Saint Charbel Makhlouf (Sharbal Makhlūf), the subject of this chapter, was a nineteenth-century monk belonging to the Maronite community, the most significant Christian community in Lebanon in terms of numbers and political influence. This community, with its own rites and an autonomous hierarchy under the authority of a patriarch whose seat is in Bkirki (Lebanon), is nonetheless a full member of the Roman Catholic Church, whose authority it recognises.

Our study will not focus principally on the period of Charbel's life (1828–98), as there is in fact not much to say about the man himself during his lifetime. What is, in fact, more pertinent and more coherent with the theme of this collection is an analysis of the discourse triggered about him when he was at the height of his saintly fame, more than half a century after his death, in a period stretching from Vatican II and the first inter-community difficulties in constitutional Lebanon to his canonisation in 1977, when the country was exiting the first violent phase of the war. The ‘creation’ of this Christian hero thus coincided with similar phenomena in the emergence of charismatic figures in other communities and countries of the Islamic world during the same period. Saint Charbel is certainly original in an Arab-Muslim pantheon, especially on account of his Catholic character, rubberstamped by Rome. But his consecration lies within a context which was probably not specific to the Maronite community: the search for local authenticity (as opposed to Western influence) and the constitution of a ‘national’ community narrative, all this not without some element of paradox.

Charbel Makhlouf did not write anything and left practically no trace of his time on Earth, which made him quite a convenient saint for the hagiographers. Michel Hayek has stated in the introduction to a book that is dedicated to him and that manages to extend to 187 pages: ‘His greatest miracle was that his silence could give rise to so many words. […] As a consequence, to write his life-story is not possible, as there was no history where one could research and find sufficient elements to “make” a book’.

It might be argued that, for much of his lifetime as a director, Wes Craven's horror film work faced a crisis of legitimacy among critics, perhaps highlighted by the fact that some of his best-known projects were banned and censored in various countries. In Germany, this “crisis of legitimacy” was especially evident when it came to Craven's first feature-length film, The Last House on the Left (hereafter: LHOTL, 1972). In the late 1960s and 1970s (West) Germany had been quick to follow trends from countries on the liberal forefront of the portrayal of sexual content in films, especially Denmark and Sweden. In the absence of legal pornography, the country even began producing its own brand of sexually charged films, either billed as lurid sex education or soft-core comedy films, modelled on Russ Meyer's work. However, similar laissez-faire treatment was not extended to filmic displays of graphic violence reaching German shores (indeed, the country only became known for provocative horror films at the tail-end of the 1980s, with Jörg Buttgereit's Nekromantik [1987]).Craven's LHOTL can be seen among the canonical independent American horror films of the 1970s. Others almost certainly include The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1974); Snuff (Michael and Roberta Findlay, 1976); The Hills Have Eyes (Wes Craven, 1977); Halloween (John Carpenter, 1978), and Dawn of the Dead (George Romero, 1978). Invariably, these benchmark genre films had problems with various censorship boards. In the following chapter, I will approach the subject of LHOTL and German censorship by first providing a quick overview of the country's certification practices in spirit and in letter, and especially as regards the modern horror film. Then, I will look at LHOTL's initial (non)release in Germany. It will emerge from this discussion that, far from following a liberal doctrine on artistic freedom, for many years German censors followed restrictive practices already established in the infancy of film around 1900 and then fully emerging during the Nazi era. Furthermore, the place of Wes Craven's LHOTL in the history of horror will be discussed with an eye on US society at the time of its release.

Until the early 1990s, Eastern Christianity was virtually absent as an object of academic research, except for the history of its most ancient periods. Over the past two decades, however, a growing body of scholarship has been produced, on both the early modern and modern history of Middle Eastern Christians, with the social sciences investigating their contemporary features. Such an outburst of interest is due to a public opinion generally more informed about the social and political reality of the Middle East, in a period dramatically difficult for local Christians, as well as the interest of social scientists in minority studies. The first two sections of the Introduction will briefly sketch the origins of the current denominational diversity within Middle Eastern Christianity and the development of this ‘new sub-field’ of research, with a focus on the early modern age. The third section will take into particular consideration the contribution made by the historian Bernard Heyberger to this renewal of studies and to the opening of new research paths on the connected history of Middle Eastern Christians between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. His ground-breaking work has spanned many disciplines (history, anthropology, art history), thanks to a method that has applied microhistorical analysis to the global mobility of people, texts and objects. Far from being limited to a single area study, his approach has produced many important contributions to the social and cultural history of early modern Catholicism tout court. In order to allow the international public to access his work, we will outline his intellectual path and discuss his most important publications, while also providing a comprehensive bibliography of his writings at the end of the volume.

1. middle eastern christianity: a brief historical overview

To understand the living conditions of the Christian inhabitants of the Middle East in the Ottoman period, it is necessary to briefly present the various communities. We are dealing with a plurality of different Churches, which are the result of a complex history marked by two main historical sequences. At first, between the fifth and seventh centuries, the faithful began to divide into groups along fracture lines that echoed political rivalries, linguistic and cultural differences, or divergent theological opinions, both within and outside of the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire.

0 Introduction

There is no doubt that with the publication of The Sound Pattern of English by Chomsky and Halle in 1968 a new era began for phonology. This was by no means the first important publication in generative phonology (see for example Chomsky 1964, 1967; Halle 1959, 1962), but it was the first extensive application to English, yielding basic principles for a novel approach to the nature of phonological representations and processes. The cornerstone of The Sound Pattern of English (hereafter SPE) is its treatment of word stress. Whether for or against, specialists now had to contend with an original way of envisaging English word stress that underlined its regularity if one was ready to delve under the surface. Within the generative tradition itself there emerged a rich tapestry of revisions and counter-positions leading eventually to a number of radical overhauls of phonological theory. Our aim here is to survey some of these main revisions and to provide a route through a complex technical literature.

Of course, SPE was by no means the first work to deal with English word stress: the topic had been discussed by a wealth of publications, descriptive, pedagogical and theoretical. Although we focus here solely on the generative tradition, we emphasise that the background to SPE cannot be neglected. We have chosen to cover some of this ‘prehistory’ by dividing it into a British and an American tradition, and by selecting a few major figures that paved the way for SPE. In the British camp, we focus on the contrasting views of Daniel Jones and Roger Kingdon. In the United States, we consider the work of Leonard Bloomfield and John Samuel Kenyon, as well as some of the conclusions reached by various post-Bloomfieldian phonologists. Of course, each tradition is not monolithic in its treatment of stress: these studies have influenced one another, and similar ideas were defended on both sides of the Atlantic. It is against this backdrop that SPE came into the world.

In SPE, sets of ordered rules are postulated for English stress, linking underlying phonological representations to phonetic representations. Rules are applied cyclically by means of a universal transformational cycle, from the innermost constituents to the outermost.

Wes Craven's Scream series has been viewed as a form of postmodernism or even so-called “hyperpostmodernism.” It should, however, be noted that “postmodern horror” was discussed before the release of the film: Isabel Pinedo, for instance, (somewhat inevitably) drawing on Jameson, would note how “Humor frequently involves self-reflexive references to other horror films” in her discussion of franchise entries such as Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (Tom McLoughlin, 1986) and Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II (Bruce Pittman, 1987). This acknowledgement of earlier genre productions that also involved characters discussing elements of common horror frameworks should not distract from what made and makes Scream unique. Whereas in previous “postmodern” examples, the narrative personalities may show their pop culture awareness (“I’ve seen enough horror films to know this means trouble” states someone being stalked by Jason in Friday the 13th Part VI shortly before her impalement), Craven and screenwriter Kevin Williamson had Scream subvert the expectations of characters, genre, and audience. Hence, premarital sex does not result in death, one of the killers (instead of the potential victims) says “I’ll be right back,” there is more than one “final girl,” and the teenagers of the suburbia where the slaughter takes place band together and watch old horror movies instead of splitting up (which also does them no good but attests to a wider, general acceptance of a doomed generation). Even the concept of copycat antagonists across sequels, although not without some precedence, is unique within a slasher template that favors the reappearance and repetition of key villains (Chucky, Leatherface, Michael Myers, Norman Bates et al.).

Certainly, the influence of the Scream franchise is undoubted; Adam Rockoff speaking of the original 1996 film notes how it “broke all the rules, shattered box office records and once again made the slasher film viable.” Perhaps Craven's most famous achievement, and certainly his most lucrative, it was probably no surprise to anyone that Scream inspired a quicky turned-around sequel (in 1997) and a “concluding” chapter in 2000.

It is difficult to discuss the work of Wes Craven without acknowledging the wider American socio-political context as a central thematic concern of his stories, spanning across multiple decades and films. The integral role of horror to the expression of social and political commentary in cinema was perhaps most famously expressed by the late Robin Wood in his concept of “The American Nightmare.” Wood's conceptualization of the American nightmare as the “return of the repressed” argues that during the 1960s and 1970s, the American horror film offered an avenue for expression of that which was repressed within society. Wood connected the horror films of this period directly to the concurrent issues in American society, such as the Vietnam War and the fallout over Watergate. The author would view later horror films, of the 1980s, as representing the failure of the revolutionary potential of the genre a decade earlier, mentioning how an “astonishingly abrupt shift” saw “the progressive, exploratory, often radical late 1960s–70s” turn into “the reactionary and repressive […] Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees, Freddy Krueger—they did not develop out of the characteristic monsters of the 1970s, but represent a refusal of everything embodied earlier.” Thus, this chapter aims to address Wood's assertation that the later work of filmmakers such as Wes Craven, specifically the Freddy Krueger figure, no longer represents The American Nightmare. Indeed, I will argue that A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984—from herein Nightmare) can be seen as a “progressive” and even “radical” expression of the social and political context of American society of the time, as expressed through personal experience, particularly that represented by Heather Langenkamp's Nancy Thompson character. I propose that although Nancy's “active resistance” to Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund) has been described as a feminist formulation of the “final girl”, it more specifically expresses the rampant individualism and dissolution of social structures such as the family in 1980s America, directly relating to the popular Reaganite ideology of the time. However, rather than rejecting the presence of feminist ideology in Nightmare altogether, I propose alternative expressions of feminist thought within the film text.

0 Introduction

This chapter compares the two main groups of theories of word stress assignment in American English (General American, hereafter English), highlighting certain exceptional treatments in their accounts and identifying their limitations. It then briefly introduces a new approach that attempts to explain both exceptional and core (i.e. non-exceptional) examples in a unified way, together with an attempt to refine some of the new theory's limitations.

In section 1, we will look at certain types of exceptions to the theories. We will discuss one group of exceptional words to word stress treatments in The Sound Pattern of English (Chomsky and Halle 1968) and subsequent studies (section 1.1), followed by discussion of a converse group of exceptional words to treatments in classic Optimality Theory (section 1.2). In section 2, by applying the recently developed Positional Function Theory (PFT) of Yamada (2010, 2013a), we will suggest a solution to these two groups of exceptional words relating to subsidiary stress assignment (section 2.1), followed by a brief introduction to the treatment of main stress assignment within the PFT framework (section 2.2). In section 3, we will consider a number of remaining issues in PFT: first, we will solve a problematic word type by employing the concept of Coordinate Axis Shift (section 3.1); second, we will look at the treatment of another problematic word type using the concept of Stress Domain in tandem with Stress Retraction (section 3.2); and third, we will examine the motivations for the two types of ‘primary–secondary’ word-stress treatments discussed in 3.1 and 3.2 (section 3.3). The advantages of PFT will be outlined in section 4. The chapter ends with conclusions in section 5.

1 Exceptions

1.1 One type of exception to treatments in SPE and subsequent studies

First to be mentioned here is The Sound Pattern of English (Chomsky and Halle 1968, hereafter SPE). In SPE, main and subsidiary stress assignment are comprehensively accounted for by the Main Stress Rule (MSR) and auxiliary rules with the help of the cyclic application of stress rules.

Take the còndênsátion word type, (1a) below, for example. This is a noun derived from the verb condénse.

Compared with the usual lack of documentation experienced by scholars studying the lives of Christian women in Islamic societies, the subjectmatter treated here rests on a large amount of documents dating from the midseventeenth to mid-nineteenth centuries. These documents deal with a group of Christian women, mainly from Aleppo, although some are from Lebanon.

This study begins with a presentation of these sources and the inevitable question regarding their authenticity and reliability. The fact that women's words have been delivered to us in written form means that they have been more or less reworked. The flood of words related by and about women, which could a priori be astonishing, might be easier to understand if it were put within the general modernisation and Westernisation process experienced by the Christian minorities in Lebanon and Syria (at least those who opted for the Roman Catholic Church and post-Tridentine Catholicism). As a result, the sincerity of these women's words is less important than what is learnt from them regarding the make-up of individual consciousness, the interiorisation of new social rules and the apparatus of power: the latter two not only offered public status to women, but even enjoined them to speak out.

The analysis of this process presented in this article was originally inspired by Max Weber who initiated the examination of the modernisation of postsixteenth century European societies.

writings about women and by women

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Western travellers and missionaries quite frequently viewed Eastern Christian women as being in an unfortunate position, similar to Muslim women. They never left their houses unless completely veiled in white calico, the colour and fabric alone distinguishing them from Muslim women. Married women also covered their faces in black crepe. This happened not only in towns where Muslims were in the majority, but even in villages wholly occupied by Christians. Women were excluded from education and political life and had fewer occasions to leave their homes than did Muslim women; they scarcely even visited the church. This picture must be corrected and nuanced by information about the role of women from judicial evidence, waqf and maḥkama documents. In the cities, at least, the position of women, as a whole, must have been less insignificant than outside observers of the time have led us to believe.

Eastern Christians, at least the Melkites and the Maronites from bilād al-Shām (Greater Syria), on whom this chapter focuses, had a tradition of images. This was, on the one hand, the art of the icon that expanded in the Byzantine Empire after the crisis of iconoclasm, with some local particularities. On the other hand, it was the monumental decoration of churches and monasteries, which since ancient times had been covered with frescoes and mosaics. It was also the art of the miniature in manuscripts. Images destined for the public were limited to sanctuaries where they formed part of the decoration, alongside lanterns, mirrors and ostrich eggs. Their place, the themes that they represented and the material figures chosen to appear in them followed very formal rules. They first of all helped to teach the people and to put the faithful in contact with the sacred, while at the same time narrating episodes from the life of Christ, the Virgin, or a saint. When an image was an icon, it had to be consecrated before being placed in a church.

For unknown reasons, this traditional art of religious painting nearly died out in Syria, only surviving as miniatures in manuscripts. The painted decor of churches still visible around the eleventh century for the most part seems to have faded afterwards. In principle, the cult required icons. But these must have been extremely rare, and for the most part they were imported.

From the seventeenth century onwards, there appeared a truly new phenomenon: an explosion of consumption, importation and production of images amongst Eastern Christians. It is this development, linked to the economic and cultural opening of Christian minorities towards Orthodox and Catholic Europe, that we will examine here. One can observe in particular an enormous distribution of religious images from, or inspired by, the West, which had consequences for local production and the use of figurative representations; this encouraged a significant evolution of attitudes, in the same manner as the growth of schools or the spreading consumption of printed books.

At first glance, Colmar seems an unlikely place for thinking about the Middle East. Mostly spared the violence of the French Revolution, its colourful homes, cobblestone streets and picturesque shops were allegedly the basis for Disney's version of Beauty and the Beast. Similarly, its museums and attractions all speak to the local circulation that connects Colmar to the region of Alsace and places further afield in Germany – for example, the Unterlinden Museum with its evocation of the Issenheim Altarpiece, as well as stunning works by Holbein, Cranach and Schongauer. Locals also celebrate the quaint, folkloric work of the artist ‘Hansi’, Jean-Jacques Waltz, whose characterful depictions of everyday life in Alsace are another reminder, if any was needed, of the distinctly local, regional spirits that animate the city of Colmar today.

It is perhaps strange, therefore, that Colmar has also gained for itself a certain global notoriety in recent years. Consider, for instance, that the city provided the setting for a widely popular Chinese reality show called Chinese Restaurant. With over 200 million viewers, the show offered an occasion for droves of tourists to visit Colmar, bringing with it the arrival – likely for the first time in the city's history – of the bilingual French-Chinese menus that one finds in some of its restaurants today. The city also hosts the annual Colmar International Festival, a celebration of classical music that gathers performers and audiences from around the world. Rich and varied therefore are the afterlives of a one-time provincial town in a supposedly ‘global’ age, with connections to the world that owe much to digital communications, the growing ease of transport and international fashions and patterns of consumption.

On a casual walk through Colmar, one might not suspect that the city's relevance also extends to the international role that it has played as a site for incredible transformations in the writing of Middle Eastern history, in particular the history of Christianity in the Middle East. For over the past three decades, Colmar has proven a lieu de retour for Bernard Heyberger, the scholar whose writings fill the pages of this volume.

0 Introduction

At the end of the sixties, Lionel Guierre had been studying English stress for a number of years in view of a French doctoral dissertation when Chomsky and Halle published The Sound Pattern of English (1968, hereafter SPE), a truly revolutionary view of the workings of English stress, though its actual concern was more likely to have been linguistics and phonological theory than English stress per se. In view of what he considered a momentous scientific event, Guierre took the rare decision to re-start his analysis from scratch by resorting to computer analysis, which was becoming more easily available to scientists at the time. Let us recall that at the time, the challenge was daunting: each entry of Jones's English Pronouncing Dictionary (12th edition) had to be transferred on to a punched card, with an appropriate and efficient coding transfer, even before attempting any kind of systematic analysis. Guierre finally succeeded in completing his analysis of the very first computerised corpus of English pronunciation by the end of the seventies, when he presented his doctoral dissertation which allowed him to become the first Professor of English pronunciation in the history of French university.

Except for a few specialists around the world, his dissertation remained mostly unknown, however, as it was never published as such: unlike Chomsky and Halle's book, its scope was strictly limited to English stress and pronunciation, with no linguistic theoretical ambitions. Guierre's work is best known through his Drills in English Stress-Patterns (1984a), a book aimed at students of English as a foreign language, but with a foreword by A. C. Gimson himself:

Written and directed by Craven in 1991, The People Under the Stairs (hereafter People) came after The Serpent and the Rainbow (1988) and Shocker (1989), followed by a three-year hiatus from cinema (he directed Night Visions and Nightmare Café for television) before Wes Craven's New Nightmare (1994) and Vampire in Brooklyn (1995), making it the center film in a loose trilogy of Craven projects directly engaging Black culture. Although marketed as a horror film (the voiceover for the trailer begins: “In every neighborhood there is one house that adults whisper about and children cross the street to avoid. Now Wes Craven, creator of A Nightmare on Elm Street takes you inside … “ implying an experience very similar to Freddy Krueger), the film was not a “new Nightmare” but rather a critique of gentrification, capitalism, and systemic racism (particularly in the urban real estate business) of the Reagan/Bush era.

Taking place in Los Angeles (rather than the Mid-west suburbs in which many of Craven's 80s films were set), the film depicts two adult burglars, Leroy (Ving Rhames) and Spenser (Jeremy Roberts), and their thirteen-year-old accomplice Poindexter Williams AKA “Fool” (Brandon Quintin Adams), breaking into the home of a wealthy white couple (who are unnamed, called “Man” and “Woman” in the credits, but referred to in the narrative as “Mommy” [Wendy Robie] and “Daddy” [Everett McGill]), who are slumlords. The burglars then learn about a number of children held prisoner in the basement (the eponymous “people under the stairs”), before all of them except Fool lose their lives at the hands of Mommy and Daddy. Fool then works with Alice (A. J. Langer), Mommy and Daddy's “daughter” (their victim whom they kidnapped), and Roach (Sean Whalen), one of the people under the stairs who has escaped into the walls, to expose and defeat Mommy and Daddy and save not just the kidnapped children, but also Fool's family, who are equally trapped by the housing system Mommy and Daddy manipulate.

A cursory glance over Wes Craven's filmography might indicate that his more family-audience-orientated Music of the Heart (1999) stands out as an unusual diversion in a plethora of acclaimed horror motion pictures. In addition, it is the only one of his films to be nominated for an Academy Award. Other elements, for instance its lack of gothic trappings, have resulted in the film being singled out as a notable exception from Craven's more familiar horror templates by academic writers on the form. Nonetheless, the purpose of this chapter is to argue that Music of the Heart—which is based on a true story and a later documentary—actually has thematic similarity to several other Craven projects, including even his blockbuster Scream (1996), which preceded its production and (for a short while) provided the filmmaker with an A-list brand. This argument will also use the text as a prism through which to note that the director, although not innocent of presenting a “white savior” narrative, at least indicated an occasional dedication to racial diversity throughout his catalogue of work—an aspect that was frequently lacking in the resume of some of Craven's contemporaries. Finally, this chapter concludes that Music of the Heart should be reconsidered within wider concerns that have surfaced in the director's most notable achievements, from as far back as his debut with The Last House on the Left (1972). Writing in 1985, for instance, Christopher Sharett, treating the director as an auteur figure, acknowledges “The equation of horror with pervasive social crisis—the chief characteristic of Craven's films.” It is also this social crisis that is addressed and discussed in Music of the Heart.

Perhaps the best way to begin this chapter is to clarify where Craven's reputation stood in 1999. While the success of Scream gained him his biggest audience to date, his previous work was still the subject of considerable controversy. Writing about the filmmaker in 1992, for instance, Robert Shaye—the Chairman of New Line Cinema, which had produced A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)—would state that Craven was a “problematic” director, adding “I had seen The Last House on the Left and was frankly appalled. It was beyond horrific. It was brutal.”

Writing about the film this chapter focuses on, John Kenneth Muir states, “When viewed in the context of Craven's film career, The Serpent and The Rainbow is a bit of an anomaly as it does not focus either on the American middle class or the destruction of the family.” How right he was. A thematic break from Craven's earlier work but also arguably a stylistic shift, the film is kinetic and vibrant with the aesthetics of third world adventure and intrigue, at a time in which America's own geopolitical location and lineage was rarely addressed or discussed in the mainstream arena

The opening alone is worth summarizing for its nightmarish provocation. The screen floods with red. The image pulls out of this saturation to reveal it is the painted membrane of a coffin. The camera swirls round the casket as it is tended to by a dockside worker, polishing its lid, preparing it for use. A caption informs the setting: “Haiti, 1978.” A tall, threatening figure sporting a gun intercepts the coffin and takes it for his own, his men carrying it off on a boat further down the coast. That evening, the figure re-emerges with a torch and a firearm, perhaps a militarized manifestation of the popular voodoo bogeyman, the incarnation of death. He leads a procession at which the coffin is the main attraction. It is set on fire and paraded through the streets, beneath a large billboard featuring the visages of François “Papa Doc” Duvalier and his son Jean-Claude (“Baby Doc”), then Haitian President in 1978, before being dumped outside a building.

A hospital. Inside, a patient has just been declared dead. When he is subsequently buried, the interred camera records a tear coursing down his cheek, his eyes twitching slowly open. Screen douses black.

Bookended by the coffin, the movement of the opening section of Wes Craven's 1988 film could be seen as a cyclical one, a metaphysical lurch that swirls amongst a funerary ritual, culminating with a cremation and then a return to earth. It is an out-of-body experience that does not return to the anatomy but stays proximate, an interred camera and an interred man, both conscious, both watching.