MUSIC 790S-1 – Seminar in the History of Music – Th 12:00-2:30PM Biddle 069

Music in France from Lully to Gluck. Aim of this seminar will be to study the most salient aspects of the period musically dominated in late 17th-century France by Jean-Baptiste Lully, the Sun King’s composer, down to the eve of the French Revolution that saw the reconciliation of the antagonistic styles of Italian and French music through Gluck’s “Reform operas” performed in Paris during the 1770s.

Since the 19th century, historiographies of 18th-century music have remained essentially concerned by the supremacy of Austro-German and Italian musical repertoires. Yet no other country than France has offered so many challenging grounds for debates on the aesthetics of music. The intellectual contributions and legacies of the French Enlightenment still continue to fuel our contemporary conceptions of music as an art of expression, and of music and its supposedly common origins with language.

This seminar will consist in close examinations of primary sources: texts on music, and musical scores, that will help us to understand the privileged place, in 18th-century French musical discourse, of the primacy of vocal expressivity. We will also favor dialectical approaches of French musical style and aesthetics by encouraging comparisons with foreign musical models and discourses (Italian opera seria and buffa, German Singspiel; Northern European and Italian instrumental music). (Taught by Professor Waeber)

LIT 681S – Wittgensteinian Perspectives on Literary Theory – M 4:40-7:10PM White Lecture 201

Key questions in literary theory reconsidered from the point of view of ordinary language philosophy (Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin, Cavell). Topics will vary, but may include: meaning, language, interpretation, intentions, fiction, realism and representation, voice, writing, the subject, the body, the other, difference and identity, the politics of theory. New perspectives on canonical texts on these subjects. (Taught by Toril Moi)

LIT 690-8 – Special Topics in Literature: Paradigms of Modern Thought – Tu 10:05-12:35PM Carr 242

Specialized study of the work of individual thinkers who have modified our conceptions of human reality and social and cultural history, with special emphasis on the form and linguistic structures of their texts considered as ‘language experiments.’ Topics vary from year to year, including: Marx and Freud, J.P. Sartre, and Walter Benjamin. Seminar version of Literature 690-8 (Taught by Toril Moi)