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Overview
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. Upon tracing the linkage of music and madness that courses through the work of Herder, Hegel, Wackenroder, and Kleist, Hamilton turns his attention to E. T. A. Hoffmann, whose writings of the first decades of the nineteenth century accumulate and qualify the preceding tradition. Throughout, Hamilton considers the particular representations that link music and madness, investigating the underlying motives, preconceptions, and ideological premises that facilitate the association of these two experiences. The gap between sensation and its verbal representation proved especially problematic for romantic writers concerned with the ineffability of selfhood. The author who chose to represent himself necessarily faced problems of language, which invariably compromised the uniqueness that the author wished to express. Music and madness, therefore, unworked the generalizing functions of language and marked a critical limit to linguistic capabilities. While the various conflicts among music, madness, and language questioned the viability of signification, they also raised the possibility of producing meaning beyond significance.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780231142205 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Columbia University Press |
| Publication date: | 05/06/2008 |
| Series: | Columbia Themes in Philosophy, Social Criticism, and the Arts |
| Pages: | 272 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Table of Contents
A Note on Translations and AbbreviationsHors d'ouvre I
Introduction: The Subject of Music and Madness
1. Hearing Voices
2. Unequal Song
3. Resounding Sense
4. The Most Violent of the Arts
6. Before and After Language: Hoffmann
Hors d'ouvre II
Notes
Bibliography
Index
What People are Saying About This
Music, Madness, and the Unworking of Language is energetically committed to tracing the struggle for power between words and the unspoken, between language and, as John T. Hamilton calls it, 'the unworking of language,' to eighteenth-century continental philosophy and, further back, to the Greek tradition. Hamilton's book is not only accomplished, it succeeds gracefully in appealing to an audience drawn from a number of different disciplines and perspectives. His prose is, as a rule, enviably clear and engaging, often rendering thick theoretical nodes and processes transparent. Hamilton acts as philologist and cultural historian, as close reader and synthesizer of the history of philosophy. He does a fine job in all roles.
John T. Hamilton has produced a powerfully insightful reading of the intrusive and often devastating effects of music on the historically sensitive psyche. Erudite, compelling, and wide-ranging, the work follows the strained and vanishing minds of Hölderlin and Nietzsche, the startling scales of Bernhard and Jelinek, among others, as they are capsized by language and thrown against the philosophical limits of musical mimesis—beginning, therefore, with Plato's haunts and bone-chilling melodies that reverberate in the still vibrant texts of German Romanticism. A splendid and necessary dive into the dark regions of musical invention.
Music, Madness, and the Unworking of Language is energetically committed to tracing the struggle for power between words and the unspoken, between language and, as John T. Hamilton calls it, 'the unworking of language,' to eighteenth-century continental philosophy and, further back, to the Greek tradition. Hamilton's book is not only accomplished, it succeeds gracefully in appealing to an audience drawn from a number of different disciplines and perspectives. His prose is, as a rule, enviably clear and engaging, often rendering thick theoretical nodes and processes transparent. Hamilton acts as philologist and cultural historian, as close reader and synthesizer of the history of philosophy. He does a fine job in all roles.
— Eileen Gillooly, associate director, Heyman Center for the Humanities, and associate faculty in the Department of English, Columbia University
John T. Hamilton's newest work exhibits a fineness of close reading, a graceful assimilation of theory, and a breadth of historical knowledge that is rare in our current cultural object-besotted climate. He brings the light of his exceptional intelligence into darker zones of the spirit, and he is relentless. Having illuminated Pindaric obscurity in his last book, Hamilton now attends to music in its 'blood relation' to madness as it undoes the language of canonical works of Greek, French, and German literature even in the act of being represented. The sweep and the lights of his survey are dazzling.
Music touches the soul and sounds both the heights and the depths of spirit. Beyond all others in Europe, the German lands have cultivated music, yet John T. Hamilton is the first scholar to trace their poetic portrayals and philosophical accounts of music's powers and dangers from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. His astonishingly penetrating, imaginative, wide-ranging, and lucid book will remain the definitive synthesis of ancient and modern myths, aesthetic theories, and imaginative representations of the seductive and dangerous musical realms lying beyond the confines of conceptual reason.