André Jolles

This essay presents the positivist perception of the prophetic biography (sīra) and early Islamic historiography as capable of yielding hard historical data against the background of skeptical approaches to the Islamic literary sources and compares it with external literary, epigraphic, and numismatic evidence. The essay calls for a systematic use of modern-day classifying categories, such as ‘myth’, ‘legend’, and ‘saga,’ which can be epistemologically misleading, if applied on sīra traditions in an undisciplined manner. At the end of the essay, I have attached my translation into Arabic of its part “Sīra and Poetry”.

Keywords: sira, prophetic biography, myth, legend, Geistesbeschäftigung, salvation history, isnad-cum-matn analysis, fictionalization, epigraphic evidence, numismatic evidence.
====================================================================================================================
أقارن في هذا المقال بين النظرة الإيجابية في السيرة النبوية والمصادر التاريخية المبكرة، وهي نظرة قائبة بأنّه من شأن هذه المؤلفات توفير المعلومات التاريخية الثابتة، من جهة، وبين النظرة الارتيابية في المصادر ذاتها، من جهة أخرى، مستنجدا بالقرائن الخارجية من الأدبية والنقشية والنُّمِّية. كما أني أدعو إلى الاستعمال المنضبط لمفاهيم التصنيف الأدبي كـ"الميث" و"الأسطورة" و"الساغا" التي قد تؤدي الى متاهة منهجية حالَ تطبيقها العشوائي بالنسبة للسيرة النبوية. وفي نهاية المقال يجد القارئ ترجمتي إلى اللغة العربية للفصل "السيرة والشعر".

A partire dalla constatazione della forte similarità tra la figura della ninfa come è presentata da André Jolles nella Epistula prima del carteggio fittizio con Aby Warburg (1900) e quella della Gradiva descritta nella novella di Wilhelm Jensen (1903), il contributo riflette sulla significatività della convergenza tra l’interesse suscitato dalla stessa novella nella nascente psicoanalisi e quello di Jolles per la ninfa, non solo per il valore dello scambio di idee con Warburg nel contesto della storia dell’arte, ma anche come espressione in nuce delle originali riflessioni di Jolles relative al mito, sia precedenti che successive il carteggio.
::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
There are strong similarities between the figure of the nymph in André Jolles’ Epistula Prima (1900)—the first letter in his fictive correspondence with Aby Warburg—and the spectral female character in Wilhelm Jensen’s story Gradiva (1903). This article reflects on the significance of this convergence, with particular attention to the interest roused by Jensen’s story in the rising field of psychoanalysis, and the importance of fascination for the study of art inspired in Jolles by the nymph. This work is based on the analysis of this shared interest between psychoanalysis and art history in order to emphasize the originality of Jolles’ thinking about myth, both before and after his correspondence with Aby Warburg.
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
À partir du constat de la forte similarité entre la figure de la nymphe telle qu’elle est présentée par André Jolles dans l’Epistula prima de la correspondance fictive avec Aby Warburg (1900) et la figure de Gradiva décrite dans la nouvelle de Wilhelm Jensen (1903), cette contribution réfléchit sur l’importance de la convergence entre l’intérêt suscité par la nouvelle dans la naissante psychanalyse et celui de Jolles pour la nymphe, non seulement au regard de la valeur de l’échange d’idées avec Aby Warburg dans le cadre de l’histoire de l’art mais aussi en tant qu’expression in nuce des réflexions originales de Jolles relatives au mythe, précédentes et successives à la correspondance.

Nel saggio del 1921 su La visione d’amore nella Vita nuova, Jolles allarga all’ambito delle forme letterarie l’indagine sul rapporto tra «forma» e «visione», in precedenza impostata nel campo delle arti figurative. Dopo aver inquadrato il problema tracciandone con rapidi schizzi lo sviluppo dai Provenzali a Dante, Jolles discute nella sezione finale con Vossler e Huizinga la questione della demarcazione tra Medioevo e Rinascimento sfruttando lo schema offerto dal classico conflitto che domina la questione degli universali. L’articolo si propone di chiarire quale fosse all’epoca il valore storiografico e culturale delle categorie di «realismo» e «nominalismo» per cogliere con maggior precisione il senso dell’approccio morfologico-dinamico di Jolles, che può essere forse accostato a quello esattamente contemporaneo di Jung.

Tanaka Jun, Touching the Past: Historical Experience, Photography, Suspense Foreword " Touching the Past " —I thought that I would begin this book based on the feeling of definitely having had such an experience. This book focuses on events with a connection to the past, especially through photographs, to clarify these " historical experiences. " It also investigates an ideal form of a historical narrative that conveys these experiences within a principle of " suspense. " The text presented in the introduction of this book was written at the time of the Tohoku earthquake and Fukushima nuclear incident in March 2011 before I directly took up the theme of historical experiences. This is because it was a dangerous moment wherein there were encounters with historical images. At this time, when there was contact with surrounding disaster and imminent danger and five senses became completely and abnormally sharpened, a sense of history that attempted to understand the various signs of the past was also sharpened. The historical experiences that this book attempts to problematize are sensory experiences felt through the body and not through information or understanding. In that sense, the discovery of special sensations and knowledge made possible because of being under dangerous circumstances that are presented in the introduction, especially the historical views in Hotta Yoshie's Hōjōki Shiki (A Personal Note on Hōjōki) reported in Chapter 1 and the theme of " hope " discussed in accordance with Walter Benjamin in Chapter 4, announce the entire argument of this book as a sort of " forewarning. " Part I of the book is devoted to theories of historical experience and individual case studies. Chapter 1 investigates the historical narratives of Johan Huizinga and Aby Warburg and their relations with historical experiences. Discussions of historical experiences in current historical theory are also pursued. The work of self-analysis based on my personal experiences cannot be avoided given the nature of the matter at hand. My initial motivation in writing this book was because of the experience that I had in archives that I repeatedly visited as it was necessary for my research on the history of ideas. Chapter 2 is a record of the search for " Asia, " a mysterious woman who appears in the journal and letters of Gilbert Clavel (who is the protagonist of my book Gilbert Clavel: Architect of the Chthonic, which was born out of such comings and goings through an archive). While this is a reasoning process and an investigation that searches for the answer to the question " Who is Asia?, " at the same time, it is a journey through historical experiences that studies firsthand the process required to understand the past. Chapters 3 and 4 report the historical experiences of the historian of thought Hashikawa Bunso and the architect Daniel Libeskind, respectively. Because they are the figures who serve as guides, as I have pursued my research on political imagination and modern and contemporary architectural discussions, the investigations in these two chapters search for experiences that were the root of their philosophy. In this book, the target when dealing with experiences that " touch the past, " especially in focused investigations, is photographs. This is because photographs strongly define historical experiences since the mid-19th century as objects that directly prove the reality of the past. However, the value of photographs as historical materials has not necessarily been recognized in historical research because photographs too directly display the past, and thus, they could not be easily incorporated into the historical discourse. In Part II of the book, I analyze five photographs of the blast zone clicked by Matsushige Yoshito on August 6 th , 1945, the day when the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima; I also analyze four photographs secretly clicked by a Sonderkommando at the second concentration camp at Auschwitz (Birkenau). All these photographs were clicked under extreme circumstances; thus, I focus the discussion on the possibility of getting close to places of liminal experiences through photography and ethical problems that are entailed. The former takes the form of a study on the discussion in Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz by Georges Didi-Huberman.

Both Francesco Domenico Guerrazzi’s short story La serpicina and chapter XVII of Alessandro Manzoni’s novel I Promessi Sposi encompass the same referential world that Italian culture inherited from folk-tale and raised in 19th century to a literary genre known as fiaba. For lack in these two works of “a thing permeated with power of form” which could be able “to represent [this form] like the relic represents the form of the legend” (André Jolles), its function seems to have been assumed in 19th century Italian literature by a linguistic form: i. e. the reduplicated imperative which Guerrazzi uses in his short story and Manzoni introduces in the late version of his novel (la Quarantana). This linguistic form becomes then and is still the distinctive feature of fiaba genre: both as a folk-tale collected in the field and in the works of well known writers as Carlo Collodi, Vittorio Imbriani and Luigi Capuana.

L’articolo tenta di individuare una «forma semplice» che possa essere considerata tipica della narrativa contemporanea e la ravvisa nel necrologio. Il romanzo del secondo Novecento o del nuovo Millennio contiene spesso al suo interno porzioni testuali chiaramente dedicate al ricordo di morti o vittime della Storia. Si tratta di una ampia linea letteraria necrologica, di cui si offre qui una prima fenomenologia tematica ed espressiva che comprende le opere di Primo Levi, di Sebald e di Bolaño. Il necrologio può anche diventare elemento strutturale dominante in testi costituiti pressoché esclusivamente da brevi narrazioni necrologiche, come nelle microbiografie di Baroncelli e nelle visite a tombe illustri di Noteboom.

This essay considers physical daguerreotype cases from the 1840s and 1850s alongside scholarly debate on case studies, or “thinking in cases”, and some recent physicalist claims about objects in cultural theory, particularly those associated with “new materialism”. Throughout the essay, these three distinct strands are braided together to interrogate particular objects and broader questions of cultural history. It contributes to thinking about daguerreotypes and their cases, but it does so in order to interrogate thinking in cases and objecthood as a legal category. I argue that daguerreotypes have to be understood as image-thing amalgams, paying particular attention to the construction and distinguishing marks on the cases and frames that enclose these images. These cases, particularly those of the patent holder Richard Beard, are situated within legal debates on property and cannot be understood without attention to social relations of capital and class.
With three short embedded films.

http://britishartstudies.ac.uk/issues/issue-index/issue-18/making-a-case#figure33

What is a literary case history? How does literature contribute to the establishment of casuistic forms that since the 18th century have been involved in the formation of psychological knowledge and legal decision-making? And how does this in return contribute to the formation of a literary and aesthetic discourse to which we attribute special formative and critical qualities that define our cultural self-conception? This essay addresses these questions by focusing on three literary texts by Schiller, Büchner, and Musil. While these texts address the casuistic problem of the mediation between individual history and general rule, each of them simultaneously conceives its specific literary aesthetics from its engagement with historical cases. Thus, these texts must be read not only as literary case histories that contribute to a general anthropological knowledge, but must be understood, more comprehensively, as cases of literature.