Lionel Gossman

Literature and Education

N the mid-sixties an Anglo-Indian film, directed by James Ivory, had a brief showing in a few major cities. Shakespeare Wallah portrayed the dwindling fortunes of an itinerant troupe of English Shakespearean actors doing the circuit of the Indian hill towns in the years following independence. In the last scene of the movie, a class of Indian schoolboys emerges from a performance of Othello and eagerly waits to catch a glimpse of a sexy Indian screen actress, who is scheduled to pass by. The teaching of literature, until very recently at least, seemed as well established as the British Raj once was in India. Even now, in our time of austerities and cutbacks, departments of language and literature, graduate and undergraduate, still dot the academic landscape more thickly than Indian Army barracks were once scattered over the landscape of the subcontinent. The MLA-the professional organization of university teachers of modern languages and literatures-has so many thousands of members that only two or three cities in the country have enough hotel rooms to accommodate those who attend its annual conventions.

Augustin Thierry and Liberal Historiography

Sonderbare Schickung: das Glick goldener Zeiten, das Gott keinem seiner Volker verweigert haben kann, vermag nicht, sich ein dankbares Andenken bei spatern Geschlechtern zu sichern. Nur die Schrecken des Untergangs erzwingen ewiges Gedachtnis. Italiens ilteste Elinnerungen zeigen die Todesstunde zweier friuher machtiger Volker, von welchen das eine das andere unterjocht, um spater mit ihm einem dritten zu erliegen, das die Truimmer beider unter sich begrabt, wie unsere heutige Erdoberfldche friihere Schopfungen. J. J. Bachofen, Die altesten V6lkerbeivegungen

THE IDEA OF EUROPE

In 1991, at Princeton University where I then taught, “The Idea of Europe” was selected as the topic of a newly established senior seminar to be offered jointly by the departments of Germanic, Romance, and Slavic languages and literatures. The cold war had very recently ended; the last customs barriers among the member states of the EEC, now the European Union, were about to come down; and the prospects for Europe seemed extremely promising. The EU was at that time a predominantly Western European affair, but since 1991 the Central and Eastern European states of Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovenia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia have been added, along with Sweden, Cyprus, and Malta; and of course the two Germanies have been reunited. During the same period, however, there have been serious outbreaks of ethnic, religious, and nationalist conflict in the southeastern part of the continent, sectarian violence in Northern Ireland, and Basque separatism in Spain. There is even a violent independence movement on the island of Corsica, which from time to time requires significant deployments of French police and military. In Turkey — supposedly a candidate for full membership of the European Union in the near future — popular support for a more religiously based, Islamic society has continued to grow. Meanwhile, unrest and instability in Albania, virtual civil war in Algeria, and economic hardship in Morocco and parts of the Near East and Central Asia have led to an influx of immigrants, many

Jacob Burckhardt: Cold War Liberal?*

Since the publication of Middlemore’s translation in 1878, Jacob Burckhardt’s The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy has been a classic of English as well as German historiography, read by generation after generation of college students.1 With a couple of relatively unimportant exceptions, however, none of Burckhardt’s other writings, whether published during his lifetime, like Die Zeit Constantin’s des Grossen, or posthumously, like the Griechische Kulturgeschichte and the monograph on Rubens, was available in English before the Second World War.2 Only a few specialist historians knew anything about them. As a result, the appearance in 1943, simultaneously in war-torn London and New York, of a translation of Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen, almost forty years after the original German text, created a sensation in the Englishspeaking countries by revealing an unsuspected, surprisingly topical Burckhardt—a savvy observer of his own time, a penetrating and original political thinker, remarkably independent of the dominant currents of thought of his age, and a prophetic diagnostician of fundamental trends in modern culture

Imperial Icon: The Pergamon Altar in Wilhelminian Germany*

In August 1882, Jacob Burckhardt traveled to Berlin to see for himself the latest trophy of Imperial German archaeology, the remarkable external frieze of the great altar at Pergamon, parts of which had only recently been laid out for public exhibition. Burckhardt had already obtained photographs of the frieze and had been impressed, but coming face to face with it bowled him over. “This discovery,” he wrote to a Basel friend from his hotel in Berlin, “has shattered the systems of the archaeologists and tumbled an entire pseudo-aesthetics to the ground. . . . Since we have come into possession of these terrifyingly glorious spectacles [‘spectacles’ is the best translation I could find for Burckhardt’s striking ‘Evenements’] everything that has been written about the emotional power of the Laocoon is for the wastebasket. Try to imagine a frieze . . . as of now, well over 200 feet long; 8-foot tall gods locked in struggle with giants and protruding so far out from their background that they practically constitute free-standing sculptures; a scene of biting, battering, chopping, crushing, involving also powerful dogs and lions, and with the snake-like tail-ends of many of the giants forming into heads that bite the gods in the back and leg—all this taking place sans ombre de generosite [relentlessly and unforgivingly]. The artistry and style . . . such as to make Phidias tremble on his throne”1 (fig. 1; for additional illustrations, see

The Empire Unpossess'd: An Essay on Gibbon's Decline and Fall.

1. A name, a rank, a character, in the world 2. The plenitude of paternal power 3. The vacant space of the eternal city 4. A liberal education and understanding 5. Order and perspicuity 6. A fair and authentic history.

FIGARO'S CHILDREN

The topic of this guest column is Beaumarchais’s endeavor, as a dramatist, to overcome the irreconcilable polarities of high and low, spirit and body, noble and base, tragedy and comedy that are essential to French classical theater by adapting traditional comedy to the less rigid, more pragmatic and optimistic outlook of the Enlightenment and a new middle class and by experimenting with “bourgeois drama,” notably in the third play of the Figaro trilogy. The bourgeois drama—and the trilogy itself, as it moves the same cast of characters from The Barber of Seville through The Marriage of Figaro to The Guilty Mother— is seen as an attempt to bypass not only the conventional opposition of comedy and tragedy but also the even more fundamental polarity of epic and dramatic through the infusion of elements of the new bourgeois novel into works for the theater. Roles and situations in Beaumarchais are not fixed and eternal but evolve in historical time. Figaro himself emerges as a characteristically modern figure, neither noble nor base but mixed, many-sided, energetic, and enterprising, an individual rather than a type, and thus a more realistic representative of Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment humanity than the Scapinos and Frontinos of traditional comedy.

From Every Tongue a Several Tale

Book reviewed in this article: Satya P. Mohanty, Literary Theory and the Claims of History: Postmodernism, Objectivity, Multicultural Politics

Men and Masks. A Study of Moliere

Come with us to read a new book that is coming recently. Yeah, this is a new coming book that many people really want to read will you be one of them? Of course, you should be. It will not make you feel so hard to enjoy your life. Even some people think that reading is a hard to do, you must be sure that you can do it. Hard will be felt when you have no ideas about what kind of book to read. Or sometimes, your reading material is not interesting enough.