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This chapter explores how disciplinary identities emerge through so-called narratives of disciplinary legitimation. It focuses on six authors whose work seems to provide imaginative solutions to the problems of disciplinary identity: Lawrence Kramer, Kay Kaufman Shelemay, Manuel Peña, Nicholas Cook, Joseph Kerman, and Kofi Agawu. The cultural dilemmas to which they respond are examined. If the musicological subject is split, then its discourse is also divided; the narrative level may contradict the explicit assertions in the text. By exploding the narrative closure of these texts, we can open discourse to the strategic exclusions that make closure possible.

This chapter presents the text of Arthur Ruhl's review of George Gershwin's Broadway musical comedy satire Of Thee I Sing, which was published in the December 28, 1931 issue of New York Herald Tribune. Ruhl notes that the musical offered more than a conventional musical comedy and it was received by the audience with more than routine first-night enthusiasm. He also provides a detailed description of every act and lauded the role of Ira Gershwin, Morrie Ryskind, and George S. Kaufman to the success of the show.

The sixth chapter explores animal-friendly teachings and practices in Christian religious traditions through sacred texts, including teachings such as love and mercy, service and sharing, peace, humility, and the God-centered disposition of the Christian life and natural environment. This chapter also surveys the inclusive nature of Christian salvation, and presents ideal models of compassion and animal advocacy through the life of Jesus and through Christian moral exemplars (saints). Chapter 6 closes by exposing the activist nature of Christianity, including the teachings of eighteenth-century Dr. Humphrey Primatt, nineteenth-century Leo Tolstoy, and the works of dedicated contemporary Christian animal liberationists such as Dr. Stephen Kaufman of the Christian Vegetarian Association, PETA's Bruce Friedrich, and Swedish activists Pelle Strindlund and Annika Spalde.

Fred and Adele appeared on stage together for the last time in The Band Wagon by Howard Dietz, Arthur Schwartz, and George S. Kaufman. Unlike Smiles, the production was backed by a creative team, which was not only talented but also professionally competent and reliable. The cast was uniformly of first-rate quality. The Band Wagon brought a new sophistication to musical theatre and, with its introduction of a revolutionary double revolve or turntable, it spelt the end of the old-style musical revues. Adele left the show in March 1932 and sailed to London to wed Lord Charles Cavendish. The marriage took place in the private chapel at Chatsworth, seat of the Devonshire family, after which Adele and her new husband went to live at Lismore Castle in Ireland. Fred, without the support of his talented sister, stepped up to the mark, to begin his solo career. He also began a two-year courtship of society divorcée Phyllis Potter. The course of his future life was set in London when Phyllis accepted his proposal of marriage and suggested he return to New York to take the lead role in Gay Divorce with a score by Cole Porter.

Many contemporary theologians hold that there are profound problems in the very idea that we can refer to and think about a being characterized in the way Christians characterize God; in this chapter, I consider the claims of two such thinkers, Gordon Kaufman and John Hick. Roughly, Kaufman's position (in his early work) appears to be the following: the term “God” may or may not have a real referent, but if so this real referent transcends our experience and hence is something to which our concepts don’t apply; the term “God” does, however, have an available referent, which is a human construction. I examine and reject this view, as well as some of Kaufman's claims about the function and utility of religious language. I then examine and attempt to clarify John Hick's position that there is an unlimited and transcendent being, the Real, which is “the noumenal ground of the encountered gods and experienced absolutes witnessed to by the religious traditions,” and which is such that only our formal concepts and our negative concepts apply to it. I argue that although this position (or one close to it) may manage to avoid incoherence, Hick gives us no good reason to think that we cannot predicate of God such positive, nonformal properties as wisdom, knowledge, love, and the rest.

In the 1920s and 1930s, Berlin worked with gifted comedy writers associated with George S. Kaufman. The Cocoanuts (1925), a madcap spoof about the fad for land speculation in Florida, set the tone. Featuring the Marx Brothers in their first musical comedy, the show launched a collaborative style that would mark the middle decades of Berlin’s career. With Moss Hart, Berlin created two shows that cleverly spoofed New York City police corruption and theatrical excess (Face the Music, 1932) and, in a revue shaped by newspaper headlines, a wide array of current events, celebrities, and musical theater clichés (As Thousands Cheer, 1933). These shows produced several Berlin standards, including “Let’s Have Another Cup of Coffee,” “Soft Lights and Sweet Music,” “Easter Parade,” “Heat Wave,” and “Supper Time.” Two other projects emerged from the Kaufman orbit: the musical comedy Louisiana Purchase (1940) and an unfinished revue satirizing American behavior during holidays, “Happy Holiday” (1939).

This chapter presents an interview with Charlie Kaufman, whose scripts include Being John Malkovich (1999) and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004). His directorial debut Synecdoche, New York (2008) is described as a work of rare ambition and scope. The film grapples with themes of failure, disappointment, and ennui. The cast is also one of the best in recent American cinema, which include Philip Seymour Hoffman, Michelle Williams, Hope Davis, and Dianne Wiest. The interview covered topics such as how Kaufman found the transition from writing to directing; whether he intended that Synecdoche be viewed numerous times; the comic element in Synecdoche; his reputation for writing strong female characters; and his working relationship with veteran cinematographer Frederick Elmes.

This chapter explores Gordon Kaufman's construction of the theological concept “human being,” and the degree to which this construction does or does not fulfil his requirement of appropriateness to human experience and the provision of meaning for human life, particularly as this relates to individuals with profound intellectual disabilities. It demonstrates that Kaufman's theological anthropology is developed primarily around an understanding of the human as agent, with capacities for symbol-use, intentionality, self-reflection, creativity, and purposeful action. While he avers that there is no “essence” to human being—no reified point at which the theologian locates “human being”—he himself locates what is essential to human being in the capacity to “grasp, shape, create” itself in and through historical processes—what Kaufman refers to as our “biohistoricity.” This concept is one of his most distinctive contributions to theological anthropology.

Exploring the tensions between the themes and visual style, Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York is an exemplary manifestation of dissensus: ‘the presence of two worlds in one’ (Rancière, 2010: 37). Staging and subsequently thwarting middle-class America and classical Hollywood style, the film ultimately allows us to envision ways of being beyond the apparent “end of history”. Yet, in so doing, the film also highlights the tendency towards irony in contemporary American art cinema: a feedback-loop, art-housing the art film spectator safely, intellectually, inside the space of the film. This takes us to the political impasse of art cinema in general: when formal innovation meets cultural critique, a redistribution of the sensible occurs and makes possible subsequent changes outside of the cinema.

This chapter argues that Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York creates a metatextual relationship between director and protagonist through its use of Romantic irony. The film directly addresses issues of solipsism as it is told from the radically subjective viewpoint of its self-obsessed protagonist, who may or may not be descending into madness. Kaufman conjures sublime feeling in the spectator through aesthetic devices of fantastic world creation. These include the creation of mise en abyme and an engagement with Tzvetan Todorov’s fantastic ‘themes of the self’ and ‘themes of vision’, which are expressed by inexplicable narrative elements such as a continually burning house fire. Drawing on German idealism and Schlegel’s concept of Romantic irony to counteract traditional notions of mimetic realism, Kaufman portrays his film world (and the world itself) as chaotic. But whereas Kaufman’s film embraces the chaos of becoming inherent in Schlegel’s philosophy, its protagonist suffers from a complete inability to engage with life on any authentic level and subsequently fails as an artist and person.

This chapter provides a number of examples of misrepresentations of medical history. It specifically shows that the claims made against the role of animals in biomedical research are simply false. It also considers the animal-rightist claims of those who really should know better, the medically trained. Ray and Jean Greek highlight in their book that they are not interested in animal rights but only in demonstrating that using animals in research endangers human health. They present the same distortions of medical history as those presented by other individuals discussed in this chapter. In addition, Brandon Reines specializes in advancing the thesis that significant medical advances are primarily due to observations made on human patients.

Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart had themselves become (very minor) movie stars in a twenty-minute two-reeler written and directed by the former theater critic of the Globe, S. Jay Kaufman. Makers of Melody appears to have been a pilot for a series of shorts about songwriters. The basic idea was simple: Hart and Rodgers, as themselves, would answer the perennially unanswerable question “Where do you get your ideas from?” by demonstrating how they had come to write “Here In My Arms,” “Manhattan,” “The Girl Friend,” and “The Blue Room.” Featured as singers were Inez Courtney from Spring Is Here, Robert Cloy, Allan Gould, Ruth Tester, and Kathryn. Principal photography was effected early in April at the Paramount-Famous Players-Lasky studios, supervised by Walter Wanger. Reviewing Makers of Melody for Variety, “Bige” buried it as “a novel try that missed.”

On opening night, November 2nd, I'd Rather Be Right stopped the traffic on Fifty-Second Street: the show had the biggest opening, said critic George Jean Nathan, since the Grand Canyon. Two squadrons of police did what they could to contain the heaving crowds — “the most insufferable crush, confusion, and amiable uproar Fifty-Second Street has ever known” — who had turned out to see a star-studded celebrity audience. Pausing only for his opening-night ritual of kissing his wife, Richard Rodgers led the orchestra into the overture of a memorable evening. Only two small misadventures marred the opening; George Cohan tripped over a cable backstage and had to play the first performance with his leg in a special rubber cast, and Beatrice Kaufman, who wore a new fur coat to the premiere, had it stolen from her seat at intermission.

In 1927, George and Ira collaborated with producer Edgar Selwyn and playwright George S. Kaufman—two of Broadway's most eminent figures—on the musical comedy Strike Up the Band. It is surprising that the show proved, at least at first, to be one of Gershwin's biggest flops. For all its brilliance, the music tellingly lacked some of the vivacity and charm of Gershwin's best theater scores. Meanwhile, Funny Face premiered on Broadway on November 22, 1927, and, after six frantic weeks on the road, opened to surprisingly unanimous acclaim. During the Broadway run of Funny Face, the Astaires took some screen tests for Paramount Pictures, who considered adapting the show as a movie musical.

Of Thee I Sing is a musical collaboration between the Gershwin brothers, George Kaufmann, and Morrie Ryskind. Commentators have traditionally viewed it as a political satire with the story concerning John P. Wintergreen, who runs for President of the United States on the “love” platform. The Gershwins correspondingly blended the romantic and the satirical in ways that surpassed anything they had previously attempted along these lines, an achievement epitomized by the title number, which marvelously operates as at once a love song and a patriotic hymn. The show proved a complete triumph for the Gershwins, notwithstanding a few critics who found it hard to warm up to such a sardonic score. On May 3, 1932, the New York Times announced that Columbia University's School of Journalism had awarded Kaufman, Ryskind, and Ira Gershwin the Pulitzer Prize for the best American play of 1931.

In late 1932, as George S. Kaufman and Morrie Ryskind considered writing a sequel to Of Thee I Sing, Kaufman's wife, Beatrice, suggested picking up the story with John P. Wintergreen's reelection campaign following his first term as president. They started work on the show in early 1933, announcing its title, Let 'Em Eat Cake, in April. The Kaufman–Ryskind book remains one of the most unusual in the history of the American musical: a caustic satire of the American body politic. To celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Rhapsody in Blue, Gershwin and Harry Askins launched an extensive 1934 road tour featuring the composer and the Leo Reisman Orchestra performing not only the Rhapsody but a new work composed specifically for the occasion, the Variations on “I Got Rhythm” for piano and orchestra.

This chapter shows how Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind establishes structure and projects a sense of musicality. Its story’s lacunae emerge through a bewildering number of flashbacks as well as process-oriented and mood-based events, all which make a space for the soundtrack. Alongside these lacunae are carefully refined structures. At least 30 visual motifs—like the skeleton posada figures, lamps, and hair dye—crisscross the film, playing a variety of roles. These motifs and the lattices that hold them are structured to connect with the soundtrack in an intimate fashion. The film’s soundtrack contains much music, but even when music is absent, the dialogue and environmental sounds are designed to work musically. A latticework of sound-image relations create new kinds of characterization, affect, and story.