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Arnold Schoenberg, Exile, and the Crisis of Modernism

By Kenneth Marcus
FIAR: Forum for Inter-American Research

This essay explores contributions to the modernist movement in Southern California by exiled composer Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951), with a focus on the twelve-tone cantata for speaker, male choir, and chamber orchestra, A Survivor from Warsaw, Op. 46. I argue that an important way for Schoenberg and other exiles in Southern California to find Heimat, or a sense of belonging, was through cultural hybridity: works that resulted from collaboration with other artists, either foreign or American. In order to survive as artists, the exiles had to reach out to American audiences, which meant adapting to American culture. This interest in hybridity resulted in part from what several scholars have called a “crisis of modernism,” which resulted from the collapse of democracies in the 1930s in Europe and the supposed decline of the cultural ideals that those democracies had upheld. During an era in which foreign artists in the United States were often viewed with suspicion, cultural hybridity provided a means of finding acceptance among American audiences.

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Mixture and Transition: The Urban Space(s) in Flannery O’Connor’s “Everything That Rises Must Conver

By Hsiu-chih Tsai
REAL: Review of English and American Literature [Yingmei wenxue pinglun]

This paper focuses on the spatial politics inscribed on human memories and practiced in the public social spaces in Flannery O’Connor’s “Everything That Rises Must Converge.” The narrative event happened on a bus in a small American southern town in 1950s, while the public space was just desegregated. The riders on the bus were all facing a new situation and both the white and the black people were not used to this kind of spatial relationship. Their behavior and thoughts could be seen as the results of a much more complicated inscription of the Southern culture and history of slavery and discrimination. Racial discrimination and the Southern culture make the fictional urban space full of mistrust and threats.

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