music

The article traces the attitude to music in the Hellenistic Greek novels, namely the pastoral novels and tries to outline the significance of music and musical improvisation in the ancient world. It is shown against the backdrop of the representations of visual images. The text follows an excursus from there on and it is aimed at explaining the fate of music within the tradition of the aesthetics of the Enlightenment. With this purpose in mind, it considers the distinguishing between the varying signs and the divergent content of different arts as it is done in Winkelmann, Lessing and Herder. Visual art is privileged in the whole tradition of aesthetics. This is true mostly for aesthetics, which considers itself to be a philosophy of art and not a science of perceptive faculties and intuition. This tendency reaches its peak in Hegel’s “Aesthetics”.

This study examines the shift in the prosecutorial strategy of Ernest Pinard in the cases against Gustave Flaubert (“Madame Bovary”) and Charles Baudelaire (“Les Fleurs du mal”), offering an interpretation that explores the ways in which legal professionals read literary works. Using examples such as the poet-detective Gabriel Syme, a character in G. K. Chesterton’s “The Man Who Was Thursday”, and the investigating monk William, a character in Umberto Eco’s “The Name of the Rose”, the article investigates potential connections between poetry and law. These connections create legal spaces where both laughter and music become possible. Particular attention is given to the relationship between text and music within the framework of court proceedings (the so-called “courtroom acoustics”) as well as in the formation of judicial practice (understood as a harmonious performance).

“Shipwreck with a Witness: Music and Fascism in Thomas Bernhard’s “The Loser”” is an attempt to think the multifaceted relations between music as an art and practice, and fascism as a desire as well as a political, existential, aesthetic, etc. condition and phantasm. These relations are explored through a close reading of Thomas Bernhard’s novel “The Loser” which is a fictional account of a doomed friendship between Bernhard‘s unnamed narrator, a fictionalised version of Glenn Gould, the infamous piano virtuoso, and Wertheimer – a caricature of the equally infamous philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. It is through them that Bernhard addresses the problems of madness, desire for eternity and totality, the hatred of diversity and the Other, etc. By unpacking the dense logic and meaning of the above through ideas by Deleuze, Brassier, André Michels, etc., the text addresses the crucial figure of witnessing a transcendental trauma (fascism) qua event. Finally, the article engages with the theoretical and practical (ethical) importance of examining not just the relation between fascism and music but also the problem of the return of fascism within contemporary culture.

The paper aims to analyse the dimensions of silence in “The Name of the Wind” in order to highlight the various roles that music plays in the examined work. The subversive strategies that the novel employs in regard to the genre expectations of fantasy literature are of particular interest. Deposition is seen as a conceptual move that draws on the dynamic between the magical, the scientific and the musical within the framework of the fictional world.