This article re-examines Willa Cather's short story ‘A Wagner Matinée’ (1904) as a complex text s... more This article re-examines Willa Cather's short story ‘A Wagner Matinée’ (1904) as a complex text steeped in European debates about Richard Wagner's music dramas as well as American discourses about the composer's role in national culture. Criticism on the story – even while examining the psychology of narrator Clark, a cultivated Bostonian who takes his Nebraska aunt to an orchestral Wagner performance – has tended to accept his fundamental premise: the opposition between Wagner's aesthetic power and Nebraska's cultural vacuity. However, this reappraisal finds a narrative more ambivalent in its characterizations and more searching in its study of Wagner's significance, in regard to such issues as gender, sexuality, anti-Semitism, the philosophy of Schopenhauer, and American national identity. ‘A Wagner Matinée’ floats on the stream of Wagnerism that ran through American modernity, and the text itself evolved as it ran that course, undergoing substantial revision as Cather's understanding of Wagner, and America, matured. Cather's struggle to square the ambiguities of Wagnerism with the ruptures of American experience is compacted into the story's dissonant modernist structure.
During the Gothic revivals of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Gothic architecture s... more During the Gothic revivals of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Gothic architecture shed the morbid associations attached to it in earlier periods and was admired for the aesthetic and theological vision that shaped its medieval development. The Gothic cathedral came to epitomize the wholeness of the Middle Ages and an impulse toward synthesis in theology as well as the arts. This essay surveys four Gothic revival texts that define a relationship between medieval Gothic architecture and Scholastic theology: John Ruskin's essay " The Nature of Gothic " in The Stones of Venice (1851-53); Henry Adams' Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904); Wilhelm Worringer's Form in Gothic (Formprobleme der Gotik, 1911); and Erwin Panofsky's Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism (1951). In these widely read works, influential beyond the field of art history, the seemingly arcane analogy between the Gothic and the Scholastic becomes a proving ground for the projects of prominent intellectuals within distinct historical and cultural contexts. For each author, the meaning of the Gothic hangs in a particular balance between its tracery—that is, its naturalistic ornamental detail—and its larger structure: the balance between the concrete and the abstract, between multiplicity and unity, also achieved in Scholastic theology. Because their analogies between the Gothic and the Scholastic isolate distinct lines of force within these complex systems, Ruskin, Adams, Worringer, and Panofsky each identify different values there, revealing as much about the modern mind as about the medieval. The syntheses that their medieval forbears accomplished collectively in service of faith, these interpreters seek independently in service of their own cultural identity, aesthetic values, or intellectual coherence.
This article re-examines Willa Cather's short story ‘A Wagner Matinée’ (1904) as a complex text s... more This article re-examines Willa Cather's short story ‘A Wagner Matinée’ (1904) as a complex text steeped in European debates about Richard Wagner's music dramas as well as American discourses about the composer's role in national culture. Criticism on the story – even while examining the psychology of narrator Clark, a cultivated Bostonian who takes his Nebraska aunt to an orchestral Wagner performance – has tended to accept his fundamental premise: the opposition between Wagner's aesthetic power and Nebraska's cultural vacuity. However, this reappraisal finds a narrative more ambivalent in its characterizations and more searching in its study of Wagner's significance, in regard to such issues as gender, sexuality, anti-Semitism, the philosophy of Schopenhauer, and American national identity. ‘A Wagner Matinée’ floats on the stream of Wagnerism that ran through American modernity, and the text itself evolved as it ran that course, undergoing substantial revision as Cather's understanding of Wagner, and America, matured. Cather's struggle to square the ambiguities of Wagnerism with the ruptures of American experience is compacted into the story's dissonant modernist structure.
During the Gothic revivals of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Gothic architecture s... more During the Gothic revivals of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Gothic architecture shed the morbid associations attached to it in earlier periods and was admired for the aesthetic and theological vision that shaped its medieval development. The Gothic cathedral came to epitomize the wholeness of the Middle Ages and an impulse toward synthesis in theology as well as the arts. This essay surveys four Gothic revival texts that define a relationship between medieval Gothic architecture and Scholastic theology: John Ruskin's essay " The Nature of Gothic " in The Stones of Venice (1851-53); Henry Adams' Mont Saint Michel and Chartres (1904); Wilhelm Worringer's Form in Gothic (Formprobleme der Gotik, 1911); and Erwin Panofsky's Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism (1951). In these widely read works, influential beyond the field of art history, the seemingly arcane analogy between the Gothic and the Scholastic becomes a proving ground for the projects of prominent intellectuals within distinct historical and cultural contexts. For each author, the meaning of the Gothic hangs in a particular balance between its tracery—that is, its naturalistic ornamental detail—and its larger structure: the balance between the concrete and the abstract, between multiplicity and unity, also achieved in Scholastic theology. Because their analogies between the Gothic and the Scholastic isolate distinct lines of force within these complex systems, Ruskin, Adams, Worringer, and Panofsky each identify different values there, revealing as much about the modern mind as about the medieval. The syntheses that their medieval forbears accomplished collectively in service of faith, these interpreters seek independently in service of their own cultural identity, aesthetic values, or intellectual coherence.
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