This article investigates a series of experimental television broadcasts undertaken by Italian Fascism’s national broadcasting entity, the Ente Italiano per le Audizioni Radiofoniche, in the years leading up to the Second World War. It explores both the official autarchical policies and the technological limitations that shaped the radio network’s early experiments with television to show that producers’ attitudes regarding medium specificity shaped decisions about programming and musical content. It then suggests that these early sorties into televisual broadcasting left traces that can be seen in the style and political clout of Italian television even today.

This essay focuses on the history and politicization of radio announcers’ vocal delivery in China during the mid-twentieth century. It explores how Chinese Communist Party leaders used internal party debates, national policies, and broadcasting training to construct an ideal Communist voice whose qualities would ostensibly communicate party loyalty and serve as a sonic representation of political authority.

Arguing that aesthetic preference generates the historical forms of human racial and gender difference in The Descent of Man , Charles Darwin offers an alternative account of aesthetic autonomy to the Kantian or idealist account. Darwin understands the aesthetic sense to be constitutive of scientific knowledge insofar as scientific knowledge entails the natural historian’s fine discrimination of formal differences and their dynamic interrelations within a unified system. Natural selection itself works this way, Darwin argues in The Origin of Species ; in The Descent of Man he makes the case for the natural basis of the aesthetic while relativizing particular aesthetic judgments. Libidinally charged—in Kantian phrase, “interested”—the aesthetic sense nevertheless comes historically adrift from its functional origin in rites of courtship.

Modern critics of French Classicism in the visual arts were indebted to a formalism derived from the natural sciences. A nineteenth-century biological discourse identified hidden analogies rather than visual similarities among different specimens, whether animals or paintings. An ambivalence to the use of biological metaphors in North American art history may be traced back to this theoretical genealogy.

Karl Marx’s comments on silk manufacture in “The Working Day” chapter of Capital , volume 1, demonstrate how “quality”—usually associated with “use value”—has been mobilized by capital to naturalize industrialized labor. Putting his insight into conversation with a recent multimedia poetic project, Jen Bervin’s Silk Poems (2016–17), this essay examines the homology between, on the one hand, poetry’s avowed task of fitting form to content and, on the other, the ideology of labor that fits specific bodies to certain materials and tasks.

Focusing on a close, contextualized reading of a single case of invented identity from 1906, this article illustrates how, in fin de siècle Europe, a mutually generative relationship between the real, the imagined, and the rapidly proliferating mass media transformed the female “nihilist” from an apocryphal Russian figure into a durable Russian archetype—an archetype that had significant consequences in the shaping of European public opinion about Russia.

There are two kinds of thing called the wolf : one is acoustic and music adjacent; the other is biomaterial. Together, they are an instance of what Donna Haraway called “figures”: that is, “material-semiotic nodes or knots in which diverse bodies and meanings co-shape one another.” This essay begins by observing these wolves in London, ca. 1806, where both conjured anxious musings on the human relationship to nature. From there, the perspective widens geographically and historically, to situate the figure of the wolf within a wider history of repressed animalia in Western art music.

This essay reassesses Matthew Arnold’s place in the history of modern criticism, arguing that his most important contribution to that history was his refashioning of the critic as an empty and recessive type of agent. Arnold’s famous call for criticism to abandon the “sphere of practical life” was no mere slogan, but the product of an extended meditation on the nature of agency and action, undertaken in dialogue with the works of the philosopher Benedict de Spinoza. From Spinoza’s “lower” criticism, Arnold derived a method that both approaches individual texts as actions and stresses the critic’s role in “composing” those texts as individuals in the first place. To perform these functions, however, criticism must renounce its claim to count as an action in its own right. The essay traces the development of this method from Arnold’s early essays on Spinoza through his mature criticism of the 1860s and 70s and considers its bearing on the wide variety of practices that describe themselves as “critical” today.

In the second half of the twentieth century, in the very decades when the concept of “media” entered the vernacular, the “medium concept” began to shape American art criticism and curation. This was no coincidence: “mediums” emerged as a category for the organization and appreciation of art as the dialectical counterpart to media, and in response to the cultural imperialism of its mass-produced forms. As art became increasingly public, mediums became the public face of art.

This essay puts Yale critic and cofounder of the New Criticism William K. Wimsatt into the balance with the most influential poet of eighteenth-century England, Alexander Pope. A scholar-collector with a lifelong penchant for Pope’s poetry and iconography, Wimsatt molds his influential theoretical paradoxes of abstract particularity after the uniquely embodied poet who made himself inseparable from his art. The elusive power of style connects universal truth to worldly materiality for both writers, giving theoretical abstraction a human likeness.

The Hungarian-born French painter Vera Molnar is one of the few artists who pioneered the use of the computer as a creative medium starting in the late 1960s. This article explores how Molnar’s computer-generated works used programming as a means to reflect upon the autographicity of the handmade trace in drawing and painting.

Oscar Wilde and Émile Zola are conventionally opposed as the figureheads of, respectively, the aestheticist and the naturalist literary trends. Yet they exhibit a number of uncanny similarities—not least the turn both made in their last years toward religious themes and imagery, and especially those of martyrdom and the Passion. This article explores such images in the later life, work, and public persona of each writer and sets them within the context of the dizzying proliferation of references to Christ and martyrdom in fin de siècle culture. It examines the “entailments”—the unexpected consequences, meanings, and echoes—that these overdetermined themes brought in their train from the wider literary field and shows how those entailments were exacerbated by the massive politicization of “martyr” discourse around the time of the Dreyfus affair, when the theme acquired its fullest significance.

“RAND Narratology” looks at the unlikely historical and aesthetic overlap between narrative theory and strategic defense thinking in the middle part of the twentieth century. Looking at the many writings and frankly odd intellectual styles of nuclear war planners working at the RAND Corporation, the essay examines the unexpected play between the material facts of intellectual history, the obscure but nonetheless real force of narrative desire, and the unthinkable costs of nuclear war.

This paper presents a computational method for assessing the uses of the category “genre.” It takes as its example the long-standing “Adam Smith” problem, which seeks to settle whether Smith’s two major works, The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations are compatible with each other and can be seen as contributing to a larger “system” of inquiry embarked upon by Smith.

This essay draws upon the work of Erving Goffman and Michael Silverstein to read Shakespeare’s first poem as a guide to mastering the burgeoning early modern art of conversation. The epyllion follows the conversation manuals of its day in embracing the aphorism as a charismatic form of talk, but it departs from its precedents in attributing to the aphorism an overtly erotic force. By according to the aphorism the power to turn conversation into an erotic encounter, Venus and Adonis elaborates its period’s most seductive fantasy of talk.

This essay argues that Ernst Cassirer’s thinking about the spontaneity of form-giving in the creation of art, which he allies to the ethical dimension of Judaism, informs his critique of fascism in The Myth of the State . Aesthetics, for Cassirer, is not divorced from politics but one of its conditions of possibility.

This essay examines the role of geological time in the work of the German Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich in the early nineteenth century. It foregrounds the challenges this model of time posed for the relationship between the human and the natural—a relationship usually considered central to Friedrich’s work—and for the perceptual powers of the viewing subject.

For all their concern with the nature of medical authority, historians of medicine have paid remarkably little attention to the history of the medical script, the main medium in and through which the doctor’s authority is enacted. This essay analyzes the medical prescription as an instance of a written performative. While focusing on the changing uses of one particular documentary genre in turn-of-the-twentieth-century France, it seeks to outline a broader theory of graphic performativity , or of the conditions under which the symbolic power of the oral performance is transferred and transformed as it is transcribed on paper.