James Joyce and Absolute Music


Book Description

Drawing on draft manuscripts and other archival material, James Joyce and Absolute Music, explores Joyce's deep engagement with musical structure, and his participation in the growing modernist discourse surrounding 19th-century musical forms. Michelle Witen examines Joyce's claim of having structured the “Sirens” episode of his masterpiece, Ulysses, as a fuga per canonem, and his changing musical project from his early works, such as Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Informed by a deep understanding of music theory and history, the book goes on to consider the “pure music” of Joyce's final work, Finnegans Wake. Demonstrating the importance of music to Joyce, this ground-breaking study reveals new depths to this enduring body of work.




James Joyce and Absolute Music


Book Description

Drawing on draft manuscripts and other archival material, James Joyce and Absolute Music, explores Joyce's deep engagement with musical structure, and his participation in the growing modernist discourse surrounding 19th-century musical forms. Michelle Witen examines Joyce's claim of having structured the “Sirens” episode of his masterpiece, Ulysses, as a fuga per canonem, and his changing musical project from his early works, such as Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Informed by a deep understanding of music theory and history, the book goes on to consider the “pure music” of Joyce's final work, Finnegans Wake. Demonstrating the importance of music to Joyce, this ground-breaking study reveals new depths to this enduring body of work.




Joyce and Wagner


Book Description

Timothy Martin documents Joyce's exposure to Wagner's operas, and defines a pervasive Wagnerian presence in his work.




Absolute Music and the Construction of Meaning


Book Description

This book is born out of two contradictions: first, it explores the making of meaning in a musical form that was made to lose its meaning at the turn of the nineteenth century; secondly, it is a history of a music that claims to have no history - absolute music. The book therefore writes against that notion of absolute music which tends to be the paradigm for most musicological and analytical studies. It is concerned not so much with what music is, but with why and how meaning is constructed in instrumental music and what structures of knowledge need to be in place for such meaning to exist. From the thought of Vincenzo Galilei to that of Theodore Adorno, Daniel Chua suggests that instrumental music has always been a critical and negative force in modernity, even with its nineteenth-century apotheosis as 'absolute music'.




Ulysses


Book Description




Ezra Pound and Music


Book Description

Included here are all of Pound's concert reviews and statements; the biweekly columns written under the pen name William Atheling for The New Age in London; articles from other periodicals; the complete text of the 1924 landmark volume Antheil and the Treatise on Harmony; extracts from books and letters, and the poet's additional writings on the subject of music. The pieces are organized chronologically, with illuminating commentary, thorough footnotes, and an index. Three appendixes complete this comprehensive volume; an analysis of Pound's theories of "absolute rhythm" and "Great Bass;" a glossary of important musical personalities mentioned in the text and the composer George Antheil's 1924 appreciation, "Why a Poet Quit the Muses."




The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem


Book Description

'A wonderful book - an invigorating revelation ... An essential collection of prose poems from across the globe, by old masters and new, reveals the form's astonishing range' Kate Kellaway, Observer 'A superb anthology . . . it is hard to know how it could possibly be bettered' Daily Telegraph This is the prose poem: a 'genre with an oxymoron for a name', one of literature's great open secrets, and the home for over 150 years of extraordinary work by many of the world's most beloved writers. This uniquely wide-ranging anthology gathers essential pieces of writing from every stage of the form's evolution, beginning with the great flowering of recent years before moving in reverse order through the international experiments of the 20th century and concluding with the prose poem's beginnings in 19th-century France. Edited with an introduction by Jeremy Noel-Tod




The Most Dangerous Book


Book Description

Recipient of the 2015 PEN New England Award for Nonfiction “The arrival of a significant young nonfiction writer . . . A measured yet bravura performance.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times James Joyce’s big blue book, Ulysses, ushered in the modernist era and changed the novel for all time. But the genius of Ulysses was also its danger: it omitted absolutely nothing. Joyce, along with some of the most important publishers and writers of his era, had to fight for years to win the freedom to publish it. The Most Dangerous Book tells the remarkable story surrounding Ulysses, from the first stirrings of Joyce’s inspiration in 1904 to the book’s landmark federal obscenity trial in 1933. Written for ardent Joyceans as well as novices who want to get to the heart of the greatest novel of the twentieth century, The Most Dangerous Book is a gripping examination of how the world came to say Yes to Ulysses.




James Joyce's Silences


Book Description

In this landmark book, leading international scholars from North America, Europe and the UK offer a sustained critical attention to the concept of silence in Joyce's writing. Examining Joyce's major works, including Ulysses, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Finnegans Wake, the critics present intertextual and comparative interpretations of Joyce's deployment of silence as a complex overarching narratological strategy. Exploring the many dimensions of what is revealed in the absences that fill his writing, and the different roles – aesthetic, rhetorical, textual and linguistic – that silence plays in Joyce's texts, James Joyce's Silences opens up important new avenues of scholarship on the great modernist writer. This volume is of particular interests to all academics and students involved in Joyce and Irish studies, modernism, comparative literature, poetics, cultural studies and translation studies.




The Idea of Absolute Music


Book Description

This volume examines a single music-aesthetical idea from various historical and philosophical backgrounds. In exploring the origins of the idea and its career over two centuries, it brings to light the variety of ways in which it has affected music.