ibn Taimiyyah, Ibn Khaldun and al-Maqrizi’s from the Islamic side, and St.
Thomas, Antonino of Florence, Buridan, Oresme, Copernicus, Azpilcueta, Bodin
and Mariana’s from the Latin part). The monetary views of the scholars are
analyzed and compared in respect to: (1) their intellectual and religious
traditions, (2) their own experiences and observations of reality, and (3) the
existence of a shared set of common.
1C. Rock Steady or Hanging Boulder? Turkey’s
Precarious Geopolitics in the Mediterranean
Chair: Nevin Ates,
Istanbul Bilgi University, Turkey
“The Cultural
Geopolitics of Being Mediterranean”
Galip B. Isen, Istanbul Bilgi
University, Turkey
The geopolitics of being Mediterranean can be interpreted as a quest to
arrive at a genre of geo-political paradigms that seek to achieve security on
multilateral, trans-cultural paths of understanding, forms and modes of
cultural interaction based on accommodating rather than underlining differences
and patterns of clash. The meaning and context of geopolitics has changed
drastically with the progress in communication and technology to supersede
merely the geographical. Since the end of the Cold War conflict has markedly
shifted toward such new concerns as terrorism, fundamentalism, illegal
migration, mass poverty or ecological deterioration which represent a risk for
a whole social, political and economic way of life incorporated in the
principles and goals of modernity. The paper aims to explore the cultural aura
surrounding the Mediterranean to assist charting the possibilities that
political praxis has to navigate through in order to achieve the objectives of
stability, freedom and welfare.
“Geostrategy Never Dies: Turkey’s
Newly Acquired Position in the Middle East and
Eastern
Mediterranean”
Ulke Aribogan,
Istanbul Bilgi University, Turkey
Its strategic position in the middle of the “old
world” has historically kept Turkey under focus in major geopolitical
calculations. Its location was Turkey’s chief bargaining asset during the Cold
War and not long after the Soviet collapse, the Gulf War and its aftermath kept
geopolitics fairly high on the list. This paper analyzes the political aspects
of Turkey’s situation in the current political situation concerning the Middle
East, especially in regard to what can happen after Iraq and the possible neutralization
of the conflict between Israel and its Arab neighbors in the Eastern
Mediterranean.
“Where Did the Boot Step and Where Did it Stop? Turkish-Italian Tension and Contention in the
Mediterranean during the Mussolini Era”
Hilal Akgul,
Istanbul Bilgi University, Turkey
Fascist Italy’s expansionist policies that peaked with the invasion of
Ethiopia also set eyes on control of the Mediterranean, causing noticeable
disturbance for Turkey, seeing implicit hostility in Rome’s declaration of the
sea as Mare Nostrum. Turkey, whose foreign policy was based on avoiding any
conflict that might involve change in the status quo
was so anxious with Mussolini’s imperial ambitions that it felt a need to
increase its war readiness. This paper looks at the crossing of swords between
two major political elements in the Mediterranean.
1D. Borders and Interpretations of the Mediterranean
Chair: Maria
Antonietta Mariani, Centre for Social Studies, Rome
“Quando
i segni non hanno più senso: L’Ulisse senza risorse negli schemi di identità e
perdita del sé: In margine a Itaca per sempre di Luigi Malerba”
Rita
Venturi, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island
In
the literature of all the ages, from Virgil to Joyce, of Ulysses it is the
nature of wandering that it enunciates, is the nature of frustrated sailor and
I never tame that it returns in much production. Nevertheless it is like if us
one were forgets since to you endured that Ulisse does not travel for appeals
to: far island of utopia is not to the search of one earth promised neither of
one. The reasons of its travel are very more concrete without alcunché than
exotic taste: Ulisse has gotten lost during the return to Ithaca, Ulysses must
return to house. In this c it is indeed little of magical or wonderful. Malerba
returns to these elements of bottom: its Ulysses is not the traveler for
antonomasia, but l archetype of $R–he who is lost. A hero smarrito in the space
but also in a time, because he is astonished not to find the signs of the
twenty years of attended on the ace of the moglie neither knows to recognize
its island on which the time has operated heavy. “I watch myself around
smarrito because I do not recognize the pebbly coast, this covered barren earth
of trees undressed from twenty navy, l horizon of mountains, neither this sky
of color of the sea”. But above all it has lost same himself, victim of its
same one polytropia. “I am therefore being shipwrecked in my native land.”
“Utopia
and Shifting Space”
Maria Antonietta Mariani, Centre for
Social Studies, Rome
Myths use travels as a metaphor for reaching knowledge. A travel log therefore becomes human history itself. Ulysses is a mythical figure of Western culture, his shadow wanders around the Mediterranean looking for the identity. But in the ancient world, the boundary was fixed and no one would have dared to transgress it. Colombo steps over the known threshold. More and more the traveling experience narrows the world’s borders and defines the end of discovering.
If in the past
the Mediterranean narrated the borders of the known world and of the changing
empires, now, new borders are drawn. New stories of borders and conflicts,
shifted axes and international political strategies lie. Economic and political
changes define space changes. Space could be connected, disconnected or shared.
Power signs space, it fills up or it empties. Walls, gates, check points,
military bases, refugee camps, buffer zones: these are
some of our daily borders. They tell stories and keep memory. It happens in
Israel, Cyprus or other areas, moving on boundaries between ideologies or
religions. Then travelling could
mean escape.
“Prime Considerazioni sull’immagine di
Cristoforo Colombo nei siti web e nel manuali scolastici italiani”
Luciano Gallinari, Consiglio Nazionale
delle Ricerche (CNR), Cagliari
The paper is a first test of a
research that has like object the currently image of Christopher Columbus
proposed in Italy in the web sites and in the Italian school handbooks. From
this analysis emerges the survival of many old topoi about the Admiral and his
life.
2A.
Ex-Patriots Residing in Italy, 1920-1950
Chair: Elizabeth
Mathias, St. John’s University, Jamaica, New York
“Sounds
of Sardinian Shepherds’ Oral Poetry: Ethnographic Insights from D. H. Lawrence
in the Field”
Elizabeth Mathias
The mountain villages of central Sardinia, an area labeled the Barbagia in Roman times, range in size from about 400 to 7000 inhabitants. The economy of the region is agro-pastoral, representing a combination of herding of sheep, goats, or, more rarely, cattle. Most shepherds here are transhumant. In both summer and winter seasons, however, the pastures are generally near enough to the villages that the men may return to their homes for a day or so every few days. Men generally take turns tending the herds.
Shepherds’ work is essentially
gendered and men seek personal respect and social enjoyment largely within the
confines of the male working group. The gara
poetica, their verbal improvised poetic dueling goes on for many hours in
the sheepfold, the town squares and village bars. In 1921, D.H. Lawrence and
his wife, Frieda, traveled through the Barbagia
and listened to the shepherds’ verbal dueling from their bedroom above a
village bar. Lawrence hears the shouting of the men, the sounds of the ancient
verbal forms of the Shepherds and is puzzled. He suggests that the sound is
like dogs “yelping.” Lawrence’s early ethnographic description of highland
Sardinian social life and improvised poetry is invaluable. My own field tapes
of the shepherds’ verbal art and also of the women’s folk poetic form, l’attitu, funeral lamenting, will
illustrate my descriptions.
“Representing the Other in D. H. Lawrence’s
Italian Travel Literature”
Antonio
Traficante, Concordia University College of Alberta, and Grant MacEwan College,
Edmonton, Canada
Lawrence’s
relationship to Italy connected him to the broader Mediterranean, a past to
which Lawrence was especially drawn. Lawrence, I would argue, considered
himself just as much a European as he considered himself an Englishman—perhaps
more. Evidence of this, for example, can be seen in his three travel books—Twilight in Italy, Sea and Sardinia, and Etruscan
Places where his observations on English and Italian life usually serve to
introduce the reader to larger, more comprehensive issues which involve
European issues. Elsewhere, his translations of the Italian Giovanni Verga lead
Lawrence to speculate on the Italian writer’s connection to ancient Greece, and
reminiscences on the similarity of ancient Greece to Sicily. It should also be
remembered that Lawrence’s life-long quest for Rananim finally ends in the late
1920”s with his discovery of the ancient Etruscans. Finally, we should also
state that in such critical pieces as “Movements in European History,” Lawrence
once again establishes the clear and powerful link between England and the
Continent.
“Outsider Artist Leonardo ‘Diobello’ Sileo”
Moyra Byrne,
Washington, DC
Roger Cardinal defined the
creativity of what he termed “outsider artists” as deeply extra–cultural. In
his 1972 groundbreaking book Outsider
Art, Cardinal explained that the
artistic creativity of such self–taught artists springs directly from the
original source of the emotions, and manifests itself with a minimal debt
towards the forms and the course of cultural history. Leonardo Sileo, or “Diobello”,
self-taught woodcarver, “illiterate” poet and at times apocalyptic sage, was
such an artist.
“Diobello” was born in 1920 of
extremely poor sharecropper parents in Basilicata—the same the southern Italian
region in which Carlo Levi (Christ
Stopped at Eboli), in political exile in 1936–1937, discovered a peasant
world that he saw as existing “outside of history”. “Diobello” was in his 40’s
when he began to expand his expression in wood from that of a chance tavern
jest to the exploration of his visionary fantasy and beliefs. With the
inclusion of slides, I will elaborate
on how this man and artist, through the serious historical, social and personal
disjunctions that a life such as his in the 20th century encompassed,
managed to construct a coherent and valid sense of himself and his place in the
world.
2B. A Bridge to the 21st Century: Italian Writers from the 1950s
to Today
Chair: Giose Rimanelli,
State University of New York at Albany
“The Language
of the Night: The Journal AltroVerso
and the Creation of an Alternative Literature”
Luigi
Bonaffini, Brooklyn College, New York
AltroVerso is an international
multilingual quarterly review of contemporary signs which publishes original
literary and artistic works by Italian and international authors. The mission
of AltroVerso is to investigate - with interdisciplinary instruments
(ranging from poetry and fiction, to comics and the visual arts) – the
contemporary artistic and literary landscape in order to restore the original
function of literature and art as poiesis of history and society.
The goal of
AltroVerso is to create and disseminate an alternative literature - “militant”
in nature and intercultural in scope– as an alternative to traditional
market-oriented publications
“A Mediterranean Writer Confronting a New
Reality: Giose Rimanelli’s Benedetta in Guysterland”
Sheryl
Lynn Postman, University of Massachusetts, Lowell
Giose Rimanelli’s first novel
written in the English language, Benedetta
in Guysterland, is not a simple or easy text for the novice. The author,
already established as part of the world of Italian letters of the post civil
war years in the peninsula, moves to the United States at the very start of the
1960s, a decade that he describes, in his Italian book Tragica America, as “il decennio piú tormentato della storia dopo l’Unificazione
e il New Deal.” Historically, these ten, pivotal years in the United States
manifest the coming of age of a young nation. It is a period in which the
country loses it innocence with the assassination of a president; the
assassination of a potential future president; the assassination of a civil
rights leader; the engagement in an unpopular war; the introduction of equality
of the races and genders; and the entrance of the nation into a heightened
state of fear due to a cold war between two nuclear super powers. The reader of
Benedetta in Guysterland is
immediately thrust into a rapidly moving and constantly changing vortex of this
decisive and combative era in America, and it manifests, within this text, by
the use of language, a linguistic process that in this novel, explores, evolves
and expands with each passing chapter. Comparable to the numerous lights and
projections that reflect from a prism and spread out rapidly and diversely on a
large white screen, refashioning a multiplicity of images that may stand
individually by themselves or combine into one huge surrealistic Picasso like
image, the unsuspecting lector becomes a witness to a defining moment in America’s
new dantean-like reality. The author presents a world in which the existing
actuality is one of darkness and despair. The collective life with all its
ramifications, oddities and elaborateness play out and dominate the current
time. To spotlight the discernment and loss of hope of the present era in his
new social environment (a defining moment in the American culture of the
present day that scarred and changed the American political landscape for years
to come), Rimanelli interweaves, within the current text, parallel situations
of terror and dread that hurled the Italian peninsula, thirty years earlier,
into its monstrous infernal of the Civil War. The author, relying on his
classic, Italian medieval literary tradition, juxtaposes this contemporary historical
period with the horrific reality of the Fascist era that engulfed the Italian
peninsula from 1922-1945. In so doing, Rimanelli is crystallizing the gulf that
exists between two very different generations that manifested itself as the “generation
gap,” a socio-political dilemma that engrossed the entire nation and threatened
a war-like confrontation between the groups: father and son; mother and
daughter; old and new ways of lifestyles and its perspectives. The impetus for
this constant battle stance between the two opposing social groups was a
defining moment in American international policy: the Vietnam War. He then,
carefully, juggles two different historic periods within two diverse universes
at two extremely critical moments in their social and political developments. In
so doing, the distinctions and barriers that separate these two realities erode
away and coalesce into one, showing that they actually flow, similar to liquid,
from one sphere of existence into the other.
2C.
Shakespeare’s Britain: Interplay of Spaces
Chair: Geraldo U. de
Sousa, University of Kansas, Lawrence
“‘Into the Wild’ in Shakespeare’s Scotland”
Geraldo de Sousa
In his Scottish play, Shakespeare juxtaposes two opposite
kingdoms, one of light and another of shadows; yet he may be less interested in
a Manichean cosmic structure than the extraordinary dramatic effects created by
an exploration of contiguous territories and the interaction of neighboring
rival communities. This play explores the boundaries of the possible and the
impossible, a border region where domestic life abuts a fantastical, wild
world.
“Madness in Hamlet”
Kenneth
Khoury, School of Medicine,University of California,
San Diego, and Richard Raspa, Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan
Shakespeare’s
greatest hero Hamlet can intensify the practice of medicine, and, inversely,
psychiatry can deepen our response to the world’s greatest literary text. As a
psychiatrist and a humanities educator, we will do two things in this paper.
First, we will explore how the study of Hamlet can illuminate the
therapist-patient relationship. Psychiatry is a search for answers in
face-to-face encounters to the problems of living with other people and of
negotiating their often-conflicting claims. Second, we will investigate how the
most recent edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental
Disorders, (DSM), the standard text reference for practicing psychiatrists,
expands understanding the critical role of family and social dynamics in
individual suffering.
“Hamlet’s England”
David M.
Bergeron, University of Kansas, Lawrence
In Act
Three, Claudius decides to send Hamlet on a journey to England. This paper
traces the evolving strategy of this plan, specifically how it moves from
benign to murderous intent. Claudius makes the mistake of assuming that this
direct action and direct line of movement from Denmark to England will suffice,
but the play keeps demonstrating that indirection prevails. On the actual
journey Hamlet switches places with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who complete
the trip to England. The experience does constitute a kind of catharsis for
Hamlet, readying him for the play’s final movement.
2D. Early Modern Mediterranean History
Chair: Heleni Porfyriou, Consiglio
Nazionale delle Ricerche, Istituto per la Conservazione e la Valorizzazione dei
Beni Culturali, Sezione di Roma
“The Venetians in the
Cyclades under Latin, Byzantine and Ottoman Rule, 1204 to 1715”
John Villiers, University of
London, UK
This paper traces the chequered
history of the Venetian presence in the Cyclades from the fall of
Constantinople in 1204 to their final departure from Tinos in 1715, with
particular reference to Andros and Tinos and to the relations between the Greek
and Latin churches on those two islands.
“The
Reinvention of an Imperial Past: The Rediscovery and Promotion of the Roman
Italica under the Spanish Habsburgs”
Zeynep
Akture, Izmir Institute of Technology, Turkey
The Columbian expedition marks the birth of the Spanish Monarquía Universalis and the beginning of Seville’s aspirations to become the commercial and cultural capital of the Atlantic. The re-discovery of the Roman Italica in 1535, and its later promotion, would appear as part of a re-invention process for the justification of the imperial ideas of Charles I and Philippe II in close Roman contacts established through Seville and maintained by Philippe IV who visited the site in 1632. Located close to Seville, Italica was where Roman citizens first settled in the Iberian Peninsula and the only city there with an exclusively Roman name that gives reference to Italy, wherein Columbus would later originate. Italica was, moreover, the patria of the first Roman emperors of provincial origin, Trajan and Hadrian, the latter of whom embellished it with ambitious architectural enterprises. By finding its most “authentic” roots in the imperial glory of the Roman Italica that was now named “Sevilla la Vieja”, the intellectuals of the period attempted to offer a new historic image for Seville, as part of a process that will be interpreted in the proposed presentation as the self-making of central imagery by the Habsburg dynasty of the Austrians.
“Un’Italiana in Algeri:
Some Thoughts on Christian Slave Women on the Barbary Coast, 1500-1800”
Robert Davis,
Ohio State University, Columbus
This
paper will investigate the range and nature of the enslavement of Christian,
European women by Muslims of the Maghreb, from the sixteenth through eighteenth
centuries. Although the image of the half-naked white woman placed on sale at a
Muslim slave market has been an enduring one in Western popular culture, its
typicality has been routinely debunked by most modern scholars, who have
claimed that the great majority of Christian slaves were captured (male)
soldiers and sailors and that, consequently, only extremely low numbers of
females actually experienced enslavement. It turns out, however, that these
historians have based their counts almost exclusively on redemption lists,
which (inevitably) contain only the names of those men and women who were
actually ransomed. As this paper will attempt to show, captive European women
were much less likely than men to ever be offered up for ransom, due to the
high value that Muslims placed on their persons and their services. For a
number of structural reasons that I will take a look at, slave women were also
much more likely to convert to Islam than were men, and once converted,
especially if they had given birth to Muslim children, they not only could not
be legally sold by their Muslim owner back to Christian redeemers, but they
also effectively disappeared from the records of the redemptive organizations
themselves. I will conclude by trying to come up with some new estimates as to
just how extensive Christian, female was in the Early-modern era.
“Three Cities on Water: Genoa, Naples, and Venice”
Anna
Proudfoot, Oxford Brookes University, UK
This paper sets out to explore what is at the heart of a ‘città d’acqua’ a city on water. It takes a comparative view of three cities whose reputation was founded on their position on the sea: Genova, the port from which Cristoforo Colombo set out to explore the globe, now one of the busiest ports on mainland Italy; Naples whose site on the Gulf of Naples first attracted its Greek settlers and continued to attract English visitors on the Grand Tour, and Venice, whose unique fascination made it better known than either Genova or Naples. Many people compare Genova with Naples, referring to it as the “Naples of the north”: the busy port, the narrow back streets, the Mediterranean atmosphere. Others allege the Genovese are in character more akin to the Venetians, at least in terms of their grasp of money.
This
paper looks at what the three cities have in common, at their past fortunes
under foreign domination, and at their present day status, and considers why at
varying times in history, one flourished while another declined.
3A.
Ancient World: Greece and Rome
Chair: Susan O.
Shapiro, Utah State University, Logan
“Euripides’ Medea:
Modern Psychiatry and the Construction of Madness”
Kenneth Khoury, School
of Medicine, University of California, San Diego, and Richard Raspa, Wayne
State University, Detroit, Michigan
In the 5th century BCE, Euripides wrote a story of madness for the West. Medea, a traditional representation in Western cultures of the mad woman, is out of her mind, angry, vicious, boastful, betrayed, and maimed. She is at first mad for love, and later mad for revenge. Love and hate drive her to exceed the taboos of civilized conduct in Greek antiquity. She betrays her nation and her father, and kills her brother out of desire for the exotic stranger, Jason of the Golden Fleece. She tricks Jason’s cousins into killing and tearing to pieces their father so that Jason may reclaim his right to the throne of Iolcus. Later, Medea uses witchcraft to torture and kill Jason’s bride, Glauce, daughter of Creon, King of Corinth, the woman for whom Jason has abandoned Medea and their two sons. In the end, she commits the monstrous act of infanticide to exact revenge upon Jason for his betrayal.
What we propose in this
paper as a professor of psychiatry and a professor of humanities is to explore
in an interdisciplinary way how diagnostic categories in modern psychiatry can
illuminate the classical construction of madness, and how, at the same time,
the ancient tale of Medea can disclose understandings about madness today.
Contemporary psychiatry, particularly the diagnosis of borderline personality,
will help reveal Medea’s struggle with madness as a particular construction of
Greek antiquity. As well, Euripides’ ancient representation of the mad woman
can deepen insight into a case study of a contemporary Medea whose violent
struggles with a husband and child reflect postmodern notions of mad behavior
in our 21st century globalized world.
“Catiline, Northern
Italy, and the Problems of the Late Republic”
Susan O. Shapiro
In 63 B.C. a nobleman named Lucius
Sergius Catilina formed a plot to overthrow Rome’s Republican government. A
natural leader, Catiline enlisted the help of key senators and other well-to-do
Romans, and within a few months he had collected an army of 10,000 Roman
citizens, based in Pistoia (120 miles from Genoa). Catiline’s conspiracy might
well have succeeded, were it not for the fact that Cicero, who was consul that
year, forestalled the uprising through a series of bold public speeches,
supported by behind-the-scenes detective work and deft political maneuvering.
Why would a patrician, a member of Rome’s exclusive inner circle, want to
overthrow his own government? How could he attract scores of upper-class Romans
and thousands of ordinary citizens to participate in his ill-advised scheme?
This paper shows how Catiline’s conspiracy grew out of the political and social
problems that plagued the late Republic. A weak and ineffective political
structure, land confiscations in northern Italy, a serious debt problem in all
levels of society combined with untold wealth for a few; these and other
difficulties produced a volatile and unstable society that was ripe for
revolution.
“Tibullus in
Phaeacia: From an Island in the Middle of the Mediterranean Straight to Elysium”
Vaios Vaiopoulos, Ionion University,
Corfu, Greece
The elegiac poet Tibullus (1st cent. B.C.)
is temporarily quitting Rome, accompanying his friend
Messalla on official business to the Eastern Mediterranean. The expedition was
probably that undertaken by Messalla at Octavian’s request shortly after the
battle of Actium in 31 B.C. As long as maritime journeys and military office
are often rejected by Tibullus, the announcement that the poet has participated
in a military expedition away from Rome, at the very edge of the Roman mare clausum,
at first puzzles the audience, but the surprise quickly withers away, as the
initial announcement is supplemented by Tibullus’ complaint; he is unable to
accomplish his mission, as he has fallen sick in the middle of the
Mediterranean, on the island of Corfu. The reference to Phaeacia-Corfu
certainly constitutes a hint to Homer, but apart from that, it is known through
Greek texts that this place is sited near the island of the blessed, i.d. near
Elysium. Therefore, Tibullus presents himself ill in Phaeacia because his deep
aim is to go to Elysium, to be immortalized. His participation to this paradise
doesn’t really depend on his loyalty as a soldier accompanying Messalla or
Augustus in imperialistic expeditions away from Rome; only the “soldiers” of love
are entitled to this erotic Elysium. In addition, the ideal world described in
el. 1.3 is a paradise that meets not only the expectations of Tibullus as a
lover but also the aims of a conscientious of his literary identity poet. The
pax romana established throughout the Mediterranean may be a situation of which
a peaceful elegiac poet may profit, but not an ideal in favor of which Tibullus
could consent to fight in the military field.
“Iasos: A Roman Harbor Town through the Middle
Ages in the Light of New Archaeological Evidence”
Iasos is a small Roman harbor town situated in Caria on the southwestern coast of Asia Minor, between Miletus and Halicarnassus. The indented coast of Caria provides many natural harbors, as does neighboring Lycia, and is very rich in Late Antique and Byzantine settlements, as a result of the advantageous situation of the region located at the crossroads of main shipping routes from Constantinople to the Eastern Mediterranean. The ancient site of Iasos, flanked by two protected harbors, includes vestiges from the Early Bronze Age to the Late Byzantine period.
This paper intends to offer an
architectural survey of the Early Christian and Byzantine buildings (mainly
churches) of Iasos on the light of new archaeological evidence, as well as a
topographical analysis of the town throughout the Middle Ages. Six churches
have so far been identified at Iasos, and excavations are now extended to an
extra-mural Middle Byzantine church located at the Big Harbor. Archaeological
evidence from this building seems to indicate a continuous urban life at Iasos
throughout the Byzantine Middle Ages. This paper aims to present the results of
the fieldwork carried out by the author from 1997 to 2003 in the context of the
Iasos excavations, as well as an interpretation of the new archaeological
evidence.
3B.
Turkish Music and Folklore
Chair: Nermin Kaygusuz, State Conservatory of
Turkish Music, Istanbul Technical University, Turkey
“A Brief History of Turkish Music from the 19th
Century to the Present”
Turkish Music, which has in a sense reached its highest peak during the period of Selim the 3rd, began to be strongly influenced by the West during the period of Sultan Mahmud the 3rd. The closing down of Mehterhane and the founding of Muzika–yı Humayun in place of it and the incorporation of important western musicians such as Donizetti Pasha in the music scene, resulted in augmentation of the effect of Western Music in the Palace.
Some of the composers in the Palace who felt disturbed by this new movement actually had left the Palace. Among those that remained, some learned the Western System and western musical notes and started a profoundly new era. By the declaration of the Republic in 1923, as a matter of the revolution, the objective of breaking with the tradition and creating a society anew from scratch, lead to the negligence of the “classical” understanding of Turkish Music prior to the period of Selim the 3rd. Therefore, Turkish Music which was formerly widely educated and flourishingly spread owing to the support from the Palace became abandoned to its fate only to be educated and practiced in Public associations and the like founded by local communities. There could not have been any attempt of serious education in the area until the opening of the Conservatorium of Turkish Music in 1976.This has been an important obstacle that prevented Turkish Music from improving and developing. Most probably that is the reason why we do not have a new and alternatively evolved Turkish Music now. The performance-notation(sheet music) difference(bifurcation) persists to our day while music written exclusively for instruments is still lacking since instruments exist in order to accompany the soloist, and a standardization in this respect is still not achieved. Furthermore, the most important concern is that Turkish Music seems to be at the threshold of an era in which it no longer preserves its respected position and qualities owing to the deterioration of conditions it undergoes, as well as gradually loosing its popularity in our society (and of course within the international community).
Nevertheless, I do not think these
problems might not be overcome. However, I do believe in an urgent necessity to
debate and contemplate more about the issue and to take more responsibility
over Turkish Music which has formerly been an important gift of human
civilization and musical discourse.
“Woman in Turkish Music from
Ottoman Period to the Present”
Serife Guvencoglu, State
Conservatory of Turkish Music, Istanbul Technical University, Turkey
In Turkish Society, the
place and importance of women have occasionally been mentioned and different
opinions and topics in this respect have been matter of concern. Women have
under all sorts of conditions achieved outstanding successes with their
responsible, willful character and their solidarity. It is an undeniable fact
that under every dimension of the Turkish History of Arts, women have had a
profound importance in almost all artistic discourses. As for our concern here,
we acknowledge that Music develops and flourishes in the compositions that the
composers create. Composers, with the compositions they make are able to convey
their historical period within the framework of the social and cultural
atmosphere of that very period and thus enable us to penetrate our gaze through
different historical periods. The women musicians who have always occupied a
profoundly important position in Turkish Classical Music, have throughout the
past until now successfully taken the roles of educators, performers, soloists,
singers, chorists, composers, song–writers, choir leaders and so on and so
forth in innumerable careers of utmost value. Therefore, women musicians are
substantial points of reference in the history of Turkish Music in comparing
the past and contemporary conditions of our social and cultural structures.
“Istanbul Meddah
Stories”
Seyma Gungor, Istanbul
University, Turkey
Meddah stories are urban short stories
told by meddahs in oral form. The meddah tells stories to audience while
sitting on a chair. His stories deal with events from daily life, folk tales,
epics, stories and legends. Meddah
stories have evolved into a special form in 17th-century Istanbul. These
stories importance is that they reflect 17th- and 19th-century
daily life, literature and early theatres in Istanbul. Istanbul meddah stories concentrate on
entertainment, love and intrigue; mostly telling adventures about historically
significant people.
“The Historical Development of the Music and Instruments in Mehter”
Zeynep
Barut, State Conservatory of Turkish Music, Istanbul Technical University,
Turkey
Mehter is the oldest turkish military music band with a history beginning from
the eighth century BC. Mehter was popular throughout the age of Ottoman Empire.
It has only historical and folkloric significance currently and is played only
in special performances today. The wind and percussion instruments, Cymbal, and
Cevgen are main groups of Mehter instruments. Shrill pipe (zurna), Horn, Mehter
whistle,Clarinet,and Kerrenay are Wind instruments.
Big drum (kos), Kettle drum, Small kettle drum,
Tabilbaz, and Tambourine are Percussion instruments. These instruments evolved
over time and in different parts of the world such as Central Asia, Anatolia,
the Arabic Peninsula, Africa, and Europe. In this presentation, they will be
introduced with vignettes of mehter music. Special meanings of mehter music in
political and social life of its time and its influences on world music will be
discussed as well.
“The Final
Techniques of Kemane and the Role of the Kemane Family in Turkish Folk Music”
S.
Yücel Açin, State Conservatory of Turkish Music, Istanbul Technical University,
Turkey
Today, it is known that the first form of the wind instruments is the “ıklığ”. In central Asia, arch and bow which were normally used for hunting were also known to be used as musical instruments and the sound was achieved through pressing the arch and bow against each other. The instrument thus formed out of that action was named “okluğ.” “Iklığ” was the instrument formed in due respect by attaching a water-pumpkin underneath and which was played by a bow of horse-strands. “Rebap” is a derivation of ıklığ and known to be the first from of viols.
This instrument Iklığ, which the Turks have brought with them to Anatolia, is encountered in regions where the immigrant culture is widespread. The most common form of the instrument widely encountered during that period was the “Kabak kemane” which is made out of water pumpkin (su kabağı).
When the kabak kemane began to appear as an instrument in many Turkish Folk Music Bands, it has gained more of a significance. In Turkish Folk Music departments of Conservatories, courses designed to educate Kabak Kemane artists were opened and Cafer Acin, who opened an Instrument Making Department in 1976 in the Conservatory, continued developing the making of the Kabak Kemane and in 1978 formed a completely new Kemane with a body of carved wood and a sound board on its skin. This Kemane was no longer to be named as Kabak Kemane since it was not made of Kabak, namely pumpkin, anymore.
Therefore, it is appropriate to call this instrument only as a Kemane rather than a Kabak Kemane. “Kabak”(pumpkin) is not used in the production of kemane as it has no Standard shape. This is why the kemane should be made with carved wood or sliced wood. Since it is an instrument of profound importance in Turkish Folk music , the Project of founding a “kemane family” has been developed for this instrument during recent times.
As a matter of these studies and
researches, the balance and ratio standards have been established. Better
quality wood for is now used to enhance the sound quality and aesthetic of the
instrument. Different sizes of this instrument to fit alto, tenor, soprano, bass sounds have been developed and made and
therefore nowadays the “viol family” for Turkish Folk Music has been formed as
the hitherto mentioned “Kemane Family.
3C.
Medieval History II
Chair: Joan
Dusa, Los Angeles, California
“Why Did the
Papacy Distrust Stephan Dushan of Serbia?”
Joan Dusa
The reasons why the papacy did not organize a crusade to defend Europe from the Turkish incusions of the fourteenth century has never been thoroughly understood. Stephan Dushan of Serbia requested audiences with both Popes Clement VI and Innocent VI to negotiate unification with the Roman Church and have himself named "the Defender of Christendom," as the head of a crusading army. Clement and Innocent, however, treated Dushan's offer with suspicion accusing him of infidelity and heresy.
In this paper, I will present evidence from various published sources that Dushan was persecuting Catholics in his kingdom and surrounding areas. Although this was not the sole factor in determing the papal response to him, it should be evaluated for its political and cultural ramifications.
“Francesc de
Cassassaja: A Mediterranean Merchant at the Service of the Kings of Aragon and
Sicily”
Nuria
Silleras-Fernandez, University of California, Santa Cruz
Francesc de Cassasaja was a citizen of Barcelona and in many ways a typical late medieval Mediterranean merchant. As a commercial agent he sold precious objects, clothing and other expensive objects to the aristocracy of southern Europe, including the Barcelona dynasty. However he did more then that, becoming a royal counselor and intimate confidant of the royal family, who used his services as courier, advisor, and diplomat. As such he became the “bo e especial servidor” (“good and special servant”) of Martí I the Human, King of the Crown of Aragon (1396–1410) and his son Martino il Giovani, King of Sicily (1392–1409), and their queens.
By examining the case of Francesc
de Cassassaja and his relation to the Barcelona dynasty, we can see the
importance of the merchant elite to the contemporary monarchs and appreciate
the special and valuable services which—with their mobility, international
contacts, and comparatively low public profile—they could render to their
patrons, and the benefits which they enjoyed in return.
“Genovesi a siviglia al tempo di Colombo”
Silvana Fossati Raiteri, Università di
Genova
In the literature of all the ages,
from Virgil to Joyce, of Ulysses it is the nature of wandering that it
enunciates, is the nature of frustrated sailor and I never tame that it returns
in much production. Nevertheless it is like if us one were forgets since to you
endured that Ulisse does not travel for appeals to: far island of utopia is not
to the search of one earth promised neither of one. The reasons of its travel
are very more concrete without alcunché than exotic taste: Ulisse has gotten
lost during the return to Ithaca, Ulysses must return to house. In this c it is
indeed little of magical or wonderful. Malerba returns to these elements of
bottom: its Ulysses is not the traveler for antonomasia, but l archetype of
$R–he who is lost. A hero smarrito in the space but also in a time, because he
is astonished not to find the signs of the twenty years of attended on the ace
of the moglie neither knows to recognize its island on which the time has
operated heavy. “I watch myself around smarrito because I do not recognize the
pebbly coast, this covered barren earth of trees undressed from twenty navy, l
horizon of mountains, neither this sky of color of the sea”. But above all it
has lost same himself, victim of its same one polytropia. “I am therefore being
shipwrecked in my native land.”
3D.
Mediterranean History II
Chair: Heleni Porfyriou, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Istituto per
la
Conservazione e la Valorizzazione dei Beni Culturali, Sezione di Roma
“When the han Meets the Arcade—Passage:
Issues of Discontinuity or Disruption in the Use of Public Space in the Levant”
Traditionally hans (along with funduks, bazars and bedestens) were among the most important commercial premises of the Islamic world. Used as centers of wholesale business and warehouses, they often carried on retail business and housed manufacturing activities. They were generally two-storey buildings with central courtyards aligned with porticoes all around. Commercial activities and storage was taking place on the ground floor while sleeping accommodation was offered in the rooms on the upper floor. The westernization of Ottoman cities and of the Eastern Mediterranean area, in the 19th century, is the context in which the spatial and functional transformation of the traditional han will be discussed in this paper, as a double process.
1. The gradual transformation of
the traditional han and its uses. The existing
traditional hans were gradually modified in the period under consideration hand
in hand with the changes undergoing in the location of land uses in the city
(due to urban extensions, or the emergence of new land uses, etc.).
Accommodation facilities were taken over by hotels and hans
became mostly and almost exclusively commercial places, hosting shops,
manufacturing activities (such as small workshops) and storerooms. The shops
occupying the ground floor were gradually opened up towards the surrounding
streets and were not only looking inward (on the internal courtyard). Continuity
with the past seems, however, to have prevailed in this kind of transformation.
2. The emergence of a new building type, around the turn of 20th century, out
of the intermingling of Levantine and European cultures. These new buildings
retained selectively the name of han (thus denoting
linguistically a continuity to tradition) or took over the new European
denominations: passage, cité, or stoa in the Greek territories. They also
retained some of the old functions performed up to then by the traditional hans: retail shops and storage. They had shops on the ground
floor and offices on the upper floors and they were built either around
courtyards - which were however open through archways to the street - or along
small internal, pedestrian, streets. In other words, they were outward oriented
buildings looking to the streets.
These buildings showed also a new locational preference in respect to the
traditional han. Instead of being close by or part of
the traditional commercial areas - of the bazar, carsi, souq — they were
located along newly opened streets, in new business districts and close to the
residential quarters of the European minorities, or in general to the
Europeanised parts of the city. The case of the Grand Rue de Pera (the “Cicek passaji” being an outstanding example), or of the
Galata district is eloquent. The emergence of this new building type was
related to broader changes brought about by the incorporation of the Eastern
Mediterranean region and its cities into the western economic network (transport
development, European financial penetration, etc.) and it was the outcome of
the demand, by western businesses for a renewed environment for economic
activities. In this context the contribution of the 19th century European
commercial building type of the “Arcade-Passage-Galleria” should not be
underestimated. The change in building style was also a result of morore
general efforts and planning interventions concerning the modernization
(westernization) of the form and use of urban space, such as the rebuilding of
destroyed quarters, the opening up of straight streets “à la franqua” and the
creation of new business areas near the new transport infrastructures (railway
stations and new quays).
The paper will illustrate this process of transformation of the han (okelle or okale) from a traditional to a new building type through a number of examples drawn from Thessalonica, Izmir, Istanbul and Alexandria. Its aim is to focus on the transition from a semi-public, inward space of commerce and exchange, as represented by the han, to an outward, public space of commercial and tertiary activities, as represented by the passage, cite, stoa. The intention is to underline the resistance and adaptability of the traditional building type to new imported uses of space, as well as the potentialities inherent to the century long typology of the han. The ultimate scope is to address the issue of continuity in the use of public space in the Levant.
More specifically some of the most relevant examples which the paper will discuss, are:
- In Istanbul - Pera: the passage
or cité d’Anatolie; the passage Hazzopoulo; the passage Oriental; the cité de
Roumélie (Rumeli Hani); the cité d’Alep.
- In Thessalonica: the Kentriki stoa; the stoa Foroglou; the stoa Koutroumba;
the Koritsa han; the cité and stoa Saoul; the Emniet han or passage Natsina;
the passage Kyrtsi; the Kyrtsi han.
- In Alexandria: the Okale Passage Menasce; the Okale Monferato.
“‘Desiring to Go Learn of Virtue in Italy’:
Re-examining Mediterranean Honor Culture through the Activities of Southern
French and Italian Nobles, 1580-1635”
Brian Sandberg, European University
Institute, Florence
In a 1602 letter, Alfonse d’Ornano
explained to Ferdinando I de’ Medici that one of his pages wanted to go to Italy
to “learn of virtue” and hoped that one of the Granduca’s courtiers could
instruct him. This letter and other contemporary manuscript sources open
fascinating windows not only into the education of young noblemen in the early
modern period, but also into the mobility and fluidity of noble culture in that
period. Honor conceptions and practices emerge as key aspects of “virtue’” that
nobles claimed to desire to “learn.” A rich historical and theoretical
literature on Mediterranean honor has adopted an honor/shame dichotomy and
perceived a pan-Mediterranean conception of honor in the early modern period. In
this paper, I intend to re-examine such notions of Mediterranean honor culture,
focusing on examples of southern French and Tuscan nobles in the late-sixteenth
and early-seventeenth centuries. I will develop my analysis using archival
sources from various archives départementales in southern France in conjunction
with documents from the Archivio di Stato di Firenze. I hope to be able to
suggest some new ways of considering early modern Mediterranean honor based on
these cases.
“The New Republic and the Italian Peninsula: A New Appraisal of a
Two-Way Mediterranean and Atlantic Network, 1770-1840”
Luca
Codignola, Università di Genova
Based on new research in
Italian, American, English, and Canadian archives, this paper shows that there
were many more Americans in the Mediterranean, and Italians in the North Atlantic,
than it was previously thought. Historiography has so far mainly devoted its
attention either to some key figures (Philip Mazzei, Luigi Castiglioni being
amongst the most celebrated ones), especially when these were authors of travel
books or were in some way related to the Enlightenment; or to the so-called
main economic trends, represented by ships, tonnage, balance of payments, etc..
This paper shows that these “key figures” hardly represented the majority of
people who regularly crossed the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean. These
were mainly sailors, merchants, seasonal workers, emigrants, and ecclesiastics.
Also, since serial sources being are mostly unavailable or very unreliable, and
it being impossible to verify the extent of any economic significance in the
overall traffics, only by retracing individuals through painstaking archival
work can the historian reach a clearer impression of the extent and nature of
the US presence in the Mediterranean, and of the people from the Italian
peninsula crossing over to North America.
“Mediterranean Problems
in the Context of the International Aspects of the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939”
Vera Malay, Belgorod
State University, Russia
This paper is based on new archival materials and studies the place and the role of the Mediterranean problems in the international aspects of the Spanish Civil War.
Mediterranean problems were very important in the context of geopolitical aspects of the Spanish war. Main contradictions in this connection took place in Anglo-Italian relations. All their aspects as well as evolution are studied, not only on the base of printed materials, but also with a help of documents of the Russian Foreign Affair’s Archive. Nyon conference (1937) is studied as one of attempts of international isolation of the USSR.
4A. The Permeability of the Mediterranean: Reinvention and
Self-Discovery in the Northern European Imagination
Chair: Bernardo
Piccichè, Virginia Commonwealth University
“Inventing the
Post-Columbian World: Italy and America in Montaigne’s Essais”
Ayesha Ramachandran, Yale
University, New Haven, Connecticut
This paper investigates the repeated juxtaposition of Italy and America in Montaigne’s New World essays, and demonstrates how an emerging global consciousness at the end of the sixteenth century led to a repositioning of the Mediterranean and its classical past (“middle–earth”) with regard to the Terra Nova (“new earth”) in the European imagination.
“Our world has just discovered another world,” writes Michel de Montaigne, “and who will guarantee us that it is the last of its brothers, since the daemons, the Sibyls, and we ourselves have up to now been ignorant of this one?” In “Des coches,” one of the two celebrated essays on the discovery of the New World, the French humanist records and responds to this upheaval of historical and geographic proportions through a subtle re-imagining of “the world” itself. Yet, almost a century after Columbus’s voyage, this famous turn in the essay towards America is still framed by a lingering gaze backwards, through citations of Lucretius, to Italy and to classical Rome. A similar rhetorical structure also characterizes the opening of the much–discussed “Des cannibales,” which begins with a meditation on Pyrrhus in Italy before moving rapidly in space and time to a textual cartography of Atlantis, which serves as an imaginative double for America.
In
each case, Montaigne carefully constructs a dichotomy between (renascent)
classical antiquity and the nascent New World, one which mediates key themes of
the Essais as a whole: the inextricable relation of civilization and barbarism,
of self and other, of self and world. It is this return to Rome as a formative
and shaping space, a mental landscape that counterbalances the new geography
within the essayist’s weltanschauung,
that frames his profoundly skeptical vision.
“Rossellini’s Naples, or
the Reconstruction of Imperfect Italy”
Giuseppe Gazzola, Yale University, New Haven,
Connecticut
The descent in Italy to broaden one’s
life experience, as practical Bildungsedukation,
has been considered since the early Eighteenth century by the Northern European
élite as a common, almost compulsory practice. Italy has been, for a long time,
Europe’s internal “other”, its pre–industrialized and
folkloristic South. Roberto Rossellini, in his celebrated movie Viaggio in Italia (Journey to Italy),
moved from this cultural commonplace using the concept of otherness to build a
dynamic of self-knowledge in his characters, travelers who are forced to
confront as aliens a whole new reality and, doing so, are forced to redefine
their identity as well as their concept of relationship. The traditional
scholarship on the movie has understood and extensively explained this concept,
which is only a half, in my opinion, of Rossellini’s operation.
It is evident that the map of the
movie does not reproduce a consciousness closed in upon itself; we are not
presented with a homogeneous portrait of the traveling couple, sound and
immutable, but with characters whose self-awareness continuously evolves
according to the new experiences they are facing; rather, it is the map in the
movie—that is, the city of Naples, Pompeii, the National Archaeological Museum,
Capri, Cuma and the temple of the Sybil, Pozzuoli, Fontanelle and, above all,
the Catholic procession of the seventh day—that negotiates the process of
consciousness of our couple. The gaze of the “other,” of myth and history,
changes the subjects and their parameters of identity; and I intend to claim
how such gaze is reciprocated and symmetrical. The travelers, precisely in
their condition of “explorers” and “tourists”, discover in the diegetic real a
world new to them, of which the audience is made aware through their eyes by
means of the subjective movements of the camera. The characters authorize,
with their fresh perspective on the surrounding reality, an act of “reconstruction”:
their gaze makes possible the double reading on the Italian territory. As it is
evident in another of his celebrated movies, Germania anno zero (Germany, Year Zero) Rossellini believes that
history and reality are not given facts, but cultural processes that have to be
reinterpreted through human experience. Rossellini shows us how reality is, in
the etymological sense, imperfect, since it is constantly changing and in need
to be constantly reconstructed.
“Proust’s Italian Visions”
Johannes Türk,
Freie Universität, Berlin, Germany
In
Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, topography plays a pivotal role:
mythical landscapes compared to Homer’s not only organize Proust’s childhood
memories, but specific topographic points are also at the center of his
artistic search and vocation. Swann’s pictures of Venice inspire the first
desires mediated by art, and Bergotte’s novels lead the hero to travel to
Balbec in Normandy, where he encounters Elstir’s impressionist paintings.
Artistic creation, which Proust describes as metaphoric, thus presupposes a
metonymic relation to space. Two Italian towns epitomize the relevance of
spatial imagination in the novel: Trieste, where hints lead Marcel to suspect
lesbian adventures of his lover Albertine, and Venice, where the recovery from
the end of his relationship to her takes on the form of a religious experience
in the church San Marco, shared by his mother. Through these locations, Proust’s
novel enters into a rich history of “Italomania” in the French realist
tradition reaching from Stendhal to Flaubert. Both cities become a “lieu de
mémoire”—one for a dysphoric, the other for a euphoric experience relying on
topographic contiguity. A place of suffering is juxtaposed to a place of
artistic and religious transcendence. If Proust’s severe asthma forced him to
anxiously consider the influence of topography and favor the Mediterranean, as
some critics claim, it cannot be verified, but it seems clear that Venice as a
place of longing, where the novel inscribes itself into the artistic tradition
of the Italian Renaissance and transfigures the anxieties of jealousy embodied
in Trieste, lies at the heart of Proust’s aesthetic project. My paper will
explore the role Italian topographies and visions play in one of the major
novels of the Modernist tradition
4B.
Medieval Literatures
Chair: Caroline A. Jewers, University of Kansas,
Lawrence
“Lost in Translation:
Searching for King Arthur among the Troubadours”
Caroline A. Jewers, University
of Kansas, Lawrence
This paper analyzes
references to King Arthur in Troubadour Lyric, and discovers that far from
referring to a mythical king, the allusions are very specific, and bound up in
Plantagenet politics.
“A l’alta fantasia qui mancó possa: Dante and the Vision of the Paradiso”
Eduardo Fichera, Marquette
University, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Memory plays a decisive role in
Dante’s Commedia.
Throughout the entire poem, and more frequently in the Paradiso, Dante openly comments on the role of memory with regard
to his ability to produce an accurate textual rendition of his fantastic
journey in the afterlife. In the third cantica, direct references to what the
pilgrim is or is not able to retain about his alleged vision are often
accompanied by the use of the ineffability topos, which declares the poet’s
inability to adequately describe in words the supernatural quality of his
experience.
But the faltering limitations of Dante’s memoria are often acknowledged, only to be immediately denied in the following terzina. Dante does not seem to follow a consistent thread in his assessment of the limitations of memory. This narrative strategy, made of contrasting statements, generates a dialectic which supersedes the mnemonic limitations claimed by the poet, bringing to the foreground the inadequacy of human language in its attempt to express the ineffable vision of paradise. Hiding behind the alternating declarations regarding memory, this dialectic of ineffability reveals the truth essence of the opposition that characterizes the textual construction of the Paradiso that between the supernatural quality of the experience and the limited possibilities of human language to represent it.
Although
Dante blames the weakness of his memory, the successful completion of his poem
has little to do wit it, depending mostly in his ability to find a successful
strategy to overcome the dynamic opposition that threatens his work, that
between res and figura, between vision and representation. Here the repeated use of
the ineffability topos becomes the pattern that best represents Dante s effort
to bring his words as close as possible to the silenzio divino which ultimately constitutes the true essence of
God.
“Le Cid’s Production of Arabic and the Foreign”
Samuel T. England, University of California,
Berkeley
Sid is a useful word in Arabic. It derives, as do similar titles in European languages, from a term denoting class but now is simply a term of politeness: Romance analogues include Don and Monsieur. What happens to this word when uttered in a 17th–century French play about Inquisition–era Iberia? What can we say of the word’s curious travel, from Arabic to French by way of fictionalized Spaniards? How does Pierre Corneille’s Le Cid make use of it?
This study is
motivated by a simple premise: that the rendering of an Arabic title is
important within the workings of the play, and that it opens a useful point of
entry to the text. From that point, this study finds that the text reveals some
of its most interesting machinations in its understanding of the title Cid. The questions asked here are those
of an Arabist (and, to a much lesser degree, a reader of Spanish), rather than
a scholar of French literature. But, in its trajectory, this study intends to
be useful to comparative scholars interested in mimesis. The argument traces a
succession of representations and exchanges in the play, actions that vary in
style but form a coherent, dynamic operation.
“On the Verge
of Romance: Exogamy and Its Discontents in the Poema de mio Cid”
Clara
Pascual-Argente, Georgetown University, Washington, DC
The “Poema de mio Cid” is not an epic. Or, at the very least, it does not conform to the canonical traits of the genre, as established by French epics. There has been an ongoing effort for over a century now to transform the poem’s deviations into the canonical characteristics of the Spanish epic. One consequence of this has been that the PMC has only been read against epic works—a point of view that detracts from the poem’s richness and obscures its connections with other genres and books.
In this paper, I
will argue that there exist solid grounds to start reading the PMC as a
romance, and that it would be fruitful to do so. First, I will examine the
relations between gender and genre in the poem by concentrating on its
obsession with daughters (filiafocality) and its underlying anxiety about
exogamy—a concern situated at the very root of European romance. The PMC’s dual
structure also relates to this preoccupation as shown in contemporary French
romance, and it would support a reading of the poem as a reworking of an older
epic work. Finally, I will explore the connections of the poem with the
creation of a monarchic and chivalric ideology in Castile, best served in later
romances and treatises.
4C. Music
and Culture
Chair: Juan Francisco
La Manna, State University of New York at Oswego
“Brazilian
Composer M. Camargo Guarnieri: An Overview of His Nationalist Aesthetics
through His Piano Solo Works and Art Songs”
Rubia Santos, Central Michigan
University, Mount Pleasant
M. Camargo Guarnieri (1907–93) is
the most prolific and internationally recognized twentieth–century Brazilian
composer of art music. Guarnieri composed more than seven hundred works for a
large variety of genres, which have been performed, broadcasted, and recorded
worldwide. The art song genre and piano solo works appear to have been
Guarnieri’s favorite compositional media, appearing throughout the composer’s
life. Guarnieri performed frequently as a pianist and conductor, and is
considered the founder of the first most influential compositional school in
Brazil. He continuously researched the distinct Brazilian ethnic sources in his
many trips to the Northeast and countryside, incorporating in his works musical
elements, such as rhythm, melody, and modality, dance types, and instrumental
timbres found in folk and popular music of Brazil.
Guarnieri is known as the harbinger of the nationalist style in art music, a style that he seriously promoted not only in his compositions, but also in his fervently teaching philosophy. The Brazilian nationalist aesthetic was crystalized in 1922 during the event of the “Week of Modern Art,” a Brazilian modernist movement implemented publicly in São Paulo City. The head of this movement, the art critic and poet, Mario de Andrade, was a central figure in Brazilian culture and Guarnieri’s lifelong mentor in issues relating to Brazilian culture and artistic matters.
This presentation will focus on
Guarnieri’s compositional style by providing a historical overview of the
modernist movement in the first half of the twentieth century
in Brazil, and by examining Brazilian musical elements in the composer’s piano
solo works and art songs.
“Pulcinella: Massine’s
Comedy Ballet”
Ligia R.
Pinheiro, Wittenberg University, Ohio
This presentation will
outline Massine’s process of incorporating ‘authentic’ Italian movement into
his work, blending it with ballet and Commedia gestures creating a unique style
that proved successful at the premiere of the comedy ballet Pulcinella in May
1920. It was Massine’s last original choreography before his break with
Diaghilev’s company in 1921
“Stravinsky’s Pulcinella:
The Birth of a New Style”
Elizabeth La Manna, State
University of New York at Oswego, and Juan Francisco La Manna
Pulcinella,
a delightful ballet with music in a Neo-Classical vein, marks the beginning of
a new style of composition in the life of the Russian composer. After a brief
biography, the paper will focus on Pulcinella, its genesis, its musical
characteristics, and possible reasons for the radical departure from the
language that characterized previous ballets such as The Rite of Spring.
4D.
Contemporary Mediterranean Issues
Chair: Ángel Felices Lago, Universidad de Granada,
Spain
“Africa in the First
Global Economy”
Gwyn Campbell, McGill
University, Montreal, Canada
Much advance has been made over recent years, following the path breaking
work of K.N. Chaudhuri and others, in analysing the economic development of
Asia within the Braudelian paradigm of the long distance maritime exchange
networks of the Indian Ocean and South China Sea. However, the role of Africa
within that process has been largely ignored or described as marginal. The rare
exceptions to this, reflected in the work of scholars such as M.N. Pearson and
R.J. Barendse, only partially modify this bias. This paper seeks to fill this
gap through re-evaluating the role of Africa through an examination of its
relationship to what has been termed the first global economy not only in terms
of external influences upon Africa, but also in terms of Africa’s contribution
to that global economy.
“Past
Influences and Modern Prospects for the Specialized Business Language Syllabus:
The Case of Spanish “
Ángel Felices Lago, Universidad
de Granada, Spain
The
languages for specific purposes (known as LSP) seem to be an Anglo-Saxon
creation of the second half of the 20th century. However, deep concern about
the way in which science and specialized trades are transferred and/or
communicated among experts and non-experts has been of interest in all periods.
Taking Spanish for business as an example, it is worth noticing the high amount
of treaties about secretarial language and good writing practices for the
administration in the period which goes from 16th to 19th centuries. This will
be a starting point to underline the remarkable differences between past
approaches to business and administration language and the ideal contents of an
updated syllabus of Spanish for Business, one of the most dynamic and
fast-growing areas of specialized language since the final years of the 20th
century.
“The Mediterranean Moat: Portcullis to Paradise?”
Following on from our paper presented at the Mediterranean Studies Association Conference in 2005, in which we used examples of tourism advertising texts which use the Mediterranean label to demonstrate the differing constructs of the Mediterranean when comparing and contrasting Northern and Southern European images with those produced in the Mediterranean area, this year we will examine differing constructions of the Mediterranean as perceived from accessible sources to the north and south of the Mediterranean Basin.
Since September/October 2005 there have been widespread reports in the Spanish press highlighting the plight of aspiring immigrants ten years after the adoption of the Euro-Mediterranean Conference of Ministers of Foreign Affairs, held in Barcelona on 27–28 November 1995. The “Barcelona Process” marked the starting point of the Euro-Mediterranean Partnership, a wide framework of political, economic and social relations between the Member States of the European Union and Partners of the Southern Mediterranean and comprises 35 members (25 EU Member States and 10 Mediterranean Partners).
The Euro-Med partnership clearly
has a role to play in identifying and expressing common ground in the
Mediterranean zone, including Mediterranean politics and identity as they are
constructed and conveyed by the policy-decisions and relayed by the national
press. European, particularly Spanish, press will be reviewed with the aim of
identifying different constructions of identity, similar to those used for
commercial purposes.
“Bucking the Trend: Spain’s
Welcome to Immigrants”
John
Naylon, Keele University, UK
The population of the European Union is ageing and
declining, with serious negative implications
for continued economic growth and social security. The situation would logically
be relieved by immigrant workers but the “threat”—real or imagined—of uncontrolled immigration has provoked hostile
popular reactions in some countries of Western Europe (France, Germany, The
Netherlands, the United Kingdom), a reaction which has been exploited by
politicians for electoral purposes.
A refreshing contrast in attitude
is provided by Spain which, along with Italy, is one of the principal points of
entry into Europe for illegal immigrants from the Middle East and Africa. The Ley de Extranjeria of 2005 has legalized
the status of some three quarters of a million illegal immigrants,
stressing the positive contributions which they make to Spain’s economy,
consumption, social services, tax income, and professional and intellectual
life. This enlightened policy could be a model in the on-going debate about
immigration into Europe and the continent’s cultural identity.
5A. Franciscan Encounters
Chair: Ronald E. Surtz, Princeton University, New
Jersey
“Crociata e Diplomazia nel Mediterraneo del primo
Trecento: Il francescano savonese Filippo Brusserio”
Elena Bellomo, Università
Cattolica, Milan
The
paper aims at outlining the life and work of the Savonese Franciscan Filippo
Brusserio (1260–1340), whose activity on various occasions assumed a
Mediterranean dimension because of his ties with Genoa and with the Crusade.
Special reference will be made to the preaching and organization done by
Brusserio for both the Crusade expedition of 1301, promoted by some Genoese
ladies, and to the diplomatic mission which Brusserio,
as pontifical legate to Clement V, later undertook in the East. In addition to
outlining the historical framework in which these events took place and the
role that Brusserio had, the paper will focus on a treatise on the recovery of
the Holy Land, the Speculum Terre Sancte,
which Brusserio wrote and which has been lost. This work has been identified
with various anonymous treatises, which are about the recapture of the Holy
Land. These attributions will be the subject of a careful examination aimed at
evaluating their reliability.
“Selling Salvation: Juana de la Cruz (1481-1534)
and the Marketing of Indulgenced Franciscan Girdles”
Ronald E. Surtz, Princeton University, New
Jersey
In 1520 the Castilian visionary
Juana de la Cruz received a revelation in which Christ himself, at the
instigation of the Blessed Virgin and St. Francis, proposed a remedy for the
economic woes of the convent of Santa María de la Cruz. The nuns were to make
replicas of the Franciscan girdle with miniature scourges in place of the knots
and give them to the faithful in exchange for their alms. The girdles were
supposed not only to benefit the souls of their pious purchasers, but also to
offer protection against thunderstorms, to aid women in childbirth, and to help
the dying. The consumers were offered a choice of colors—white, green, blue,
black, gold, or red—as well as a choice of materials presumably priced
accordingly—wool, linen, or silk. Aware of the dangers of the saturation of the
market, Christ further proposed that the girdles of those who lived far from
the convent would conserve their power for five years, while those of the
faithful who lived close by would be good for only a year. While the
astuteness, if not the cynicism of such marketing techniques seems transparent
to modern scholars, I believe the sale of the Franciscan girdles must be placed
in the context of a society intensely preoccupied with the salvation of the
soul. The marketing of the girdles coincided with a time in which the
Franciscan habit was believed to be imbued with special powers, and many chose
to be buried in it so that St. Francis would act as their post-mortem advocate.
Moreover, Christ’s revelation regarding the girdles is intertwined with
warnings about the approaching end of the world, and such apocalyptic
considerations could only increase the advisability and desirability of the
girdles.
“Mediterranean Encounters: Is
She a Virgin or a Social Man? Franciscan Sightings of the Balkan ‘Man-Woman’”
Aleksandra
Djajic Horvath, European University Institute, Florence
The aim of this paper would be to look into the instances of intercultural encounters of Franciscan missionaries sent from the mid–seventeenth century onwards to tribal northern Albania by the Holy Congregation of the Propagation of the Faith.
Particular attention would be given to missionaries’ accounts of indigenous sexual practices and women and their efforts to introduce female celibacy and reform marriage practices, with the aim of imposing the model of early modern states they themselves were coming from and in which female virginity played an important role. Central to the analysis of that process, in which female sexuality was taken to be the basic signifier for denoting cultural difference, would be the analysi