Music, Madness, and the Unworking of Language

Music, Madness, and the Unworking of Language PDF Author: John T Hamilton
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231142218
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
John T. Hamilton investigates how literary, philosophical, and psychological treatments of music and madness challenge the limits of representation, thereby creating a crisis of language. He particularly focuses on the decidedly autobiographical impulse of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, where musical experience and mental disturbance disrupt the expression of referential thought, illuminating the irreducible aspects of the self before language can work them back into a discursive system. The study begins in the 1750s with Diderot's "Neveu de Rameau," and situates that text in relation to Rousseau's reflections on the voice and the burgeoning discipline of musical aesthetics. Hamilton then traces the linkage of music and madness that courses through the work of Herder, Hegel, Wackenroder, and Kleist before turning his attention to E. T. A. Hoffmann, whose writings of the first decades of the nineteenth century accumulate and qualify preceding traditions. Throughout his analysis, Hamilton considers the particular representations that link music and madness, exploring underlying motives, preconceptions, and ideological premises that facilitate the association of these two experiences.

Music, Madness, and the Unworking of Language

Music, Madness, and the Unworking of Language PDF Author: John T Hamilton
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231142218
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 274

Get Book Here

Book Description
John T. Hamilton investigates how literary, philosophical, and psychological treatments of music and madness challenge the limits of representation, thereby creating a crisis of language. He particularly focuses on the decidedly autobiographical impulse of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, where musical experience and mental disturbance disrupt the expression of referential thought, illuminating the irreducible aspects of the self before language can work them back into a discursive system. The study begins in the 1750s with Diderot's "Neveu de Rameau," and situates that text in relation to Rousseau's reflections on the voice and the burgeoning discipline of musical aesthetics. Hamilton then traces the linkage of music and madness that courses through the work of Herder, Hegel, Wackenroder, and Kleist before turning his attention to E. T. A. Hoffmann, whose writings of the first decades of the nineteenth century accumulate and qualify preceding traditions. Throughout his analysis, Hamilton considers the particular representations that link music and madness, exploring underlying motives, preconceptions, and ideological premises that facilitate the association of these two experiences.

Music, Madness, and the Unworking of Language

Music, Madness, and the Unworking of Language PDF Author: John T. Hamilton
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 572

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Book Description


The Music Between Us

The Music Between Us PDF Author: Kathleen Marie Higgins
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226333280
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
A commentary on the communicative universality of music citing real-world examples from rituals, education, work, and healing.

Keys to Play

Keys to Play PDF Author: Roger Moseley
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520291247
Category : Games & Activities
Languages : en
Pages : 468

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Book Description
A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program for monographs. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. How do keyboards make music playable? Drawing on theories of media, systems, and cultural techniques, Keys to Play spans Greek myth and contemporary Japanese digital games to chart a genealogy of musical play and its animation via improvisation, performance, and recreation. As a paradigmatic digital interface, the keyboard forms a field of play on which the book’s diverse objects of inquiry—from clavichords to PCs and eighteenth-century musical dice games to the latest rhythm-action titles—enter into analogical relations. Remapping the keyboard’s topography by way of Mozart and Super Mario, who head an expansive cast of historical and virtual actors, Keys to Play invites readers to unlock ludic dimensions of music that are at once old and new.

Wordsworth's Ethics

Wordsworth's Ethics PDF Author: Adam Potkay
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421417022
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
A comprehensive examination that breathes new life into Wordsworth and the ethical concerns that were vital to his nineteenth-century readers. Why read Wordsworth’s poetry—indeed, why read poetry at all? Beyond any pleasure it might give, can it make one a better or more flourishing person? These questions were never far from William Wordsworth’s thoughts. He responded in rich and varied ways, in verse and in prose, in both well-known and more obscure writings. Wordsworth's Ethics is a comprehensive examination of the Romantic poet’s work, delving into his desire to understand the source and scope of our ethical obligations. Adam Potkay finds that Wordsworth consistently rejects the kind of impersonal utilitarianism that was espoused by his contemporaries James Mill and Jeremy Bentham in favor of a view of ethics founded in relationships with particular persons and things. The discussion proceeds chronologically through Wordsworth’s career as a writer—from his juvenilia through his poems of the 1830s and '40s—providing a valuable introduction to the poet’s work. The book will appeal to readers interested in the vital connection between literature and moral philosophy.

Marginality, Canonicity, Passion

Marginality, Canonicity, Passion PDF Author: Marco Formisano
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192550535
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 383

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Book Description
In recent years, the discipline of Classics has been experiencing a profound transformation affecting not only its methodologies and hermeneutic practices - how classicists read and interpret ancient literature - but also, and more importantly, the objects of classical study themselves. One of the most important factors has been the establishment of reception studies, examining the ways in which classical literature and culture have been appropriated or responded to in later ages and/or non-western cultures. This temporal and cultural expansion beyond the 'traditional' remit of the field has had many salutary effects, but reception studies are not without limitations: of particular consequence is a tendency to focus almost exclusively on the most canonical Greek and Latin texts which is partly due to the sheer scale on which they have been received, adapted, discussed, and alluded to since antiquity. By definition, reception studies are uninterested in texts which have had no 'success', but the result of an implicit adoption of canonicity as an unspoken criterion is the marginalization of other texts which, despite their inherent value, have not experienced so significant a Nachleben. This volume seeks to move beyond the questions of what is central, what is marginal, and why, to explore instead the range and significance of the classical canon and the processes by which it is shaped and changed by its reception in different academic and cultural environments. By examining the academic study of Classics from the interrelated titular perspectives of marginality, canonicity, and passion, it aims to unveil their many subtle implications and reopen a discussion not only about what makes the discipline unique, but also about what direction it might take in the future.

The Operatic Archive

The Operatic Archive PDF Author: Colleen Renihan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429649134
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description
The Operatic Archive: American Opera as History extends the growing interdisciplinary conversation in opera studies by drawing on new research in performance studies and the philosophy of history. Moving beyond traditional aesthetic conceptions of opera, this book argues for opera’s powerful potential for historical impact and engagement in late twentieth- and twenty-first-century works by American composers. Considering opera’s ability to serve as a vehicle for memory, historical experience, affect, presence, and the historical sublime, this volume demonstrates how opera’s ability to represent and evoke historical events and historical experience differs fundamentally from the representations and recreations of other modes (specifically, literary and dramatic representations). Building on the work of performance scholars such as Joseph Roach, Rebecca Schneider, and Diana Taylor, and in consultation with recent debates in the philosophy of history, the book will be of interest to a wide range of scholars and researchers, particularly those working in the areas of opera studies and performance studies.

Staging Voice

Staging Voice PDF Author: Michal Grover-Friedlander
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 100052907X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 128

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Book Description
Staging Voice is a unique approach to the aesthetics of voice and its staging in performance. This study reflects on what it would mean to take opera’s decisive attribute—voice—as the foundation of its staged performance. The book thinks of staging through the medium of voice. It is a nuances exploration, which brings together scholarly and directorial interpretations, and engages in detail with less frequently performed works of major and influential 20th-century artists—Erik Satie, Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill—as well as exposes readers to an innovative experimental work of Evelyn Ficarra and Valerie Whittington. The study is intertwined throughout with the author’s staging of the works accessible online. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars in voice studies, opera, music theatre, musicology, directing, performance studies, practice-based research, theatre, visual art, stage design, and cultural studies.

Bad Vibrations

Bad Vibrations PDF Author: James Kennaway
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317176472
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
Music has been used as a cure for disease since as far back as King David's lyre, but the notion that it might be a serious cause of mental and physical illness was rare until the late eighteenth century. At that time, physicians started to argue that excessive music, or the wrong kind of music, could over-stimulate a vulnerable nervous system, leading to illness, immorality and even death. Since then there have been successive waves of moral panics about supposed epidemics of musical nervousness, caused by everything from Wagner to jazz and rock 'n' roll. It was this medical and critical debate that provided the psychiatric rhetoric of "degenerate music" that was the rationale for the persecution of musicians in Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. By the 1950s, the focus of medical anxiety about music shifted to the idea that "musical brainwashing" and "subliminal messages" could strain the nerves and lead to mind control, mental illness and suicide. More recently, the prevalence of sonic weapons and the use of music in torture in the so-called War on Terror have both made the subject of music that is bad for the health worryingly topical. This book outlines and explains the development of this idea of pathological music from the Enlightenment until the present day, providing an original contribution to the history of medicine, music and the body.

Social Appearances

Social Appearances PDF Author: Barbara Carnevali
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 023154698X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 197

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Book Description
Philosophers have long distinguished between appearance and reality, and the opposition between a supposedly deceptive surface and a more profound truth is deeply rooted in Western culture. At a time of obsession with self-representation, when politics is enmeshed with spectacle and social and economic forces are intensely aestheticized, philosophy remains moored in traditional dichotomies: being versus appearing, interiority versus exteriority, authenticity versus alienation. Might there be more to appearance than meets the eye? In this strikingly original book, Barbara Carnevali offers a philosophical examination of the roles that appearances play in social life. While Western metaphysics and morals have predominantly disdained appearances and expelled them from their domain, Carnevali invites us to look at society, ancient to contemporary, as an aesthetic phenomenon. The ways in which we appear in public and the impressions we make in terms of images, sounds, smells, and sensations are discerned by other people’s senses and assessed according to their taste; this helps shape our ways of being and the world around us. Carnevali shows that an understanding of appearances is necessary to grasp the dynamics of interaction, recognition, and power in which we live—and to avoid being dominated by them. Anchored in philosophy and traversing sociology, art history, literature, and popular culture, Social Appearances develops new theoretical and conceptual tools for today’s most urgent critical tasks.