This chapter moves from the macro-level of social and narrative imagination to the micro-level of speaking and seeing. It continues to consider the interplay of inheritance and originality in these practices: the constitutive underdetermination or equivocity of what we see and say. The chapter illuminates the ways in which even at the smallest levels, we construct the world imaginatively. It then begins to discuss how art and poetry loosen the grasp of automated perception and do not impose an alternative vision but rather grant a double vision of our lives, allowing us to see it from new perspectives or in new ways. The chapter concludes with a consideration of liturgical and biblical renewals of perception.

As titles referring to compositional genres, Nocturne, Notturno and Nachtsmusik had a particular resonance for nineteenth-century composers sensitive to romantic traditions extending from Schubert and Schumann to reach an apogee in Wagner’s celebration of the ‘fabled realm of night’ in Tristan und Isolde. Though placed there in explicit opposition to the mundane reality of daylight, Wagner (notably in Siegfried) also made much of the glorious effects of the rising sun. The tension between darkness and light as reflecting radically different states of mind as well as different effects of nature, was also a favoured topic for late romantic poets and painters active in the Viennese culture in which Schoenberg came to maturity. Nevertheless, the aspect of romantic sensibility that offset nocturnal unease with a heightened sense of the sublime and the supernatural ensured that examples of Night Music could have a special ambivalence in keeping with their exploratory technical resources.

“What now? Enough is enough. Now we have to begin. Into our hands, life has been given.” With these exasperated words, Ernst Bloch’s The Spirit of Utopia begins like no other work of philosophy. In anger and aspiration, it does not begin with a pedantic preface or scholarly introduction. It begins in situ with a catastrophe that has thrown human existence back upon itself, from which no deliverance seems to be at hand. What is to be done? How can one survive? Caught in the condition of pitching “senselessly back and forth,” something nonetheless endures, we know not what, we know not how, but with nothing in our hands save our own obscurity, life still darkly speaks, for which, in this end of days, we want to be its initiative as well as its end.

Before his commission to illustrate Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Fritz Eichenberg (1901–90) had neither read the novel nor been to Britain. To illustrate it from New York and in the middle of World War II, he imaginatively occupied Jane’s lucid gaze. Brontë’s first-person account seems so profoundly personal that many Victorian readers thought that, as its subtitle “An Autobiography” suggested, it must be a memoir. Woolf said that to write down one’s impressions of the novel year after year would be tantamount to recording the story of one’s life. The same could be said of illustrating it. Eichenberg had fled Berlin for New York with his Jewish family in 1933, motivated by fear of retribution for his anti-Hitler cartoons. As he immersed himself in visualizing Jane’s voice, and shaping his figures, background, and compositions around her perspective, he overlaid his experience of flight, emigration, and movement onto Jane’s. His gouging, roughly hewn engravings are a self-portrait, narrativized not by his life events but by Jane’s. His Jane Eyre is also telling of a culture of collection and ownership; the Book-of-the-Month Club distributed his edition to subscribers.

In Germany the years of the First World War saw an overwhelming outpouring of verse, fired for the most part by intense patriotic enthusiasm around 1914. The lyric form provided both an immediate outlet for ordinary Germans to record their experiences and feelings, but also ready-made traditional models to shape those experiences. Alongside chauvinistic hymns by poets who remain, to all intents and purposes, ‘lost voices’, were soldier-poets, writing from the front – some of them prolific and enormously popular at the time, yet now almost completely forgotten, others still read today. But there were also worker poets, other critical voices, expressly anti-war poets and women poets who focused often on the victims left behind. Later too came the satiricalor epic voices. German poetry of the period is inevitably mixed up also with Expressionism, which made for a more radical formal experimentation than in many other national literatures at the time.

The postwar years through to 1960 can be viewed as a Golden Age for American drama as distinctly American new plays, staging, and acting styles emerged. Changing social and political forces in the nation inspired dramatists to rewrite what was possible on an American stage, expanding themes, styles, and character types previously depicted. Women and minorities were finding their voices and making progress in writing, directing, and producing drama in mainstream theatres. Many of the period’s theatrical successes and innovations were fueled by groups of artists, whose collective vision helped bring new scripts, scores, and aesthetics to the American stage. During this period, Broadway established its primacy in musical and nonmusical theatre, but economic changes and artistic aspiration also fueled the growth of Off-Broadway, Off-Off-Broadway, and regional theatre helping create an even more vibrant American theatre.

This chapter reassesses the relationship between the Gothic and the cinematic experience within the silent cinema era. At its birth in 1895, the very medium of cinema itself was perceived as inherently Gothic. Maxim Gorky’s famous allusion to a ‘kingdom of shadows’ full of grey, silent figures that filled him with ‘breathless horror’ evoked the spectre of the uncanny that underpins the Gothic experience. Yet, this chapter demonstrates that if one examines the history of the Gothic in the silent era, the Gothic changes from being an intrinsic part of the cinema experience to becoming a series of narrative and stylistic elements that ultimately form part of a kind of proto-horror, a mise-en-scène in search of a genre. By focusing not upon story elements but rather upon the ongoing association between the Gothic and the cinematographic through the use of cinematic techniques to convey subjective states of being, this chapter examines how the Gothic potential of the cinematic experience that was fundamental to the era of cinema’s birth did not disappear but rather remained, and continues to remain, embedded within cinema itself.

This chapter explores Brecht’s understanding of political theater and sets it in the context of other contemporary approaches, including the work of director Erwin Piscator. It explains why Brecht did not view naturalism or expressionism as acceptable aesthetic models, and it demonstrates how he rooted his theater in a material approach to reality, showing the social and economic influences on, and implications of, characters’ decisions and actions. Epic theater creates the scope for the agency that Brecht found lacking in naturalist drama: it shows that characters have choices, enabling audiences to imagine how different decisions or circumstances might yield different results.

Magical realism, primitivism and ethnography are historically and theoretically interrelated discourses. Mavellous folk and fairy tales, legends and myths are remote origins that received renewed attention with the rise of the avant-grade and American archaeology in the early twentieth century. In the Hispanic tradition, antecedents date back to medieval lore, which inspired chivalric and pastoral romances as well as the picaresque novel, finding a seminal synthesis in Don Quixote. In the New World, the Chronicles of the Indies, with their outlandish tales of discovery, drew not only from medieval and early Renaissance worldviews, but also from marvellous sources as varied as John Mandeville, Marco Polo, Ptolemy, Pliny and the Bible. Latin American authors have consistently cited these sources of magical realism, yet they looked at them through the prism of the avant-garde. Alejo Carpentier conceived of his seminal concept of lo real maravilloso americano as an answer to the Surrealists’ artificial merveilleux. Carpentier and Miguel Ángel Asturias, with his Surrealist view of the ancient Maya, coincided in late 1920s Paris with avant-garde primitivism and another magic realist, Venezuelan Arturo Uslar-Pietri, a close associate of Massimo Bontempelli, whose version of magical realism became their true spark, whereas Franz Roh’s influence in Latin America was negligible. Later authors like Juan Rulfo and Gabriel García Márquez significantly developed magical realist narratology, consolidating the Latin American trend and making it indispensable for understanding its international expansion based on the allegorical reinterpretation, and subversion, of dominant history – a crucial postcolonial endeavour for cultures around the world.

In Borges’s poem, ’A Rafael Cansions Assens’, the image of the Segovia Viaduct in Madrid is a record of the years he spent in that city and of his brief but intense involvement with Ultraism. A member of the literary scene also represented in ’Luces de Bohemia’ by Ramón María del Valle Inclan, the benevolent, heterodox figure of Cansinos Assens was never wholly in tune with the aesthetic programme of Ultraism. Similarly, Borges would disown his Ultraist roots but never lost his admiration and affection for Cansinos Assens. In the long run, the experience from 1919 to 1922 of life in Madrid, Majorca, and Seville was stimulating and seminal in that it allowed Borges to experiment with techniques and themes he would later develop in his work.