Study Symbol Modern Lit

We will use this seminar to survey a range of ways people have thought about the relationship between music and writing, particularly literary forms of writing, over the past few centuries. Our survey will be somewhat idiosyncratic (and weighted toward French language materials -- although you are welcome to read along in English); in the course of it we will encounter a good range of critical schools of thought and a number of different types of music. Along with reading and discussing seven constellations of writers, we will also see if we can develop some critical insights into our own listening practices and our sense of what relevant linguistic, critical, and musical competencies might be (and how those competencies might sometimes overlap). Just as there are language ideologies and critical ideologies, there are improvisation ideologies and more general music ideologies. All of these, we will observe, shape our thought practices, our writing practices, our listening practices, and our music-making practices in inextricably interrelated ways. Readings by James Baldwin/Ed Pavlić/Brent Hayes Edwards; Honoré de Balzac/Roland Barthes; Thomas Mann/Theodor W. Adorno/Fred Moten; Claude Lévi-Strauss/Jean-Jacques Rousseau/Denis Diderot; Marcel Proust/Pierre Bourdieu; Gayl Jones/Daphne A. Brooks; Nathaniel Mackey/Brent Hayes Edwards.