A matter of fundamentals : sound and silence in the radio drama of Samuel Beckett

Samuel Beckett was arguably one of the most influential writers of the 20th century. Known for his stage plays, including the renowned En attendant Godot (1948), Beckett’s contribution to the field of radio drama is often overlooked. His corpus of radio dramas included some of the most innovativeradio works of the post-World War II period. For Beckett, radio drama was not exclusively verbocentric, for he always maintained that his work was “a matter of fundamental sounds (no joke intended) made as fully as possible” (Frost 362). His (radio) drama aesthetics defined a strict hierarchy of sound whereby the dramatist balances sound effects, music and the characters’ dialogue – and the use of silence. In this essay, I examine the juxtaposition of sound and silence in Samuel Beckett’s most influential radio dramas: All That Fall, Embers, Words and Music and Cascando. In the end, this essay will show that the sounds and silence employed in Beckett’s radio dramatic works were inextricably linked, which added to the overall meaning of his dramas.

A ponderação de bens em Direito Administrativo

Quando duas normas jurídicas entram em conflito não resolúvel por inexistência de normas de conflito (o que acontece em especial no domínio dos direitos fundamentais ou quando se tentam aplicar princípios jurídicos), a solução em direito não pode ser por subsunção, tem de ser através da ponderação. A ponderação não deve ser subjetiva, mas objetiva, baseada num sistema controlável externamente. O sistema neste momento internacionalmente mais reputado de fazer a ponderação é a fórmula do peso de Robert Alexy. Aqui explica-se em que consiste a ponderação de bens, a sua origem e expressão noutros países, a sua admissibilidade, a referida fórmula, e defende-se a aplicação de um sistema alternativo baseado na teoria psicológica da pirâmide das necessidades humanas, de Abraham Maslow. Verifica-se a validade das teses testando-as em casos concretos. Faz-se ainda a aplicação destes princípios a problemas próprios do direito administrativo.

Museum training to develop the social awareness of cultural identity in a time of universalization

The main theme of the ICTOP'94 Lisbon meeting is museum personnel training for the universal museum. At the very beginning it is important to identify what the notion universal museum can cover. It is necessary to underline the ambiguity of the term. On the one hand, the word 'universal' can be taken to refer to the variety of collected museum materials or museum collections, on the other hand it could refer to the efforts of the museum to be active outside the museum walls in order to achieve the integration of the heritage of a certain territory into a museological system. 'Universal' could also refer to the "new dimensions of reality: the fantastic reality of the virtual images, only existing in the human brain" (Scheiner 1994:7), which is very close to M. McLuhan's view of the world as a 'global village'. Thus, what is universal could be taken as being common and available to all the people of the world. 'Universal' can imply also the radical broadening of the concept of object: "mountain, silex, frog, waterfonts, stars, the moon ... everything is an object, with due fluctuations" (Hainard in Scheiner 1994: 7), which will cause the total involvement of the human being into his/her physical and spiritual environment. In the process of universalization, links between cultural and natural heritage and their links with human beings become more solid, helping to create a strong mutual interdependence.

Give or take: thoughts on museum collections as working tools and their connection with human beings

This paper proposes a look at museums from the perspective of sociomuseology, an area of research and practice under development in countries such as Portugal, Brazil and Spain. Sociomuseology was born from the Latin new museology tradition and is closely connected with the International Movement for a New Museology (MINOM/ICOM). The Lusofona University in Lisbon offers MA and PhD programmes in Sociomuseology. The University supports a research centre in Sociomuseology and publishes the journals Cadernos de Sociomuseologia, in Portuguese, and Sociomuseology, in English (for more information see http://tercud.ulusofona.pt.). Sociomuseology concerns the study of the social role of museums and of the continuous changes in society that frame their trajectories. The practice of sociomuseologists is based on their work with the different dimensions of social and community development from ecomuseums to networking and other ways of organizing social action in the 21st century in which heritage plays a strategic role.