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7 Music, language and literature Language and music The divergent interpretations of the relationship between music and language in modernity are inseparable from the main divergences between philosophical conceptions of language. The attempt to explain language in representational terms in the empiricist tradition that eventually leads to analytical philosophy, and the understanding of language as a form of social action and as constitutive of the world we inhabit in the hermeneutic tradition give rise to very different conceptions of music. One paradigmatic
Drinking to excess has been a striking problem for industrial and post-industrial societies – who is responsible when a ‘free’ individual opts for a slow suicide? The causes of such drinking have often been blamed on heredity, moral weakness, ‘disease’ (addiction), hedonism, and Romantic illusion. Yet there is another reason which may be more fundamental and which has been overlooked or dismissed, and it is that the drinker may act with sincere philosophical intent. The Existential Drinker looks at the convergence of a new kind of excessive, habitual drinking, beginning in the nineteenth century, and a new way of thinking about the self which in the twentieth century comes to be labelled ‘Existential’. A substantial introduction covers questions of self, will, consciousness, authenticity, and ethics in relation to drinking, while introducing aspects of Existential thought pertinent to the discussion. The Existential-drinker canon is anchored in Jack London’s ‘alcoholic memoir’ John Barleycorn (1913), where London claims he can get at the truth of existence only through the insights afforded by excessive and repeated alcohol use. The book then covers drinker-texts such as Jean Rhys’s interwar novels, Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, Charles Jackson’s The Lost Weekend and John O’Brien’s Leaving Las Vegas, along with less well-known works such as Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes, Venedikt Yerofeev’s Moscow–Petushki, and A. L. Kennedy’s Paradise. The book will appeal to anybody with an interest in drinking and literature, as well as those with more specialised concerns in drinking studies, Existentialism, twentieth-century literature, and medical humanities.
regarded as morally and sometimes mentally deficient, but London declared that he was not like them, he was not a ‘fall-in-the-gutter’ drunk, and in a genre-defining book he ushered in a new type of drinker, one who celebrates drinking in complicated, often agonised and paradoxical ways. Certainly, some elements of this celebration can be found in previous literature: London’s insistence on a kind of truth-seeking self-transcendence is identifiable in the Romantics, and the use of drugs for expanding mental horizons and the limits of the self is evident in the work
the writer beyond a rare insight.8 When the therapist reads his books, she tells him his second book is not literature, for it is not about love, sex, loss, and sadness, but is simply a ‘cry for help’ because he is nothing other than an alcoholic who needs to go to AA.9 An attendant problem with ‘dry’ endings, however, is that the narrative is always in some way a temperance tale, for what is important to the story is that the person has been through dangerous or bad times and has survived. To be fair to Sams in a Dry Season, though, Sams frequently has nineteen
borrowings combined quite distinct, even opposed, positions from within the Institute's current and former membership. It was by such means that the ‘popular’ version of the mass culture thesis attributed to the Frankfurt School emerged: that the working class had been transformed from an oppositional to conformist force by the consumption of ‘mass culture’, understood primarily as popular literature and Hollywood film; its standardized rhythms achieved this by distraction; mass culture so set an inexorable path towards fascism. It was Shils's critique
to everyday popular culture as well as highbrow literature and cinema (Imre 2014 ). Indeed, south-east European studies uses the critique of balkanism to discern a common politics of representation and exotification – with many incentives for creators to internalise exoticising Western gazes on their region – affecting music, cinema and literature alike (Iordanova 2001 ; Baker 2008 ; Volčič 2013 ). 1 More than just a parallel to what Stuart Hall termed the ‘spectacle of the “Other” ’ (Hall 1997 ) driving the construction of racial difference since imperial
capacity to read and assimilate the communication they receive from neighbouring systems. That communication is coded according to the distinct operations of the system in question. This is evidently a matter of great theoretical complexity; it is treated with care in subsequent chapters. For now it will suffice to observe that there is much disagreement within the relevant literature about how inter-systemic communication actually happens. The disagreement in question is potentially very fertile since, in accordance with the caveat not to exaggerate the differences
hierarchy, what has happened to the notion or theology of a spontaneous, abundant, and generous other-regard? There is little emphasis in the feminist theological literature on interpretations which refer to these qualities, which ironically raises the spectre for me of sacrifice. In what way might the notion of an equality that is envisaged as a defining aspect of genuine agapic love be incompatible with the qualities of spontaneous generosity? The remainder of this chapter will explore the feminist theological rejection and/or reconfiguration of agape in the exemplary
This volume collects and revises the key essays of Gunther Teubner, one of the world’s leading sociologists of law. Written over the past twenty years, these essays examine the ‘dark side’ of functional differentiation and the prospects of societal constitutionalism as a possible remedy. Teubner’s claim is that critical accounts of law and society require reformulation in the light of the sophisticated diagnoses of late modernity in the writings of Niklas Luhmann, Jacques Derrida and select examples of modernist literature. Autopoiesis, deconstruction and other post-foundational epistemological and political realities compel us to confront the fact that fundamental democratic concepts such as law and justice can no longer be based on theories of stringent argumentation or analytical philosophy. We must now approach law in terms of contingency and self-subversion rather than in terms of logical consistency and rational coherence.
‘geography’ and ‘literature’; island studies, she suggests, lacks a ‘meta-discourse’ about its scope and objects. She detects among island scholars a world view that suggests studying the real world is more meaningful than studying the imagined world. She states boldly: ‘I am convinced that much of the anxiety I detect in debates about the best way to think and write about islands stems from an underlying