Music, Sexuality and the Enlightenment in Mozart's Figaro, Don Giovanni and Così fan tutte


Book Description

Music, Sexuality and the Enlightenment explains how Mozart's music for Le nozze di Figaro, Don Giovanni and Così fan tutte 'sounds' the intentions of Da Ponte's characters and their relationships with one another. Mozart, by way of the infinitely generative and beautiful logic of the sonata principle, did not merely interpret Da Ponte's characterizations but lent them temporal, musical forms. Charles Ford's analytic interpretation of these musical forms concerns processes and structures in detail and at medium- to long-term levels. He addresses the music of a wide range of arias and ensembles, and develops original ways to interpret the two largely overlooked operatic genres of secco recitative and finales. Moreover, Ford presents a new method by which to relate musical details directly to philosophical concepts, and thereby, the music of the operas to the inwardly contradictory thinking of the European Enlightenment. This involves close readings of late eighteenth-century understandings of 'man' and nature, self and other, morality and transgression, and gendered identities and sexuality, with particular reference to contemporary writers, especially Goethe, Kant, Laclos, Rousseau, Sade, Schiller, Sterne and Wollstonecraft. The concluding discussion of the implied futures of the operas argues that their divided sexualities, which are those of the Enlightenment as a whole, have come to form our own unquestioned assumptions about gender differences and sexuality. This, along with the elegant and eloquent precision of Mozart's music, is why Figaro, Giovanni and Così still maintain their vital immediacy for audiences today.




Critique as Critical History


Book Description

This book presents the first sustained articulation of a Foucauldian œuvre. It situates Foucault’s critique within the tradition of Kant’s call for a philosophical archaeology of reason; in parallel, it demonstrates the priority in Foucault’s thought of Nietzsche over Heidegger and the framing of reason against an ontology of power. Bregham Dalgliesh hereby claims that at the heart of the Foucauldian œuvre is the philosophical method of critical history. Its task is to make the will to know that drives thought conscious of itself as a problem, especially the regimes of truth that define our governmentalities. By revealing the contingency of their constituent parts of knowledge, power and ethics, Dalgliesh demonstrates that critical history offers an alternative mode of critique to the hithertofore singular reading of the intellectual heritage of enlightenment, while it fosters an agonistic concept of freedom in respect of our putatively necessary limits.




Bertolt Brecht


Book Description

Long in preparation and in considerable demand, here are the essential poems and prose of one of the giants of 20th century world literature. Following an authoritative introduction by Reinhold Grimm, the volume includes German and English poems on facing pages.




German 20th Century Poetry


Book Description

This collection features a cogent introduction and includes representative poems by some 60 modern poets, including Ingeborg Bachmann, Gottfried Benn, Berthold Brecht, Paul Celan, Gnnter Eich, Gnnter Grass, Georg Heym, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Franz Kafka, Gnnter Kunert, Gertrud Kolmar, Friederike Mayr÷cker, Rainer Maria Rilke, Nelly Sachs, and many others.




German Essays on Psychology


Book Description

Volume 62 of this ground-breaking 100 volume collection is organized into four sections: Psychology as Philosophy, Psychoanalysis and Its Critics, Research in Gestalt Psychology, and The Iconoclasts. A showcase of German-psychological thinkers and thought through the 20th century, this volume includes several new translations of articles by pyschologists whose work is rarely available in English.




»Wenn die Chemie stimmt ..."


Book Description

Die »Pille" und ihre globalen Auswirkungen. Die »Pille" veränderte die Welt. Im Osten wie im Westen entwickelte sie sich zum zentralen Symbol einer »sexuellen Revolution", stellte die überkommenen Normengefüge in Frage und die Machtverhältnisse der Geschlechter auf den Kopf - mit weitreichenden Folgen. Ihre Markteinführung Anfang der sechziger Jahre geriet zu einer fundamentalen Herausforderung: nicht nur für die Frauen und Männer auf allen Kontinenten, für ihr Sexualleben und für ihre Familienplanung. Herausgefordert fühlten sich auch die Hüter traditioneller Werte in Politik, Religion und Kultur. Manche Gesellschaften hießen das Pharmazeutikum der Moderne willkommen, andere verweigerten sich strikt.




Contemporary German Plays II: T. Bernhard, P. Handke, F.X. Kroetz, B. Strauss


Book Description

Included in this anthology are: --Farmyard by Franz Xaver Kroetz--Offending the Audience by Peter Handke--Eve of Retirement by Thomas Bernhard--Big and Little by Botho Strauss>




Contemporary German Stories: Peter Handke, Friederike Mayröcker, Uwe Timm, and Others


Book Description

Expertly introduced and edited by A. Leslie Willson, the present volume is a collection to read and cherish, and to reread: to pass along and talk about. Its broad themes of tragedy, satire, and carefully observed daily living make it a cross section of German life and liveliness over the second half of the 20th century.




Narcissism and Paranoia in the Age of Goethe


Book Description

"The analyses of poems, narratives, dramas, and critical texts by Moritz, Schiller, Herder, Tieck, Goethe, Lavater, and others shed new light on how progress in the medical, philosophical, and anthropological discourses of the time converge with aesthetic and literary considerations." "The volume illustrates how aspects of Freud's psychology have grown out of notions of subjectivity not confined to the Victorian age, as is often assumed, but with roots in the contradicting values of bourgeois emancipation."--Jacket.