Table of Contents

A Note on Translations and Abbreviations Hors d'ouvre I Introduction: The Subject of Music and Madness 1. Hearing Voices 2. Unequal Song 3. Resounding Sense 4. The Most Violent of the Arts 6. Before and After Language: Hoffmann Hors d'ouvre II Notes Bibliography Index

Promotional Information

" Music, Madness, and the Unworking of Language is energetically committed to tracing the struggle for power between words and the unspoken, between language and, as John T. Hamilton calls it, 'the unworking of language,' to eighteenth-century continental philosophy and, further back, to the Greek tradition. Hamilton's book is not only accomplished, it succeeds gracefully in appealing to an audience drawn from a number of different disciplines and perspectives. His prose is, as a rule, enviably clear and engaging, often rendering thick theoretical nodes and processes transparent. Hamilton acts as philologist and cultural historian, as close reader and synthesizer of the history of philosophy. He does a fine job in all roles." -- Eileen Gillooly, associate director, Heyman Center for the Humanities, and associate faculty in the Department of English, Columbia University

About the Author

John T. Hamilton is professor of comparative literature and Germanic languages and literature at New York University. He has held teaching positions at the University of California-Santa Cruz and Harvard University. The author of Soliciting Darkness: Pindar, Obscurity, and the Classical Tradition (2003), he has also published extensively on German and French literature, aesthetics, and the afterlife of classical antiquity.

Reviews

As a study of a literary obsession, Hamilton's book will remain a key text for those interested in the genesis of the idea of ineffable music. Eighteenth Century Music [A] superb book... a living testimony that philological learning and literary sensibility can be happily compatible. -- Herbert Lindenberger Modern Language Quarterly An extremely accomplished work that provides a powerful insight into a potentially important historical topic. -- Ian Miller H-Disability