Is it like caring more about the language used to discuss literature than the literature itself? (For the record, I would consider that last thing to be a travesty, but I'm not going to be an academic after next year.)
Well. Here's a passage I found in the reading I'm doing for my post-structuralism-in-musical-phenomenology paper:
"Cobra is in fact a paradisic text, utopian (without site), a heterology by plenitude: all the signifiers are here and each scores a bull's-eye; the author (the reader) seems to say to them: I love you all (words, phrases, sentences, adjectives, discontinuities: pell-mell: signs and mirages of objects which they represent); a kind of Franciscanism invites all words to perch, to flock, to fly off again: a marbled, iridescent text; we are gorged with language, like children who are never refused anything or scolded for anything or, even worse, 'permitted' anything. Cobra is the pledge of continuous jubilation, the moment when by its very excess verbal pleasure chokes and reels into bliss." (from Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text. Hill and Wang: New York, 1975, p. 8.)
I can think of a great deal of literature I've enjoyed less than that passage. I'm developing a dangerous taste for the language of post-structural critique.
That's not really where I was going with the original content, though. I can only think of a few composers (and I'm sure you can guess who they are :D ) who seem to evoke something language can't; the vast majority of Western music is subordinate to language, or at best equal to it. That seems to be reversed for the other musicians in my department, though.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2009-03-26 05:18 am (UTC)Well. Here's a passage I found in the reading I'm doing for my post-structuralism-in-musical-phenomenology paper:
"Cobra is in fact a paradisic text, utopian (without site), a heterology by plenitude: all the signifiers are here and each scores a bull's-eye; the author (the reader) seems to say to them: I love you all (words, phrases, sentences, adjectives, discontinuities: pell-mell: signs and mirages of objects which they represent); a kind of Franciscanism invites all words to perch, to flock, to fly off again: a marbled, iridescent text; we are gorged with language, like children who are never refused anything or scolded for anything or, even worse, 'permitted' anything. Cobra is the pledge of continuous jubilation, the moment when by its very excess verbal pleasure chokes and reels into bliss."
(from Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text. Hill and Wang: New York, 1975, p. 8.)
I can think of a great deal of literature I've enjoyed less than that passage. I'm developing a dangerous taste for the language of post-structural critique.
That's not really where I was going with the original content, though. I can only think of a few composers (and I'm sure you can guess who they are :D ) who seem to evoke something language can't; the vast majority of Western music is subordinate to language, or at best equal to it. That seems to be reversed for the other musicians in my department, though.