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Deep Refrains: Music, Philosophy, and the Ineffable draws together the writings of Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ernst Bloch, Theodor Adorno, Vladimir Jankélévitch, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari in order to revisit the age-old question of music’s ineffability from a modern perspective. For these nineteenth- and twentieth-century European philosophers, music’s ineffability is a complex phenomenon that engenders an intellectually productive sense of perplexity. Through careful examination of their historical contexts and philosophical orientations, close attention to their use of language, and new interpretations of musical compositions that proved influential for their work, Deep Refrains forges the first panoptic view of their writings on music. Gallope concludes that music’s ineffability is neither a conservative phenomenon nor a pious call to silence. Instead, these philosophers ask us to think through the ways in which music’s stunning force might address, in an ethical fashion, intricate philosophical questions specific to the modern world.

Poetry, Photography, Ekphrasis is a detailed study of the ekphrasis of photography in poetry since the 19^th century. Unlike other critical studies of ekphrasis, Miller’s study concentrates solely on the lyrical ekphrasis of photographs, setting out to define how the photographic image provides a unique form of poetic ekphrasis. Moving between the disciplines of semiotics, visual studies, psychology, classical rhetoric, philosophy and literary criticism, Miller outlines what he defines as the chronotope of the photograph. Employing M.M. Bakhtin’s notion of the literary chronotope, Miller argues that the ekphrasis of photographs manifests itself in a series of chronotopic narratives. Each chapter of the book is dedicated to delineating one of these narratives. In this work, Miller engages in a literary history that follows the timeline of photography from its origins in the 19^th century to its contemporary digital manifestations in the 21^st. The study engages in close-readings of the works of such poets as Walt Whitman, Lewis Carroll, Thomas Hardy, Seamus Heaney, Marianne Moore and Philip Larkin. In addition, the book does the work of a comparative study, and it goes beyond the limits of Anglophone literature to include the works of such poets and writers as Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire, Bertolt Brecht, Ernesto Cardenal and Zbigniew Herbert.

The only book-length monograph in English to review James Joyce’s impact on German-language literature and literary criticism, this volume sets out to survey a literary-historical trajectory that reaches from the early reception of Exiles (with the first staging ever of this play in German translation 1919 in Munich) and Ulysses through the Marxist Expressionism debate and the Nazi blacklisting of Joyce’s works in the 1930s to the establishment of “Joyce” as one of a handful of models for innovative modernist and postmodernist writing. Joyce’s Ulysses and Finnegans Wake have become veritable text generators, and since the publication of the German translation of Ulysses in 1927 Joyce’s influence has profoundly changed the literary landscape of German-speaking countries. Three chapters delineate the German reception from the 1920s to the present, four further chapters move beyond the traditional reception perspective to explore the more intertextual dimensions of Joyce’s relationship with German literature. Here the focus lies on the parallax of scenes and settings in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre and Joyce’s Ulysses; the divergent forms of “abstraction” practised by Joyce and the Dadaists in Zurich between 1916 and 1919; the putting into poetic practice of Joyce’s theory of the epiphany by Rainer Maria Rilke in his poems and The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge; and the uses to which Joyce’s Ulysses was put by German Marxists in the ideologically charged Expressionism debate in the 1930s, with its extension into the Lukács-Adorno debate in the 1950s.

This book discusses five Early Modern literary texts that emerged in Europe between 1499 and 1627. The 5 texts are: La Celestina, the Dialoghi d’amore by Leone Ebreo, the first picaresque novel, Lazarillo de Tormes, Michel de Montaigne’s Essais, and João Pinto Delgado’s poeticizing treatments of biblical texts. The book understands these text as essential for the epoch, the interpretation of which has hitherto focused mainly on the – alleged or actual – Jewish, “New Christian”, or Marranic affiliation of their authors. The book replaces an origin-focused discussion of Early Modern Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and French literature with another perspective which neither levels the particular character of these texts nor overlooks their encapsulation in a universal historical experience due to a too narrow focus on the authors’ biographies. The individually varying engagement of the five texts with questions of origin and ancestry described in this study reveals components of a Marranic historical experience beyond the authors’ affiliations. These components seem like layers of memory which, although buried, build the foundation for the overlying layers and show through them. The analysis of these texts serves to initiate a fresh discussion of the complicated link between author and text as well as of the relevance of an author’s origin for an insight into aesthetic characteristics. The texts provide an understanding of Jewish History in Early Modern Spanish, French, Portuguese and Italian Literatures in the emergence of modernity.