Musically Sublime : Indeterminacy, Infinity, Irresolvability / Kiene Brillenburg Wurth.
2009
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Title
Musically Sublime : Indeterminacy, Infinity, Irresolvability / Kiene Brillenburg Wurth.
ISBN
9780823237982
Published
New York, NY : Fordham University Press, [2009]
Copyright
©2009
Language
English
Language Note
In English.
Description
1 online resource (234 p.)
Other Standard Identifiers
10.1515/9780823237982 doi
Dewey Decimal Classification
781.1/7
Summary
Musically Sublime rewrites musically the history and philosophy of the sublime. Music enables us to reconsider the traditional course of sublime feeling on a track from pain to pleasure. Resisting the notion that there is a single format for sublime feeling, Wurth shows how, from the mid eighteenth century onward, sublime feeling is, instead, constantly rearticulated in a complex interaction with musicality. Wurth takes as her point of departure Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment and Jean-François Lyotard's aesthetic writings of the 1980s and 1990s. Kant framed the sublime narratively as an epic of self-transcendence. By contrast, Lyotard sought to substitute open immanence for Kantian transcendence, yet he failed to deconstruct the Kantian epic. The book performs this deconstruction by juxtaposing eighteenth- and nineteenth-century conceptions of the infinite, Sehnsucht, the divided self, and unconscious drives with contemporary readings of instrumental music. Critically assessing Edmund Burke, James Usher, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Novalis, Friedrich Hölderlin, Arthur Schopenhauer, Richard Wagner, and Friedrich Nietzsche, this book re-presents the sublime as a feeling that defers resolution and hangs suspended between pain and pleasure. Musically Sublime rewrites the mathematical sublime as différance, while it redresses the dynamical sublime as trauma: unending, undetermined, unresolved.Whereas most musicological studies in this area have focused on traces of the Kantian sublime in Handel, Haydn, and Beethoven, this book calls on the nineteenth-century theorist Arthur Seidl to analyze the sublime of, rather than in, music. It does so by invoking Seidl's concept of formwidrigkeit ("form-contrariness") in juxtaposition with Romantic piano music, (post)modernist musical minimalisms, and Lyotard's postmodern sublime. It presents a sublime of matter, rather than form-performative rather than representational. In doing so, Musically Sublime shows that the binary distinction Lyotard posits between the postmodern and romantic sublime is finally untenable.
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Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.
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text file PDF
Source of Description
Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 03. Jan 2023)
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Fordham University Press Complete eBook-Package Pre-2014
Fordham University Press eBook-Package Backlist 2000-2013
Fordham University Press eBook-Package Backlist 2000-2013
Available in Other Form
print 9780823230648
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Table of Contents
Frontmatter
Contents
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction
1. Empty Signs and the Burkean Sublime
2. Sehnsucht, Music, and the Sublime
3. Ruins and (Un)forgetfulness: A Genealogy of the Musically Sublime
4. Sounds Like Now: Form-Contrariness, Romanticism, and the Postmodern Sublime
5. Anxiety: The Sublime as Trauma and Repetition
Coda: The Sublime, Intermedially Speaking
Notes
Bibliography
Contents
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction
1. Empty Signs and the Burkean Sublime
2. Sehnsucht, Music, and the Sublime
3. Ruins and (Un)forgetfulness: A Genealogy of the Musically Sublime
4. Sounds Like Now: Form-Contrariness, Romanticism, and the Postmodern Sublime
5. Anxiety: The Sublime as Trauma and Repetition
Coda: The Sublime, Intermedially Speaking
Notes
Bibliography