The 1920s and 1930s form an important period in our cultural history that is famous for its legacy of creative work focusing on the lives and concerns of African Americans. This flowering of art and literature is variously referred to as the Harlem Renaissance, New Negro Movement, or New Negro Renaissance. Among the many outstanding black writers associated with the period are Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Claude McKay, and Zora Neale Hurston. The enduring value of the work produced by black artists from this era has prompted literary scholars to recognize the Harlem Renaissance as “the one period in black letters that stands out above all others” (Harris and Davis, Afro-American Writers, xi) and theatre scholars to acknowledge the contemporary development of a serious theatre that could “speak to and for African Americans” (Hatch and Hamalian, Lost Plays 18).

Although the Harlem Renaissance is so named because of the great number of black artists who flocked into Harlem, making it the black cultural capital of the world, significant artistic activity was also occurring in cities such as Washington DC, Chicago, and Boston. Just as the movement cannot be limited to one location, neither is it easily reducible to exact dates, but it is generally conceded that an unprecedented surge in activity among African American artists, reflecting a renewed race consciousness and pride, began around World War I and extended into the decade of the the 1930s.

DOXOGRAPHI GRAECI

Because the works of the early Greek philosophers have been lost, our knowledge of their content is entirely dependent either on sparse verbatim quotations (though less sparse than for instance those relating to the early Stoics) or on various forms of reportage in all sorts of ancient authors. It has thus become customary to begin books of this kind with a critical review of our sources of information.

What is at stake is the reliability of these sources. The ideal of an objective history of philosophy is a nineteenth-century invention. In antiquity history of philosophy was part of systematic philosophy, serving a variety of purposes. The ideas of earlier philosophers were used and interpreted in many ways, and, more often than not, served merely as springboards. This holds not only for the attitude of major thinkers such as Plato and Aristotle but also for the far humbler works consisting of collections of doctrines, with or without some biographical detail, that circulated on a fairly extensive scale. Such works were used, it would seem, in the context of a primary education in philosophy and also as quarries to be exploited whenever someone writing about a philosophical issue felt he should set off his own view against those of others, to improve upon an already existing view or to replace it with another.

THE APPROACH TO HERACLITUS

Heraclitus of Ephesus must have been active around 500 B.C. Nothing is known of the external events of his life; the later biographical reports are fiction. Of Heraclitus' book, around one hundred fragments survive. It seems to have consisted of a series of aphoristic statements without formal linkage. The style is unique. Heraclitus' carefully stylized and artfully varied prose ranges from plain statements in ordinary language to oracular utterances with poetical special effects in vocabulary, rhythm, and word arrangement. Many statements play with paradoxes or hover teasingly on the brink of self-contradiction. Many seem intended as pungently memorable aphorisms. (Translations in this chapter try to capture some of the ambiguities, where this is reasonably possible.)

The meaning and purpose of Heraclitus7 book has always been found to be problematic, even by those who read it in its entirety. The Peripatetic Theophrastus (D.L. IX.6) diagnosed Heraclitus as “melancholic” (manic-depressive), on the grounds that he left some things half-finished, and contradicted himself; later Greeks named him “the obscure.” Certainly Heraclitus did not always aim at expository order and clarity as usually understood. What remains shows that he often was deliberately unclear. Like a riddle or an oracle, he practised a deliberate half-concealment of his meanings, goading the reader to participate in a game of hide-and-seek.

The Baroque and Classical eras

Andrea and Giovanni Gabrieli's Concerti per voci e stromenti musicali … (Venice, 1587), comprising sacred music and madrigals for voices and instruments, is the earliest known publication incorporating the term ‘concerto’ in its title. ‘Concerto’ then denoted simply an aggregation of performers and was applied to various musical genres, vocal and instrumental. The instrumental concerto emerged as an independent form towards the end of the seventeenth century and soon evolved into a genre in which virtuosity and textural contrast were significant elements.

Among the earliest Italian composers to exploit the cello as a concertante instrument were Jacchini, Della Bella and Dall'Abaco. Jacchini's Concerti per camera … con Violoncello Obligato Op. 4 (Bologna, 1701) comprises ten works, six of which include brief passages for a solo cello. These passages, which appear mostly in the fast outer movements (all but No. 6 are three-movement structures), are based on scales or sequential patterns and are not technically demanding. Dall'Abaco's twelve Concerti a quattro da chiesa Op. 2 (Amsterdam, 1712) reconcile their adoption of forms from the sonata with solo passages principally for a violin. But the eleventh concerto, in G major, specifies ‘con il Violoncello obligato’, which is required to play a more extensive solo role than in Jacchini's works.

The earliest true solo concertos for cello and orchestra were composed by Vivaldi, who wrote most of his twenty-seven examples (RV398–424) for the young female cellists of the Pio Ospedale della Pietà in Venice, where he was employed irregularly from 1703 to 1740. Vivaldi was the first to develop fully the formal and stylistic possibilities of the Torellian concerto model, as demonstrated in some of Torelli’s posthumously published Concerti grossi Op. 8 (Bologna, 1709). Although few of Vivaldi’s cello concertos make exceptional technical demands, they fully realise the instrument’s warm, expressive sonorities, most adopting minor keys.

By the turn of the eighteenth century, French cellists had achieved standards of performance equal to those of the Germans, who had taken over the lead from Italy. Individual characteristics were in evidence in each country; German players were renowned for a highly developed left-hand technique and a vigorous tone, while the French favoured elegance, as exemplified by the courts of Louis XV and XVI. Tone production was influenced strongly by Viotti, the Italian founder of the French school of violin playing.

The Paris Conservatoire was the main teaching centre in France. Two of its most respected professors, who contributed greatly to the improved standards, were Jean-Baptiste Bréval (see p. 55) and Jean Henri Levasseur, both of whom had studied with François Cupis. Levasseur, who had also studied with Jean-Louis Duport, was appointed first cellist of the Opéra orchestra in 1789, and later became a member of Napoleon's Private Music, continuing in that position after the defeat of the emperor. He was also one of the contributors, with Baillot, Catel and Baudiot, to the Méthode de Violoncelle et de Basse d'Accompagnement (Paris, 1805), regarded as one of the most significant instruction books for the instrument at that time.

Jacques Michel Hurel Lamare, one of the most prominent of Levasseur's pupils, was born in Paris into a very poor family; but he had such outstanding musical talent that he entered the Institute of the Pages of the Royal Music as a seven-year-old, and at fifteen became a pupil of Jean-Louis Duport. At the outbreak of the Revolution in 1789, he left his royal employers and in 1794 was appointed principal cellist at the Théâtre Feydeau, appearing frequently as soloist; he was also a professor at the Paris Conservatoire. He relinquished both appointments in 1801 in favour of a solo career and received acclaim in Moscow and St Petersburg and in many countries throughout Europe.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the modernist division between avant-garde and traditional fiction was coming to an end. As relativism, indeterminacy, self-reflexiveness, and absurdity became generally recognizable as a description of contemporary experience, experimentalism shifted from a goal in itself to a vehicle for a redefined realism.

The normalizing of the experimentalist ethos — so important in novels by men — was equally crucial for women writers. Beginning in about 1970, an unprecedented explosion of novels by and about women appeared in print, a simple fact in itself, but one that represented a fundamental change in the meaning of women’s experience. By writing, by being published, by finding an audience receptive to their work, women de facto redefined their status in our culture. They achieved a “voice” where before they were voiceless; they wrote themselves into history — both political and literary — when previously they had been strikingly absent from it. Women writers found immediately relevant the postmodern tenet that history is a construct serving an ideology and open to varying interpretation. The problem was how to appropriate the authority to tell stories of the past, and how to structure them in such a way as to generate a different kind of future.

World War II ended in 1945, ushering in a mid-century decade of major change in the world and especially in the United States. The flowering of African American literature, known as the Harlem Renaissance, had seemed to fade as writers tried to cope with the Great Depression and a World War forcing them to a new understanding of their place in the world. While the US labor force adjusted itself in order to accommodate returning soldiers, African American soldiers returned to ambivalence at home. Women were displaced from the wartime jobs that they had taken on the domestic front, but white, not black, veterans replaced them. Segregation and discrimination still prevailed in jobs, housing, and schools. But the 1950s would herald a measure of “progress,”however conflicted. In 1954, the Supreme Court declared separate schools inherently unequal, and the Interstate Commerce Commission banned segregation in interstate travel. Later, in 1957, Congress passed the first Civil Rights Act since 1875. The world and the country settled uneasily into the new phenomenon of a Cold War in an atomic age, while Senator Joe McCarthy continued his hunt for communists and homosexuals at home. The lifestyle of American families was changing rapidly as whites fled the cities and settled into new suburban housing developments, made affordable by the GI Bill and the adaptation of the assembly line to housing construction, while blacks were kept out to a large degree. As women returned to their kitchens, the pressure increased for them to conform to traditional family expectations - those of wife and mother.

INTRODUCTION: THE POETICS OF EARLY GREEK PHILOSOPHY?

For some readers, the very title of this chapter will seem a paradox or a provocation. After all, while the term “Presocratics” is modern, the concept has ancient roots; and from the very beginning it has been used to distinguish philosophers who, for the most part, wrote in prose, from poets who composed in verse. Such a distinction, which establishes the largely nonphilosophical character of the early Greek poets and the largely nonpoetical character of the early Greek philosophers, may seem self-evident to us, but in fact it has not always been so. Heraclitus names Hesiod and Xenophanes, in the same breath with Pythagoras and Hecataeus (DK 22 B40); Hippias wrote a treatise paralleling the opinions of poets and philosophers (DK 86 B6); Plato does not distinguish sharply between poets and philosophers among his predecessors, and he has his Protagoras claim that ancient poets were really sophists but disguised their opinions for fear of exciting hostility [Prot. 316d-e). As far as we know, Aristotle was the first author to distinguish terminologically between what he called mythologoi and theologoi on the one hand and physikoi or physiologoi on the other. On his view, the former group were really storytellers, poets narrating myths about heroes and gods, and any views about the nature of the world that might be extracted from their works were incidental, obscure, and philosophically uninteresting; the latter group, beginning with Thales, were engaged in basically the same kind of investigation of the physical world as Aristotle himself was and, even though their theories were, unsurprisingly, deficient in comparison with his own, nonetheless they were philosophically serious, that is, they were worth studying, pillaging, and refuting.

Parmenides and Melissus were bracketed in antiquity as the two great exponents of the Eleatic world-view which denies change and plurality. In modern times their treatment has been curiously unequal. Too much has been written on Parmenides - albeit the greater thinker of the two - too little on Melissus. Too much has been said about Parmenides' use of the verb “be,”while too little has been said about his detailed arguments for the individual characteristics of what-is. However, neither these nor other anomalies should disguise the immense wealth of scholarship that has furthered the reconstruction of their Eleaticism.

PARMENIDES

Around 150 lines of Parmenides' hexameter poem, written in the early- to mid-fifth century, have been recovered, most belonging to its first part. His densely metaphorical diction is replete with Homeric echoes, and presents the further difficulty of having to use the very language of change and plurality that it aims ultimately to outlaw. These are among the many aspects to which it will be impossible to do justice in the present chapter.

When in 1958 C. Vann Woodward defined “the distinctive character of the southern heritage,” he did not turn, as an earlier generation of historians might have done, to such things as an attachment to land and to a traditional paternalist culture (and a distrust of capitalism, equality, and modernity generally) but to a historical burden of unsolved problems about which complex moral and cultural experiences have accreted much as layers of pearl do around a particle of sand. Specifically, Woodward argued, Southerners have never been able to comfort themselves with the illusion that history is only something that happens to other peoples, that the cycles of guilt and sorrow, resentment and revenge, or rise and fall, which are the matter of historical consciousness, are something from which they have been exempted. Southerners have never been able to imagine that they had a claim on the legacy of innocence, success, and prosperity, accepted unearned by elite white Northerners. The burden of Southern history is a legacy as well, however, since those who bear it may bring to the general culture a circumspection, a sense of the irony of history, and a moral humility that may temper the crusading self-righteousness and soaring political and economic ambitions of the general culture without sacrificing the virtues that culture wishes to serve.

Woodward’s “The Search for Southern Identity” is very much a product of the civil rights era, but it is also a product of the Cold War. It does not describe a South recognizable to such antebellum defenders of the South as George Fitzhugh or to Thomas R. Dew or to such postwar idealizers as Ulrich Phillips or Sidney Lanier. It does describe, though, how the special moral problems of Southern history can, if they are brooded on without extenuation or histrionics, provide occasions for developing the kind of mature political consciousness American culture of the Cold War era was supposed — not just by Woodward but by Reinhold Niebuhr and many others — to lack. Woodward sought, without evasion, to take up the challenge to the white South that the civil rights era posed.

This study has described some of the remarkable changes in American fiction since the late 1960s. At that time, the novel displayed three main tendencies. The one considered most artistically important then was the playful experimentation of John Barth and Thomas Pynchon, which struck critics as such a departure from the past that it was labeled “postmodern.” Now, at the end of the century, its connections to such high modernists as James Joyce and Franz Kafka seem obvious, so that this experimental wing of “postmodernism” may not quite merit its prefix. In contrast to the experimentalists, such authors as Norman Mailer and Philip Roth were producing a story- and character-centered literature that seemed to have more in common with nineteenth-century realism than the twentieth-century avant garde. The third category in the trio was just emerging as a literary entity: women’s fiction. Its aim was to rewrite history so as to recast the importance of women in all areas of life, and it was defined not in terms of literary affinities or differences (traditionalism, experimentalism) but in terms of the gender of its authors.

Though the work of other groups - blacks, gays, Native Americans -was being published in the late 1960s, it was usually not identified as such. Scholars had not yet elaborated the historical and theoretical context that would create a separate identity for such works, and in the late 1960s, many critics were acutely uncomfortable with typologies determined by ethnicity and gender. Thus the work of the black novelist Ishmael Reed was treated as experimentalism and that of the gay author Edmund White was seen as realism.

In the modern world Pythagoras is the most famous of the early Greek philosophers. The same was true in the fourth century B.C., when Plato wrote his Republic, some 150 years after Pythagoras left Samos in about 530, to emigrate to Croton in southern Italy, where Pythagoreanism would flourish. Plato has Socrates say that Pythagoras was “especially loved as a leader of education in the private sphere,” and that his followers

However, beginning with Plato's successors in the Academy, the reputation of Pythagoras became seriously exaggerated, and by the fourth century A.D. in the Neoplatonic tradition, he had become the greatest of all philosophers, from whom both Plato and Aristotle borrowed their central ideas.

“The idea of nature as implying a universal nexus of cause and effect comes to be made explicit in the course of the development of Presocratic philosophy”: G.E.R. Lloyd. “The conception of cause is borrowed from the language of medicine, as is clear from the word prophasis which Thucydides uses”:W. Jaeger. “The word aition is, from the Hippocratic writings on, a standard word for 'cause', and its relative aitia... meant a complaint or an accusation, but already by the time of Herodotus's book it can mean simply 'cause' or 'explanation'”: B. Williams.

These three distinguised scholars, distant though they are from one another in their intellectual orientations, seem to agree on the opinion that a precise and well-defined conception of causality is present in fifth-century philosophy, history, and medicine. This judgement is widely shared, but it needs to be corrected, or at least clarified and formulated, from two different but complementary perspectives.

Until the beginning of the nineteenth century, musicians were largely dependent for their livelihoods upon either the goodwill of royal or noble patronage or regular employment by a municipality or the Church. A gradual emancipation subsequently took place, due to the growth of public concerts and operatic performances, and substantial developments in music printing and publishing.

The first public opera house was opened only in 1637 and the first public concerts did not take place until the late seventeenth century. The earliest and most consistent patron of music was the Church, although at first it was concerned more with composition – and with vocal rather than instrumental music. Most of the royal and aristocratic families kept a musical establishment as part of their state and were therefore of vital importance to musicians. The enormous development of instrumental forms and styles during the late sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was almost entirely associated with court and aristocratic support. There were, for example, over three hundred states and courts in Germany; these provided musicians with more opportunities for employment than in France, where there were few, or in England, where there was only one.

As with the violin, Italy was undoubtedly the birthplace of the cello; and it was employed increasingly as a solo instrument during the seventeenth century. The first known executant and composer for the instrument was Domenico Gabrielli from Bologna. His contemporary Petronio Franceschini, employed at San Petronio, Bologna, encouraged composers to write specifically for the cello, and he was also one of the founders of the Accademia Filarmonica.

At the beginning of the 1970s, “serious” American fiction was defined in terms of two predominantly male camps: Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, John Hawkes, and other “High Postmodernists” on the one hand, and such literary traditionalists as Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, Joseph Heller, John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates, John Cheever, and Philip Roth on the other. The most obvious difference between the two groups was that the experimentalists worked on two levels — the fictive and the metafictive — spinning out stories that were simultaneously the stories of those stories. The traditionalists, though their protagonists were often writers, valued the level of the primary fiction above any musings about it and held up this involvement as a sign of their humanism, their commitment to values. They explored the psychology of class and ethnicity: the self-absorption of Bellow’s Herzog, with his perpetual writer’s block; the failed dreams of Mailer’s early characters; the desperate, doomed attempts of Updike’s “little man” in the Rabbit novels to escape his meaningless life; the scandals and boredom of Oates’s suburbs or Cheever’s small-town America; and the hilarious degradations of the second-generation American Jew, Roth’s Portnoy. The novels were mostly male in outlook and authorship, masterful in style but never calling attention to this mastery, and extremely appealing to their audience. This writing represented popular educated taste in 1970. It is surprising how dated much of it now appears.