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Poetry's Knowing Ignorance
What kind of knowledge, if any, does poetry provide? Poets make poems, but they also make meaning and craft a kind of learned and creative ignorance as they provide infinitely revisable answers to the question of what poetry is. That question of poetry's definition invites broader ones about the relationship of poetry to other lived experience. Poetry thus implies something like a way of life that is resistant to definitive statements and conclusions, and the creation of communities of readers and writers that live in ever-renewed questioning. To resist concluding is to embrace a kind of productive ignorance, a knowledge that is first and foremost aware of poetic knowledge's own limits. Poetry's Knowing Ignorance shows, through an examination of French poetry, how it is this dialogue in response to a constant questioning, to an answer-turned-question, that continues to blur the boundary between poetry and writing about poetry, between poetry and criticism, and between poetry and other kinds of experience.
Thinking Poetry
This volume of essays seeks to establish a dialogue between poetry and philosophy where each could be said to read the other and announces important new paths for a reinvigorated study of lyric poetry in the decades to come.
French Symbolist Poetry and the Idea of Music
What role did music play in the creation of a new aesthetics of poetry in French from the 1860s to the 1930s? How did music serve as an unassimilable 'other' against which the French symbolist poets crafted a new poetics? And why did music gradually disappear from early twentieth-century poetic discourse? These are among the questions Joseph Acquisto poses in his lively study of the ways in which Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Ghil, and Royère question the nature and function of the lyric through an ever-shifting set of intertextual and cultural contexts. Rather than focusing on 'musicality' in verse, the author addresses the consequences of choosing music as a site of dialogue with poetry. Acquist...
Thought as Experience in Bataille, Cioran, and Rosset
Examines how postwar French writers constitute the thinking subject and reshape its relation to the external social world. Joseph Acquisto analyzes the writings of three thinkers during and shortly after the Second World War who address the question of what it means to think, and what it means to constitute oneself as a thinking subject – at a time that seems to come "after everything"; with the ruins of attacked cities echoing the remains of a philosophical tradition that was confident in its establishment of human beings as rational, of reason leading to progress, and of both the self and the world as knowable. What Georges Bataille calls "inner experience" and Emil Cioran labels "thinki...
"Manet, Wagner, and the Musical Culture of Their Time "
How did the tumult caused by German composer Richard Wagner result in the first modernist painting? In the first full-length book dedicated to the study of Edouard Manet and music, art historian Therese Dolan demonstrates that the 1862 painting Music in the Tuileries represents the progressive musical culture of his time, heretofore read by scholars predominantly through the words of Charles Baudelaire. Dolan sees in this painting's radical style the conceptual shift to modernism in both painting and music, a transition that, she convincingly argues, received a strong impetus from Manet's Music in the Tuileries and Wagner's controversial Tannh?er, which premiered the previous year. Supplemental to analysis of the painting, Dolan incorporates discussion of texts by Theophile Gautier, Champfleury, and Baudelaire who are represented in the painting. This book incorporates studies of the major artistic, literary, and musical figures of nineteenth-century France. It represents an important contribution to an understanding of French culture in the third quarter of the nineteenth century, a period of intense literary, artistic, and musical activity that formed the crucible for modernism.
Twentieth-Century British Authors and the Rise of Opera in Britain
This book is the first to examine in depth the contributions of major British authors such as W. H. Auden and E. M. Forster, as critics and librettists, to the rise of British opera in the twentieth century. The perceived literary values of British authors, as much as the musical innovations of British composers, informed the aesthetic development of British opera. Indeed, British opera emerged as a simultaneously literary and musical project. Too often, operatic adaptations are compared superficially to their original sources. This is a particular problem for British opera, which has become increasingly defined artistically by the literary sophistication of its narrative sources. The resulting collaborations between literary figures and composers have crucial implications for the development of both opera and literature. Twentieth-Century British Authors and the Rise of Opera in Britain reveals the importance of this literary involvement in operatic adaptation to literature and literary studies, to music and musicology, and to cultural and theoretical studies.
Déodat de Séverac
Best known for his piano music, Déodat de Séverac (1872-1921) also composed orchestral and vocal works, including opera, cantata and incidental music. His early works were influenced by Impressionist harmonies, church modes, cyclic techniques, folk-like melodies and Andalusian motives, though his style changed dramatically in 1907 when he began to include Catalan elements in his compositions. In this book, Robert Waters provides a much-needed study of the life and works of Séverac, focusing on the composer's regionalist philosophy. Séverac's engagement with folk music was not a patriotic gesture in the vein of nationalistic composers, but a way of expressing regional identity within France to counter the restrictive styles sanctioned by the Paris Conservatory. The book will appeal to those specializing in French music, European ethnic musics, piano music and French music history.
Baudelaire's Bitter Metaphysics
Baudelaire’s Bitter Metaphysics: Anti-Nihilist Readings by Fondane, Benjamin, and Sartre reconstructs a philosophical trialogue that might have been expected to take place between Benjamin Fondane, Walter Benjamin, and Jean-Paul Sartre over their philosophical readings of Charles Baudelaire, an exchange preempted by the untimely deaths of two of the interlocutors during the Nazi holocaust. Why did three of Europe’s sharpest minds respond to the terror of 1933-45 by writing about a long-dead poet? Aaron Brice Cummings argues that Fondane, Benjamin, and Sartre turned to the poet of nihilism’s abyss because they recognized a fact of cultural history that remains relevant today: until sometime in the 2080s, the literary world will have to confront (even if to deny) the two-century window forecast by Nietzsche as the age of cultural and existential nihilism. Accordingly, the author examines the bitter metaphysics latent in Baudelaire’s motifs of the abyss, clocks, brutes, streets, and bored dandies. In so doing, this book confronts the nothingness which modern life encounters in the heart of art, ethics, ideality, time, memory, history, urban life, and religion.
Between Baudelaire and Mallarmé
As the status of poetry became less and less certain over the course of the nineteenth century, poets such as Baudelaire and Mallarmé began to explore ways to ensure that poetry would not be overtaken by music in the hierarchy of the arts. Helen Abbott examines the verse and prose poetry of these two important poets, together with their critical writings, to address how their attitudes towards the performance practice of poetry influenced the future of both poetry and music. Central to her analysis is the issue of 'voice', a term that remains elusive in spite of its broad application. Acknowledging that voice can be physical, textual and symbolic, Abbott explores the meaning of voice in ter...
Proust's Songbook
In Proust’s Songbook, Jennifer Rushworth analyzes and theorizes the presence and role of songs in Marcel Proust’s novel À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time). Instead of focusing on instrumental music and large-scale forms such as symphonies and opera, as is common in Proust musical studies, Rushworth argues for the centrality of songs and lyrics in Proust’s opus. Her work analyzes the ways in which the author inserted songs at key turning points in his novel and how he drew inspiration from contemporary composers and theorists of song. Rushworth presents detailed readings of five moments of song in À la recherche du temps perdu, highlighting the songs’ significanc...
