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Wed 23 April
    8.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

Thu 24 April
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    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 17.30

Fri 25 April
    8.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

Sat 26 April
    8.30 - 10.30
    11.00 - 13.00
    14.00 - 16.00
    16.30 - 18.30

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Wednesday 23 April 2014 8.30 - 10.30
R-1 ELI03 Aristocracy, Literature and Film: Images, Fields and Practices of Aristocrats in 20th Century Europe
Hörsaal 42 second floor
Network: Elites and forerunners Chair: Marja Vuorinen
Organizer: Yme Kuiper Discussant: Marja Vuorinen
Yme Kuiper : The Fame of a Masterwork. Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa's The Leopard as Research Paradigm for Elite Studies

Yme Kuiper (University of Groningen)
In a letter to a friend, written in the year of his death (1957), Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa denied that Il Gattopardo (The Leopard) was a historical novel. The book could much better be typified as a semi-autobiographical narrative (“autobiografia romanzata”) than as a truthful portrayal ... (Show more)

Yme Kuiper (University of Groningen)
In a letter to a friend, written in the year of his death (1957), Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa denied that Il Gattopardo (The Leopard) was a historical novel. The book could much better be typified as a semi-autobiographical narrative (“autobiografia romanzata”) than as a truthful portrayal of 19th century characters and events, Lampedusa wrote. Notwithstanding this enigmatic remark of the author himself, it seems rather odd to argue that his classical, now world-famous novel had no relationship at all with historical reality and that the text was purely his own construction and only product of his creative imagination. The fame of this literary masterwork is great nowadays among scholars who are doing research in the field of elite studies or history (sociology, anthropology) of aristocracy and nobility, and who are especially interested in processes of change, decay, decline, transformation, persistence, tenacity, and so on, of these elites during the 19th and 20th centuries.
In my paper I will explore the reception of Lampedusa’s novel in the recent, international historiography of research on elites. Other questions that will be dealt with refer to the complex combination of fiction and history in Il Gattopardo and to the fictional techniques that the author used to evocate a world (of aristocrats) that was definitely lost in his own times. Another puzzle is why this Sicilian nobleman and devoted anglophile man of letters waited for so long to write his novel on aristocratic mentality and life forms. Finally, special attention will be paid to the concepts of “vital memories” and “approaching death” and of micro- and macro-history that are crucial aspects of the narrative of the novel.

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Maria Malatesta : A Noble in Search of Nobility. The Aristocratic World in the Films, Scripts, Writings by Luchino Visconti
The Italian director Luchino Visconti (1906- 1976) was the son of the duke Giuseppe Visconti di Modrone of Milan. He was called the red duke because of his militancy in the Italian Communist party since the Second World War. The relationship that occurred between Visconti and his aristocratic roots are ... (Show more)
The Italian director Luchino Visconti (1906- 1976) was the son of the duke Giuseppe Visconti di Modrone of Milan. He was called the red duke because of his militancy in the Italian Communist party since the Second World War. The relationship that occurred between Visconti and his aristocratic roots are very complex and no one has seriously studied it till now. He was one of the inventors of the Neorealismo, the new left- wing culture born during the Second World War as a reaction to the Fascist culture. As a pioneer of the Neorealismo, Visconti preferred to direct movies whose scripts were centred on popular characters and locations. Another distinctive feature of his Neorealistic period was the detachment from his aristocratic origins and the search of anticonformist topics as theatre director too. This period ended in 1962, when Visconti accepted to direct The Leopard, form the novel by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. The Leopard was a turning point; after that experience Visconti entered a different artistic and existential phase, in which he directed films centred on the European aristocracy and high bourgeoisie decadence, well represented by the German trilogy (Death in Venice, The Damned, Ludwig). We can consider this last period not only as a research of the past in this cultural and artistic meaning, but also as a research of his aristocratic roots. The project of a film based on the Recherche du temps perdu that Visconti tried to realize with no success in the Seventies, can be assumed as a symbol of his unachieved research of his family past and of his effort to refound his aristocratic origins and merge them into the left-wing culture and the new culture of media. (Show less)

Giacomo Manzoli : The Aristocratic Imprinting of Italian Cinema and its Influence on Contemporary Italian Filmakers during the Second Half of the 20th Century: from Rossellini to Garrone
It is known that Italian cinema has had, since its origins, an aristocratic imprinting due to peculiar factors which had led the upper classes to get a direct involvement in the film production. This phenomenon took place in Italy much more than in the USA or in other European countries ... (Show more)
It is known that Italian cinema has had, since its origins, an aristocratic imprinting due to peculiar factors which had led the upper classes to get a direct involvement in the film production. This phenomenon took place in Italy much more than in the USA or in other European countries where the popular nature of the art has been promptly evident.

The hypothesis of this paper is that such circumstance had constituted a load-bearing structure of the Italian cinema production which contributed to determine the whole spectrum of the cinematographic field and the habitus of the agents who took part in it.

Therefore, several examples will be offered of the influence of such aristocratic approach on the movie-making and on the Italian discursive production about cinema through different epochs. The examples will be adressed above all to show the model’s endurance even when in contact with superstructures of opposite sign, as the Marxist influence (the so-called cultural hegemony of the Left) and the "bourgeois revolution" ensued from the economic boom.
But the paper will focus above all on the ways through which the contemporary Italian cinema tends to perpetuate an aristocratic conception of the world even today. Axiologies and symbolic forms reflect such conception in a more or less transparent way, contributing in substance to the sector’s crisis and to a widespread anachronism of the national cinema, established in facts by the defense of conservative positions. (Show less)

Michael Seelig : Remembering a Noble World Now Lost: Collective Memory in the Autobiographies of Nobles in the Weimar Republic
At the end of the Great War a world collapsed for many Germans. This is especially true for the nobility. The lost war did not only result in the downfall of monarchy, it also caused the abolishment of the nobility as a legal status. Being deprived of central elements of ... (Show more)
At the end of the Great War a world collapsed for many Germans. This is especially true for the nobility. The lost war did not only result in the downfall of monarchy, it also caused the abolishment of the nobility as a legal status. Being deprived of central elements of their former identification – above all the Kaiser (emperor) as an epitome of noble society –, large parts of the nobility felt highly disorientated in the newly established democratic order of the Weimar Republic. Additionally, the economic crises of the 1920s – the inflation and the Great Depression – led to the loss of many estates and the impoverishment of numerous nobles. A similar effect was caused by the reduction of the army, the Reichswehr, to 100,000 men. All in all the Weimar Republic did not seem like the perfect environment for nobles. In my paper I will discuss how the nobility reacted to these challenges. One way was remembering better times and creating thus the image of a perfect noble world now sadly lost. How did it recall the ‘good old days’ of the Wilhelminian society when there had still been a firmly established noble society? Has there just been approval for the Kaiserreich or even some criticism? What were the concepts of nobility and the cultural modes of a noble life style that were invented or re-invented after the radical rapture of 1918? In order to answer these questions a couple of noble autobiographies written in the 1920s and early 1930s will be studied. The paper aims at analysing important aspects of the collective memory of the German nobility in the Weimar Republic. (Show less)

Daniel Thiel : Semantics of Aristocracy in Novels of the Weimar Republic
The end of World War I and the subsequent downfall of monarchy in Germany were experienced as a deep crisis by most German nobles. After loosing the last political privileges, they now were dependent on finding new means to distinguish and, in such a way, generate themselves as aristocracy. This ... (Show more)
The end of World War I and the subsequent downfall of monarchy in Germany were experienced as a deep crisis by most German nobles. After loosing the last political privileges, they now were dependent on finding new means to distinguish and, in such a way, generate themselves as aristocracy. This was not a new strategy; the rapidly changing circumstances after 1918 merely intensified an already existing discourse that has been labelled “New Aristocracy”. Within this discourse, new semantics of aristocracy where established, thus broadening its meaning. My paper will discuss these semantic changes, using novels of the period as sources. These sources, however, don’t necessarily have to be set within the world of “Old Aristocracy”. This relates to another “new” aspect of the discourse: aristocracy now could be claimed not only by members of the inherited nobility – the bourgeoisie also developed its own concepts, often distancing itself from the world of courts and castles. Especially (but not exclusively) conservative and right-wing intellectuals set the tone in this debate. Authors such as Heinrich von Gleichen, Edgar J. Jung, Ernst Jünger or Stefan George established new concepts of aristocracy, deeply resenting the “mass society” of Weimar. The paper will analyse these concepts and their influence on contemporary literature, using discourse analysis to identify the new semantics. This approach takes inspiration from Dietrich Busses’ concept of Historical Semantics. The goal is to work out how new ideas were created, but also how already established concepts of nobility were implemented in this new discourse. (Show less)



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