News
Just published: Norbert Elias, Mozart and Other Essays on Courtly Art
Norbert Elias, Mozart and Other Essays on Courtly Art, edited by Eric R. Baker and Stephen Mennell, translated by Edmund Jephcott (Dublin: UCD Press, 2010). 200 pp. ISBN: 9781906359096
Like his father Leopold, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was dependent on a court aristocracy in whose eyes he was little more than a domestic servant. Unlike his father, however, his personal makeup was already that of the freelance artist who sought to follow the flow of his own artistic conscience and imagination rather than the courtly conventions and standards of the day. In Mozart: the Sociology of a Genius, Elias paints a portrait of this extraordinarily gifted artist born into a society that did not yet possess either the concept of ‘genius’ or (at least in music) that of freelance artist. The apparent contradictions of his character – the refined elegance of his compositions and the coarseness of his lavatorial humour – reflect his uncomfortable and eventually tragic straddling of two social worlds.
The volume also includes two long essays on related topics, previously unpublished in English.
‘The fate of German Baroque poetry: between the traditions of court and middle class’ asks why even such notable poets of the Baroque period in Germany as Martin Opitz and Christian Hofman von Hoffmanswaldau later fell into neglect, in contrast to their contemporaries in England and France – such as Milton, Marvell, Racine and Corneille. The reason, says Elias, was that in Germany courtly conventions and feelings were rejected much more radically by the middle-class writers of the age of Goethe and Schiller.
Elias’s essay ‘Watteau’s Pilgrimage to the Island of Love’ was only published posthumously, and is not included in the German Gesammelte Schriften. It concerns Watteau’s painting also known under the title of The Embarkation for Cythera, seen as the quintessence of the courtly style and fête galante genre. Watteau’s work too fell into disfavour at the time of the Revolution, but then became the centre of attention once more among the French Romantics.
This volume includes a full colour reproduction of the Louvre version of The Embarkation for Cythera, and, like other volumes in the series, has been thoroughly re-edited and annotated.
List Price: €60.00
Discount Price if ordered directly from the publisher (www.ucdpress.ie): €48.00
XIII Simpósio Internacional Processo CivilizadorUniversidade Nacional da Colômbia (UNAL) 9 - 12 November 2010
XIII Simpósio Internacional Processo Civilizador
9-12 November 2010
Universidade Nacional da Colômbia (UNAL)
Bogotá, Colombia
The deadline for abstracts is 19 May 2010. Abstracts should refer to one of the following themes: Sport and leisure; Education and Culture; Latin America; Theoretical debates
Contact address: simposioelias2010@gmail.com
Thursday April 29th 2010 17:37Latest Volume of Collected Works PublishedThe Loneliness of the Dying and Humana Conditio
Norbert Elias, The Loneliness of the Dying and Humana Conditio, edited by Alan and Brigitte Scott, translated by Edmund Jephcott (Dublin: UCD Press, 1 April 2010 [Collected Works, vol. 6). 192 pp. ISBN 9781906359065 (hardback)
The latest volume of the Collected Works of Norbert Elias in English, edited by Alan and Brigitte Scott of the University of Innsbruck, contains two of Elias’s shorter books.
The Loneliness of the Dying is one of his Elias’s admired works. Drawing on a range of literary and historical sources, it is sensitive and even moving in its discussion of the changing social context of death and dying over the centuries. Today, when death is less familiar to most people in everyday life, the dying frequently experience the loneliness of social isolation.
Humana Conditio, written in 1985 to mark the fortieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War, has never before been published in English. ‘Human beings’, writes Elias, ‘have made the reciprocal murdering of people a permanent institution. Wars are part of a fixed tradition of humanity. They are anchored in its social institutions and in the social habitus of people, even the most peace-loving’. Although Elias, like most people at the time, failed to foresee the end of the Cold War, his discussion of ‘hegemonic fevers’ remains highly relvant to understanding present-day international relations. Elias’s meditation on the human lot ranges over the whole of human history to the future of humanity.
The volume is published at the list price of €60.00, but can be purchased at the discount price of €48.00 if it is ordered online direct from the publishers at www.ucdpress.ie.
Sunday July 25th 2010 17:50Beyond Dichotomous Thinking: The Society of Individuals. The Legacy and Continuing Relevance of Norbert Elias’s Sociology.7–8 October 2010, Polo delle Scienze Sociali, Università degli studi di Firenze,
Call for papers. Cambio is pleased to announce the first Italian conference on Norbert Elias to be held at the Polo delle scienze Sociali, Facoltà di Scienze Politiche ‘C. Alfieri’ in Florence on 7–8 October 2010.
The conference will mark the twentieth anniversary of Norbert Elias’s death on 1 August 1990.
The central focus of the conference will not be on the most widely known aspect of Elias’s work, the theory of civilizing and decivilizing processes, but rather on his characteristic rejection of polar dichotomies.
Workshops titles include: Individual and Society, Nature and Culture, Global and Local, Order and Change.
Abstracts due before 30 March 2010. See PDF for full details of conference, including workshops and details of how to submit abstracts.
Sunday April 25th 2010 21:33Globalisation and Civilisation in International Relations: Towards New Models of Human Interdependence 9–10 April 2010, UCD School of Sociology, Dublin, Ireland
XVII World Congress of Sociology 201011–17 July 2010, Gothenburg, Sweden
The Figurational Sociology Working Group will have five sessions at next year’s ISA World Congress in Göteborg. They will be convened by Robert van Krieken (University College Dublin) and Stephen Vertigans (Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen).
For details of sessions, please download PDF.
For the first time, we shall be organising a business meeting for the group, to be followed by the more customary dinner together. The agenda for the meeting will include a discussion on the possible establishment of an online journal for the group.
We hope that there will be a very large gathering in Göteborg of people with a figurational bent from all parts of the world.
Monday June 14th 2010 20:35Twentieth Anniversary of Elias's DeathPodcast
Norbert Elias died on 1 August 1990. To mark the twentieth anniversary, the German radio station WDR3 (Westdeutscher Rundfunk 3. Programm) broadcast a fifteen-minute programme in its daily ZeitZeichen series.
Friday August 6th 2010 22:28