2018 | 2

Browsing 2018 | 2 by Subject "Marriage"

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  • Article
    Charivari or the Historicising of a Question: The Irrelevance of Romantic Love for the Audio-Visual Performance of Marriage in Bern in the 18th and 19th Centuries
    Haldemann, Arno (2018) , S. 55-66
    Citing Oscar Wilde, the editors of this volume ask the question “who, being loved, is poor?” in their call for papers. On a meta-theoretical level, this article aims at contextualising this question and its citation socially. On an empirical level, it intends to contrast the socially highly determined question and its implicit presuppositions with the findings of a locally situated case study in the canton of Berne in the 18th and 19th century. By studying precarious marriages through petitions for the dispensation from the preacher’s threefold reading of the banns from the pulpit, the collective audio-visual dimension of marriages in an agrarian-shaped society of scarce resources becomes apparent. With the petitions, the couples tried to avoid attention and thus, to escape the communal tribunal of a charivari and the like. In Bern, concerning the material and media dimensions, weddings were largely governed by local standards. Charivaris were the audio-visual means of society to communicate shared values regarding marriage. They did not reflect romantic ideals of love, but were an expression of the locally accentuated moral economy. The performance of weddings as large and public rituals was a communal compulsion rather than the expression of an individualistic and therefore creative event. Performative weddings as the epitome of individualism are a very young historic development and strongly linked to a late-modern bourgeois culture of singularity.
  • Article
    Marriage and Its Representations in Classical Hollywood Comedy, 1934–1945: Stanley Cavell, the Concept of Skepticism, and Kierkegaard’s Legacy
    El-Khoury, Toufic (2018) , S. 23-37
    This article explores the questions of marriage and divorce as discussed by Stanley Cavell in his study of Classical Hollywood comedies, dubbing what he considered as a popular subgenre of the American comedy of the thirties and forties: the “comedy of remarriage”. We will focus on Cavell’s analysis of a series of films, and the way these comedies belong to a specific American school of thought, with a case study of The Awful Truth (Leo McCarey, US 1937). We will then try to identify, in Cavell’s original approach of marriage and divorce in the light of his discussion of philosophical skepticism, traces of Kierkegaard’s moral legacy, by way of Wittgenstein’s influence on the American thinker.