Personality and impersonality: Lawrence, Woolf, and Mann

Albright, Daniel

Literature & Fiction

Univ. Of Chicago Press

Representation and the Imagination: Beckett, Kafka, Nabokov and Schoenberg

Arts & Photography

Univ of Chicago Pr

Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, and Other Arts

From its dissonant musics to its surrealist spectacles (the urinal is a violin!), Modernist art often seems to give more frustration than pleasure to its audience. In Untwisting the Serpent, Daniel Albright shows that this perception arises partly because we usually consider each art form in isolation, even though many of the most important artistic experiments of the Modernists were collaborations involving several media—Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring is a ballet, Gertrude Stein's Four Saints in Three Acts is an opera, and Pablo Picasso turned his cubist paintings into costumes for Parade. Focusing on collaborations with a musical component, Albright views these works as either figures of dissonance that try to retain the distinctness of their various media (e.g. Guillaume Apollinaire's Les Mamelles de Tirésias) or figures of consonance that try to lose themselves in some total effect (e.g. Arnold Schoenberg's Erwartung). In so doing he offers a fresh picture of Modernism, and provides a compelling model for the analysis of all artistic collaborations. Untwisting the Serpent is the recipient of the 2001 Susanne M. Glasscock Humanities Book Prize for Interdisciplinary Scholarship of the Center for Humanities Research at Texas A&amp;M University.

Music

University of Chicago Press

From its dissonant musics to its surrealist spectacles (the urinal is a violin!), Modernist art often seems to give more frustration than pleasure to its audience. In Untwisting the Serpent, Daniel Albright shows that this perception arises partly because we usually consider each art form in isolation, even though many of the most important artistic experiments of the Modernists were collaborations involving several media—Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring is a ballet, Gertrude Stein's Four Saints in Three Acts is an opera, and Pablo Picasso turned his cubist paintings into costumes for Parade. Focusing on collaborations with a musical component, Albright views these works as either figures of dissonance that try to retain the distinctness of their various media (e.g. Guillaume Apollinaire's Les Mamelles de Tirésias) or figures of consonance that try to lose themselves in some total effect (e.g. Arnold Schoenberg's Erwartung). In so doing he offers a fresh picture of Modernism, and provides a compelling model for the analysis of all artistic collaborations. Untwisting the Serpent is the recipient of the 2001 Susanne M. Glasscock Humanities Book Prize for Interdisciplinary Scholarship of the Center for Humanities Research at Texas A&amp;M University.

History & Criticism

Daniel Albright investigates musical phenomena through the lens of monism, the philosophical belief that things that appear to be two are actually one. &nbsp; Daniel Albright was one of the preeminent scholars of musical and literary modernism, leaving behind a rich body of work before his untimely passing. In Music's Monisms, he shows how musical and literary phenomena alike can be fruitfully investigated through the lens of monism, a philosophical conviction that does away with the binary structures we use to make sense of reality. Albright shows that despite music's many binaries--diatonic vs. chromatic, major vs. minor, tonal vs. atonal--there is always a larger system at work that aims to reconcile tension and resolve conflict. &nbsp; Albright identifies a "radical monism" in the work of modernist poets such as T. S. Eliot and musical works by Wagner, Debussy, Britten, Schoenberg, and Stravinsky. Radical monism insists on the interchangeability, even the sameness, of the basic dichotomies that govern our thinking and modes of organizing the universe. Through a series of close readings of musical and literary works, Albright advances powerful philosophical arguments that not only shed light on these specific figures but also on aesthetic experience in general. Music's Monisms is a revelatory work by one of modernist studies' most distinguished figures.

Music's Monisms: Disarticulating Modernism

While comparative literature is a well-recognized field of study, the notion of comparative arts remains unfamiliar to many. In this fascinating book, Daniel Albright addresses the fundamental question of comparative arts: Are there many different arts, or is there one art which takes different forms? He considers various artistic media, especially literature, music, and painting, to discover which aspects of each medium are unique and which can be “translated” from one to another. Can a poem turn into a symphony, or a symphony into a painting? Albright explores how different media interact, as in a drama, when speech, stage decor, and music are co-present, or in a musical composition that employs the collage method of the visual arts. Tracing arguments and questions about the relations among the arts from Aristotle’s Poetics to the present day, he illuminates the understudied discipline of comparative arts and urges new attention to its riches.

Panaesthetics: On the Unity and Diversity of the Arts (The Anthony Hecht Lectures in the Humanities Series)

Yale University Press

Quantum Poetics examines the Modernist appropriation of scientific metaphors as part of a general search for the preverbal origins of poetry. The poetic possibilities offered by developments in scientific discourse intrigued Yeats, Eliot and Pound, writers intent on remapping the general theory of poetry. Using models supplied by physicists, Yeats sought for the basic units of poetic force, both through his sequence A Vision and through his belief in, and defense of, the purity of symbols. Daniel Albright demonstrates how Modernists created a whole new way of thinking about poetry and science as two different aspects of the same quest.

Quantum Poetics: Yeats, Pound, Eliot, and the Science of Modernism

Cambridge University Press

Quantum Poetics examines the Modernist appropriation of scientific metaphors as part of a general search for the preverbal origins of poetry. The poetic possibilities offered by developments in scientific discourse intrigued Yeats, Eliot and Pound, writers intent on remapping the general theory of poetry. Using models supplied by physicists, Yeats sought for the basic units of poetic force, both through his sequence A Vision and through his belief in, and defense of, the purity of symbols. Daniel Albright demonstrates how Modernists created a whole new way of thinking about poetry and science as two different aspects of the same quest.

British & Irish

As a young man, Samuel Beckett (1906-89) hoped that writing could provide psychic authenticity and true representation of the physical world. Instead, he found himself immersed in artificialities and self-enclosed word games. Daniel Albright argues that Beckett sought escape through allegories of artistic frustration and the art of non-representation and estrangement. Albright depicts Beckett experimenting with the concept that an artistic medium might be made to speak. Engaging with radio, film, television, prose and drama, Albright's Beckett becomes a sophisticated theorist of the very notion of the aesthetic.

Beckett and Aesthetics

Lyricality in English Literature

Univ of Nebraska Pr

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Albright, Daniel. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Albright, Daniel

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Albright, Daniel. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Personality and impersonality: Lawrence, Woolf, and Mann

Representation and the Imagination: Beckett, Kafka, Nabokov and Schoenberg

Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, and Other Arts

Untwisting the Serpent: Modernism in Music, Literature, and Other Arts

Music's Monisms: Disarticulating Modernism

Panaesthetics: On the Unity and Diversity of the Arts (The Anthony Hecht Lectures in the Humanities Series)

Quantum Poetics: Yeats, Pound, Eliot, and the Science of Modernism

Quantum Poetics: Yeats, Pound, Eliot, and the Science of Modernism

Beckett and Aesthetics

Lyricality in English Literature