Topic
Horror vacui
About: Horror vacui is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 18 publications have been published within this topic receiving 127 citations.
Papers
TL;DR: In this article, the authors focus on popular songbooks as they emerged during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but will limit themselves only to the texts, leaving the musical notation for future studies.
Abstract: While scholarly devotion to texts and documents from the Middle Ages often engenders spirited debate, we must also dedicate analytic interpretation to the study of context itself, hence of the manuscript as a holistic entity. Parchment was expensive, and the typical medieval horror vacui - vividly reflected, for instance, in the nuns' choir of the famous Cistercian convent of Wienhausen near Celle, Germany - often led to the curious phenomenon of manuscripts filled from cover to cover with all kinds of texts, these lacking a specific ordering principle even if not factoring in the often highly embellished margins and illustrations. Thus we might as well assume that paleographers and others, when scrutinizing these texts, must overcome the apparently random system that seems to have held sway because scriptorial bookmakers had to conserve space. As scholarship has observed for some time, chronicle literature, as one example, has often survived in rather crammed quarters. Occasionally, it is difficult to ascertain where one text concludes and the other begins, such as in the rich and voluminous world chronicle by Jans Enikel from the time after 1272, when Enikel began to compose the historical account. As Graeme Dunphy now describes this annalist's compilation process: "Jans assembles material from a variety of sources, including oral traditions, which he reworks freely, preferring a good story to an authoritative report."1 One of the numerous literary examples proves tobe his narrative "Sir Friedrich von Auchenfurt," which suddenly appears in the middle of the text, devoid of specific markers to signal any shift of genre, topic, theme, or focus.2In this regard we might adopt the highly useful process of bricolage (Roland Bartbes) to characterize this seemingly arbitrary, undifferentiated assemblage of materials because medieval authors and scribes appear to have had less concern with ascribing a narrow identity to a literary or historical work and instead often allowed one text to bleed into the other; that is, to rest peacefully next to each other.3 Accepting this reality does not mean that we cannot identify specific text corpora or overcome unique problems in determining the beginning and ending of a romance or a collection of poems. The issue of arriving at conclusions about a particular text proves intriguing because what individual scribes incorporated into a manuscript, and how, or whether, they perceived the need to categorize their insertions according to individual genres, remains a tantalizing puzzle to be solved.While scribes responsible for the early fourteenth-century Manesse songbook tried to create neatly categorized groups of poems deriving from poets of varying social status,4 in the later Middle Ages copyists generated a number of alternative approaches to the collection of songs or poems which I intend to discuss here. I intend to focus on popular songbooks as they emerged during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but will limit myself only to the texts, leaving the musical notation for future studies.5 We can draw from a commendable number of previous studies focusing on a variety of miscellany manuscripts, such as Manfred Zimmermann's far-reaching analysis of the Sterzinger Miszellaneen manuscript," or A. G. Rigg's analytic description of a Cambridge song-verse compilation, though these researchers take different types of text collections from the fifteenth century into view.7 Zimmermann and Rigg regard these documents as essentially textual storehouses, probably because the writing material was so expensive, as the contributors to a relevant anthology edited by Stephen G. Nichols and Siegfried Wenzel have shown. My interest here concerns the more narrowly defined textual genre of song poetry (didactic, religious, erotic, or primarily entertaining).The history of song collections runs transhistorically from the high to the late Middle Ages and even far beyond, whether we think of the Carmina Burana or the Manesse manuscript. …
35 citations
1 Jan 2000
22 citations
Journal Article•
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TL;DR: Vergil, Georgics as mentioned in this paper discusses the role played by horror vacui in Vergil's poetry, both as a thematic and a structuring device, in the context of psychoanalytic readings of ancient texts, a view that attributes far too much originality to the psychodynamic framework and far too little complexity to the ancients.
Abstract: Scilicet et tempus veniet, cum finibus illis agricola, incuruo terram molitus aratro, exesa inveniet scabra robigine pila aut gravibus rastris galeas pulsabit inanis grandiaque effossis mirabitur ossa sepulcris. And know that a time will come, when in those fields A farmer, working the land with his curved plough, Will find javelins eaten with rusty mold, Or will strike empty helmets with his heavy hoe And marvel at gigantic bones in the unearthed graves. VERGIL, Georgics At contra nusquam apparent Acherusia temple nec tellus obstat quin omnia dispiciantur, sub pedibus quaecumque infra per inane geruntur. his ibi me rebus quaedam divina voluptas percipit atque horror, quod sic natura tua vi tam manifesta patens ex omni parte retecta est. But, on the other hand, the quarters of Acheron are nowhere to be seen, nor yet is earth a barrier to prevent all things being descried, which are carried on underneath through the void below our feet. At these things, as it were, some godlike pleasure and a thrill of awe [or: horror] seizes on me, to think that thus by thy power nature is made so clear and manifest, laid bare to sight on every side. LUCRETIUS, On the Nature of Things Vacuums are nothings. We only mention them to let them know we know they're there. Anonymous fifth or sixth grader Something about Nothing This paper has its background in a few related projects. First, and most generally, it belongs to an overarching obsession in progress on conceptions of emptiness in classical literature. More immediately related are the remarks, from the Introduction to this volume, on the subject as void in classical antiquity. The aim of those remarks was to consider to what extent contemporary perspectives on the empty subject in psychoanalysis in a Lacanian vein are an inheritance of ancient views--thus reversing the worry about anachronism in psychoanalytic readings of ancient texts, a view that attributes far too much originality to the psychoanalytic framework and far too little complexity to the ancients. (Which is not to say that it eliminates the worry: the worry persists, if only in a new, displaced, and doubtless heightened form.) This paper is also connected to an essay of mine on Lucretius and the role played by horror vacui in his poem, both as a thematic and a structuring device. (1) The term void in my title, therefore, has resonances in each of these areas. Void refers generally to notions of the empty (vacuity) in Greek and Roman poets. It also refers to one aspect of this emptiness, whereby subjects in poetic settings--let us call them somethings--become thinglike or phantasmatic and finally voided of substance--let us call them nothings. Among the many examples of this are Agamemnon eclipsed by death in Aeschylus's Oresteia trilogy; Helen in Stesichorus and in Gorgias; and Europa in Moschus, as she dissolves without remainder into her fantasy. And finally, void refers to the atomistic conception of void as found in Lucretius. (2) Vergil, as an inheritor of the literary tradition, also inherits these three senses of void. And so, while it is tempting, when dwelling on the appearance of voids in Vergil, to read him from the start against his Roman Epicurean context, my topic will be straining somewhat against this narrow contextualization of Vergil's poetry. The hunt for specifically Lucretian echoes in Vergil, while valuable in itself, can do an injustice to the wealth of associations and allusions in Vergilian poetry. The Epicureans have no monopoly on the conception of void in antiquity, nor should we imagine that their conceptualizations are generally immune to prior poetic influence. (3) Moreover, broadening the search criteria for, say, Vergilian echoings of Lucretius or of Epicurus will have the advantage of shifting the focus away in part from an overly narrow understanding of Epicurean thinking. The result, I hope, will be a richer picture of Vergil's negotiation of this tradition in his works, as well as a richer picture of this tradition itself. …
20 citations
Journal Article•
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors used an inventory of publications citing Nowak's perspective to analyse the manner in which this key concept has been implemented in sociological explanations, and concluded that a sociological vacuum is often pointed out as being an obstacle for Poland's desired development and that it dramatizes the rather essayistic narratives of Polish society.
Abstract: In the late 1970s, Stefan Nowak posited the existence of a sociological vacuum in Poland, and his concept became one of the most widely employed in studies of this society. The author of the present article uses an inventory of publications citing Nowak's perspective to analyse the manner in which this key concept has been implemented in sociological explanations. According to his findings, the idea appears to be most often used in accounts of the 1980s "Solidarnosc" movement, in reference to civil society and social capital, and in treatments of democracy in Poland. The validity of Nowak's idea is not usually questioned, and scholars referring to his thesis frequently modify the initial argument by shifting its meaning and ignoring its national identity element. Furthermore, in the analyzed works, the authors point to a sociological vacuum as an obstacle to the desired development of civil society, social capital, and democracy in Poland. This is usually done without deeper theoretical or empirical discussion, and in an essayistic and dramatized fashion. Such an anxiety about the lack of necessary ingredients in Polish society is described as horror vacui-i.e., fear of empty space.Keywords: Sociological vacuum, Stefan Nowak, horror vacui, "Solidarnosc", civil society, social capital, condition of democracy.IntroductionThe existence of a sociological vacuum in Polish society-a thesis formulated by Stefan Nowak-is one of the most celebrated ideas produced by Polish sociologists. It is customarily repeated in analyses of key social phenomena like the emergence of the "Solidarnosc" [Solidarity] movement in the 1980s, the development of civil society, or the issue of social capital and the condition of democracy in Poland. It has also become part of journalistic analyses of Polish society and its recent history. In spite of its wide circulation, there seem to have been but few attempts (see: Kubiak, Miszalska 2004; Czesnik 2008a) to thoroughly discuss and debate Nowak's argument. This observation gave rise to the following questions: How is Nowak's thesis being used by social scientists? Is the sociological vacuum treated as fact? Is it ever measured? Is the proposition about a sociological vacuum being refined, or even amended? And if so, in what manner?In order to answer these questions, I made an empirical base comprising all the publications citing Nowak's thesis that I could identify.1 The resulting 1792 papers of the base made it possible to see tendencies in using the concept of a sociological vacuum. Further, it also provided valuable insights into the characteristics of social science discourse on Polish society. This study is a history of a concept embedded in the Polish context. Yet it is also a case illustrative of a broader phenomenon in the social sciences and humanities, where ideas, once articulated, start 'lives of their own' and are used in new and sometimes surprising circumstances.Below, I will first introduce Nowak's insights, and then give my objectives and the methods applied in my investigation. I present the ways in which the idea of a sociological vacuum was understood by the authors who refer to it and argue that the majority of authors treat the sociological vacuum as fact, while only a smaller part attempt to challenge Nowak's thesis. I also draw attention to two mechanisms: the shift in meaning and the selective and partial implementation of the thesis. I further point to the most significant phenomena with which this key concept is made to converge: the ideological and structural conditions of Polish society; the "Solidarnosc" social movement; civil society; social capital; and democracy in Poland. On this basis I discuss the findings and conclude that a sociological vacuum is often pointed out as being an obstacle for Poland's desired development and that it dramatizes the rather essayistic narratives of Polish society. I term this anxiety with regard to Poland's incomplete modernization 'horror vacui'-i. …
16 citations
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| 2013 | 1 |