Wallace Stevens and philosophy of language

Although literature and logic share a number of surprising symmetries and historical contacts, they have typically been seen to occupy separate disciplinary spheres. Declaring a subfield in literary studies-logic and literature-this introduction outlines various connections between literary formalism and formal logic. It surveys historical…[Read more]

Wallace Stevens and philosophy of language

Thomas Hardy and theory of time

What can one, seemingly insignificant figure–possibly punctuation mark, possibly ideogram, possibly something else entirely–demonstrate about Ezra Pound’s figurative practice? #, which draws power from associations with Mencius’s well-field system and the Chinese character ching, becomes an emblem for a recurring quodlibet in The Cantos: how for…[Read more]

Philosophy began the 1890s rooted firmly in the monistic absolutism of F.H. Bradley and J.M.E. McTaggart; it ended the decade deracinated into the pluralistic atomism espoused by Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore. If this intellectual sea change can be conceived as analytic and logical philosophies inventing their wheel, then T.S. Eliot re-invented…[Read more]

Are T. S. Eliot’s notes on The Waste Land a scholarly resource or a literary hoax? This oft-repeated question gets to the heart of the poem, which thrives on its allusions, whether seriously or cynically. However, scholars have largely passed over the notes’ (and the poem’s) numberings, despite their complexity and superabundance—a panoply of quan…[Read more]

This article corrects misconceptions regarding the history of film stereo. I show that the technical and aesthetic innovations regularly credited to Dolby Stereo, to sound designers like Walter Murch, and to films like Apocalypse Now (1979) were not revolutions but extensions of surround-sound practices that Hollywood codified in prior decades. I…[Read more]

In the 1930s, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences implemented a technical standard—known as Academy Mono, or the Academy Curve—that dramatically impaired the sound quality of motion pictures. This article accounts for why the major studios agreed to this restrictive standard. I argue that they adopted Academy Mono to curtail the pow…[Read more]

This article corrects misconceptions regarding the history of film stereo. I show that the technical and aesthetic innovations regularly credited to Dolby Stereo, to sound designers like Walter Murch, and to films like Apocalypse Now (1979) were not revolutions but extensions of surround-sound practices that Hollywood codified in prior decades. I…[Read more]

In the 1930s, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences implemented a technical standard—known as Academy Mono, or the Academy Curve—that dramatically impaired the sound quality of motion pictures. This article accounts for why the major studios agreed to this restrictive standard. I argue that they adopted Academy Mono to curtail the pow…[Read more]

This article describes and analyzes the methods of Footprints: Jewish Books Through Time and Place, a digital humanities contribution to book history. Footprints collects and aggregates information about the movement of copies of Hebrew books and books of Judaica in other languages printed in the early modern period (roughly corresponding to the…[Read more]

This is a poem about fire.

This article invites the reading of Fernando Pessoa’s Fausto as a rhizomatic work, via three different critical lenses that lead to plurality: Traditions, Transcriptions, and Translations. Regarding different Faustian traditions, instead of seeing Pessoa’s Fausto merely as a competition with Goethe (as proposed by Eduardo Lourenço in his pref…[Read more]

After the period of splendour experienced by the musical chapel of the Collegiate Church of Santa María la Mayor in Talavera de la Reina during the 18th century, we witnessed a period of decline, which was part of the crisis experienced by Spanish religious music during the 19th century. The effects of the War of Independence, the successive…[Read more]

This article focuses on the personal and artistic career of one of the most representative composers of Spain in the second half of the 18th century and the first third of the 19th century. Ramón Garay, born in 1761 in Asturias, held the post of Chapel Master of Jaén Cathedral for 36 fruitful years, which saw the birth of an extraordinary p…[Read more]

This contribution focuses on strategies to bridge what in anthropology is called ontological incommensurability: Indigenous worlds often seem inaccessible to modern thought. Instead of trying to open Indigenous worlds to Westerners, I rather intend to make Western worlds accessible to Indigenous thought; and likewise, academic disciplines…[Read more]

In this book chapter, Dr. Davis examines the depiction of a dissimulated desire for material improvement (mejora) as it is expressed in the epic poetry of imperial Spain, particularly in Alonso de Ercilla’s La Araucana. She shows that within the aristocratic context of the times, the desire for personal betterment or “mejora” is always contingent…[Read more]

The nautical motif of the ex-voto (votive offering) is a lyric genre that reflects poetically the possible experience of a shipwreck survivor. Paradoxically, many of the poets who evoke the perils of sea travel never left Spain or, at most, sailed only the waters of the Mediterranean. Their writing of the sea remained consistently codified in…[Read more]