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.

What is a feminist drama? At first glance, this question suggests a binary split: a play is or is not feminist, depending on its rhetorical or didactic intention or, in other words, on its politics. But just as the feminist movement itself has, in this century, repeatedly emerged as a political movement and then seemingly disappeared, diffusing into the mainstream of American thought, so has feminism in American drama. Playwriting, performance, and dramatic theory today offer a feminist political critique through the act of dramatic speech, of costume and visual image, of performance itself. Just as feminists of the sixties and seventies discovered that “the personal is political,” so in the nineties, the political nature of all performance has emerged as a major theme.

In the twentieth century, drama that is feminist in intention has exhibited a commitment to telling the stories of silenced and marginalized women, celebrating women’s community and sense of connection through group protagonists, and expressing the moral concerns and societal criticisms that arise from women’s experience. The eighties and nineties have built on this tradition and added a broadened spectrum of political concerns, a questioning of language and of visual images and icons, and a specific concern with performance itself as an expression of gender and racial identity.

From Mary Carr Clarke’s early play The Benevolent Lawyers; or Villainy Detected (1823), to the many successful novel adaptations by the prolific Louisa Medina, to Pauline Hopkins’ Slaves’ Escape; or the Underground Railroad (1880), to the widely varied work of Francis Hodgson Burnett, whose stage adaptations of her own novels span several decades, American women have been writing melodrama. These women, and others like them, played an important role in the development and success of the mode of drama that had the greatest impact on the American theatre in the nineteenth century.

The study of nineteenth-century melodrama has traditionally been on the fringes of scholarly work. This is due in large part to the concerted efforts of early twentieth-century theatre practitioners to create new forms completely divorced from melodrama, which by that time had held the stage for nearly a century. The writers and producers of the new styles of realism, naturalism, and symbolism had to slay the giant of melodrama in order to gain control of the theatre of the twentieth century. Writers such as George Bernard Shaw, Eugene O’Neill, Anton Chekhov, and Susan Glaspell began writing plays that demanded new acting and production styles. These writers, as well as designers, theorists, and producers, were passionate in their defense of a new aesthetic for the theatre and their arguments against melodrama gained in strength and validity as the old mode of communication failed to respond to the new age. Eventually scholars and practitioners began to speak with scorn of anything thought to be melodramatic, as they simultaneously spoke glowingly of all efforts to create a sense of realism.

InThe Anatomy Lesson, Philip Roth’s Zuckerman — who has authored a book that sounds suspiciously like Portnoy’s Complaint — receives a letter from the editors of his old college newspaper. They “wanted to interview him about the future of his kind of fiction in the post-modernist era of John Barth and Thomas Pynchon.” Because Zuckerman is in the hospital suffering undiagnosed pain, the editors have sent a list of written questions: “1. Why do you continue to write? 2. What purpose does your work serve? 3. Do you feel yourself part of a rearguard action in the service of a declining tradition?”

These are not questions of the sort to cheer an ailing writer, but they do summarize the elitist view of post-1960s fiction. From this standpoint, Zuckerman’s humor and ethnicity and his lack of esoteric technique and political commitment demote his work to a “rearguard action, in the service of a declining tradition. ” Roth locates this attitude in the self-important undergraduate editors of The Anatomy Lesson (1983), but it is still pervasive in intellectual circles. The metaphor of the rearguard (and its correlate, the avant-garde) and the assignment of the “postmodernist era” to John Barth and Thomas Pynchon are symptomatic of a conception of literary history that itself should be labeled “a rearguard action in the service of a declining tradition,” for the student editors are speaking the language of modernism, the aesthetic ideology of the early twentieth century.

The cello and its repertory have undergone radical transformations over the last seventy-five years. Whereas in former times musical styles and compositional conventions generally developed into an integral language over a period of some years, the proliferation of individual approaches to composition nowadays constantly challenges performers and their audiences to understand and assimilate new languages in rapid succession. Never before have instrumentalists been confronted with such difficulties as deciphering new notation for each different composer, mastering new technical requirements for each new piece, and transmitting often unnotatable sound-worlds convincingly to their audiences.

The left hand became liberated from its customary position-sense and the traditional diatonic framework, thanks to increased chromaticism, whole-tone, microtone and other scale patterns, glissandi and unusual non-consonant double- and multiple-stopping. Extreme applications of vibrato have been prescribed, including the ornamental vibrato-glissando, and traditional usages have been reversed, with demand for an intense, fast vibrato in soft passages, a wide, slow vibrato in loud passages, or even the use of senza vibrato for contrast or special effect. A wide variety of pizzicato effects has been developed, composers prescribing various pizzicato locations, specific plucking agents and other such instructions, and harmonics and scordatura have been exploited for their colouristic potential. Bowing technique developed in the twentieth century as a result of composers' demands on players to master awkward string-crossings, rapid changes and specific prescription of contact-point, speed and pressure, sudden or gradual changes in dynamic, often to extreme levels, and irregular slurrings and bow patterns.

INTRODUCTION: MYTH AND COSMOLOGY

Greek philosophical cosmology did not originate completely out of the blue. The first philosophical cosmologists - usually referred to as Ionian or Milesian cosmologists because they worked in Miletus, in Ionia - could react against, or sometimes build upon, popular conceptions that had existed in the Greek world for a long time. Some of these popular conceptions can be gleaned from the poetry of Homer and Hesiod (eighth century B.C.). In Homer the cosmos is conceived as a flat earth, surrounded by the Ocean (Okeanos), and overlooked by a hemispherical sky, with sun, moon, and stars. In the eighth century the annual course of the sun and the rising and setting of some constellations were integrated into a primitive seasonal calendar. Lunations were used for small-scale calendrical purposes (“the twenty-seventh of the month is best for opening a wine-jar” Hesiod Works and Days 814) and at some point - although there are no traces of this in Homer of Hesiod - some form of lunisolar calendar was established.

Even more than World War I, in which American participation had been brief and casualties relatively light, the Second World War was a watershed, a turning point, in the social history of the nation. In the second war there were five times as many American dead, over half a million in a period of almost four years. This was a total war effort that mobilized virtually every segment of American society. Men and boys from sleepy towns in the Midwest, segregated farms and hamlets in the Deep South, and large ethnic enclaves in the North were thrown together in a huge, highly organized fighting force and sent to the bloody beaches and killing fields of France, Italy, North Africa, and especially the Pacific islands. On V-J Day in August 1945, America had nearly twelve million men under arms; more than sixteen million had served in the course of the war.

Novels written about the war invariably emphasize the shock of a new kind of experience, the social and personal dislocation as well as the shock of blood and carnage. They show how recruits were forced to adjust to the army before they had to face the war itself. To many, the hierarchy and discipline of military life cut against the American grain. Individualism gave way to a harsh, demanding group experience. The men they encountered and the distant places they were sent catapulted them out of the life they knew and thrust them into a larger world.

At the end of the 1950s, the American theater seemed to have lost its direction. Miller, it appeared, had ceased to write. Tennessee Williams was on the verge of annihilating himself in what he was later justifiably to call his “stoned decade.” The initiative seemed to have shifted to the other side of the Atlantic. Where earlier, those in the British theater had been enthused and challenged by the remarkable flowering of American dramatic talent that had marked the decade from 1945 to 1955, now they generated their own talents, who brought a new energy and purpose to that theater. In America, the dominance of Broadway was undermined by its peremptory economics, a declining urban setting, and the increasing power of a dwindling number of newspaper reviewers. An audience that had once supposedly been homogeneous now showed signs of fragmenting. As is often the way, decay concealed new life, however. By 1959, Off-Broadway had become a significant force. For the first time, the Ford Foundation began to put money into the theater and a number of productions pointed the way forward into the 1960s and beyond. As political power began to move to a new generation, so also did theatrical power. In 1959, Arthur Miller was forty-four, Tennessee Williams was forty-eight, and Eugene O’Neill was six years dead (though Long Day’s Journey into Night had not been produced until 1956 and A Touch of the Poet and A Moon for the Misbegotten until 1957, with productions of Hughie still lying ahead in 1964 and of More Stately Mansions in 1967).

In addition to the sonata and concerto, the cellist's concert repertory comprises four further principal areas: music for unaccompanied cello; short genre pieces for cello with orchestra or keyboard; variations; and transcriptions and fantasias. Many nineteenth-century solo works for the cello were composed by cellists, who were strongly influenced, particularly in the first half of the century, by the violin repertory. Travelling virtuosos such as Duport, Romberg, Servais, Franchomme, Piatti, Goltermann, Grüzmacher, Davidoff, Popper, Fitzenhagen, Klengel and Becker wrote for their own use and also to meet the rapidly growing demands of flourishing middle-class audiences; their aim was both to satisfy the public's taste, to entertain and to demonstrate their own technical prowess. Writing for solo cello was only a peripheral interest for most of the ‘front-line’ nineteenth-century composers, probably because of the perceived problems of balance between the cello, with its tenor range, and the expanding orchestra or developing piano.

Music for unaccompanied cello

Among the first to compose for unaccompanied cello were the Italians Giovanni Degli Antoni, Domenico Gabrielli and Domenico Galli. Degli Antoni's Ricercate Op. 1 (Bologna, 1687) comprises twelve unaccompanied ricercari, pedagogical works for the instrument which might also be used as a bass for harpsichord improvisation – seven include figured bass with this option clearly in mind. Although perfectly playable on the conventional four-stringed cello, Kinney's recommended use of a six-stringed instrument tuned like the bass viol, with the alternate tuning for the lowest string depending on the key, C (or D)–G–c–e–a–d1, has its advocates.

Historian E. J. Hobsbawm has described the twentieth century as the age of extremes. In a strange way, no quarter of the century had to grapple with extremity, or its terrible aftermath, more than the seemingly tranquil decades after the Second World War, which some Americans still look back on as a golden age. Though the war had spared the North American continent, its effects were brought home as Americans emerged from their traditional isolation. Besides coming to terms with the general carnage on an unheard of scale, and moving rapidly toward the reconstruction of Europe and Asia, the postwar world had to assimilate the most shocking news of the war, perhaps of the century as a whole: the details of Holocaust and the effects of the atomic bomb. The Holocaust and the bomb do not often explicitly appear in the literature of the forties and fifties, perhaps because writers found them too large to encompass and too remote from their direct experience. Despite this eerie silence, they contributed to an undercurrent of anxiety that was freely reflected not only in poems and novels but in the popular culture, including horror films, science fiction, and the new vogue of ghoulish comic books that alarmed the moralists and psychologists of the period. Along with peace and prosperity came a heightening of anxiety and insecurity.

Ordinary Americans, insulated from immediate knowledge of the worst horrors of the war, recoiled after 1945 into an island of normalcy, a world of getting and spending, as they had done after the First World War. There was an emphasis on family and domesticity, on traditional gender roles, and on a new culture of consumption made possible by rapid economic growth. The war industries retooled to produce consumer goods, beginning with new homes and cars.

In the 1980s, a striking phenomenon occurred on the American stage. In an eight-year span, three women dramatists, Beth Henley, Marsha Norman, and Wendy Wasserstein, were awarded the Pulitzer Prize, approaching the total of five Pulitzers awarded to women for the previous sixty years. This same period saw the production of new plays by Tina Howe, Maria Irene Fornes, Emily Mann, Ntozake Shange, and Wendy Kesselman, among others, as well as the establishment of avant-garde, alternative women’s theatre companies, both in New York and around the country. In a 1992 New Republic article entitled “What Do Women Playwrights Want?” Robert Brustein refers to the “spate of plays by, for, and about women that have multiplied in the last decade,”saying that “in terms of numbers, if not in broadness of theme, American women playwrights now represent a significant movement that is surely unprecedented in history” (28). I would like to examine how three women playwrights, Henley, Norman, and Howe, drawing on realistic modes, use these traditional forms to dramatize feminist perspectives.