The Winter 2021 issue of Athenaeum Review includes new work by several faculty of the School of Arts and Humanities, as well as artwork by significant Black artists including Riley Holloway, Jammie Holmes, Letitia Huckaby, Sedrick Huckaby, Evita Tezeno, and Desireé Vaniecia. The front cover is by taylor barnes.
Reviewing a new translation of Max Weber’s Charisma and Disenchantment: The Vocation Lectures, Ashley Barnes, Assistant Professor of Literature, writes: “In a disenchanted modernity, professors must abandon old pretensions to teach the path to universal wisdom. But they can maintain authority, and a sense of vocation, as guides to a relativistic moral landscape.”
The life and work of Leonardo da Vinci is explored by Mark Rosen, Associate Dean of Undergraduate Studies and Associate Professor of Visual and Performing Arts. According to Rosen, “The popular picture of Leonardo as an inventor of machines (and the many science-museum exhibitions that have followed) and as a scholar of anatomy was essentially formed in the twentieth century as his manuscripts and drawings were widely published for the first time.”
Thomas Riccio, Professor of Performance and Aesthetic Studies, writes about his experience judging a competition of Isicathamiya musical performance in Durban, South Africa: “In the townships, there were few social activities besides drinking and sports, and until the early 1990s, gatherings of men were politically suspect. Belonging to an Isicathamiya group was one of the few ways to socialize after a long day of labor.”
“A Silent Fool: Cordelia’s Subversive Silence in King Lear,” is by Andy Amato, Associate Professor of Instruction. According to Amato, “Truth remains for Lear something subject to his impaired—or overly personalized—understanding of those drives that constitute him, precluding any full—or adequately depersonalized—account of the way things really are.”
Reviewing The Museum of Whales You Will Never See: And Other Excursions to Iceland’s Most Unusual Museums, by Kendra Greene, Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing, Elizabeth Molacek writes: “With persistent and contagious curiosity, Greene guides us through the unexpected spaces that make up Iceland’s museums, revealing the many ways that objects can tell human stories, if we are willing to look and listen.” And in reviewing Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Golden Goblet: Selected Poems, translated by recently retired professors Zsuzsanna Ozsváth and Frederick Turner, Mark Olival-Bartley writes: “Ozsváth and Turner, amazingly, have achieved the impossible: the syllabic count, the metrics, the rhyme scheme, and the even the number and line placement of the feminine endings matches Goethe’s German perfectly.”
Turner also contributes an essay on “The Ancient And Future Art of Terraforming,” writing that “Human art, human fiction, human invention, human technology, are not unnatural forces that have suddenly erupted into nature, but are the natural continuation of nature’s own evolutionary process.”
Along with essays and reviews, the issue also contains poetry: “Sentience As An Outing To The Zoo” by Nomi Stone, Assistant Professor of Poetry, and “Endless,” a series by Jane Saginaw, Ph.D. student in Humanities.
Athenaeum Reviewis published twice yearly by the School of Arts and Humanities and the Edith O’Donnell Institute of Art History. Featuring essays, reviews and podcasts by leading scholars in the arts and humanities, all issues of the journal may be freely read online, or ordered in print from the UT Dallas Marketplace. For more information, please contact benjamin.lima@utdallas.edu.