Aesthetic Stance Research Articles

Sharing information through book reviews in blogs

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to contribute to research on information sharing by drawing on the reader-response theory developed by Louise Rosenblatt. To this end, information sharing is approached by examining how bloggers communicate their reading experiences of fiction and non-fiction books.Design/methodology/approachThe conceptual framework is based on the differentiation between efferent and aesthetic reading stances specified by Rosenblatt. The efferent stance directs attention to what is to be extracted from reading for instrumental purposes such as task performance. The aesthetic stance focuses on what is being lived through during the reading event. Rosenblatt’s framework was elaborated by specifying eight categories of efferent reading and six categories of aesthetic reading. The ways in which bloggers communicate their responses to such readings were examined by scrutinising a sample of 300 posts from two book blogs.FindingsThe bloggers mainly articulated responses to efferent reading by sharing information about the content of the reviewed books, as well as their strengths and weaknesses. Responses to aesthetic reading were mainly articulated by describing how the bloggers experienced the narrative, what kind immersive experiences they had and what kind of emotions were felt during the reading process.Research limitations/implicationsAs the study is explorative in nature and focusses on a sample of blog posts, the findings cannot be generalised to depict how people share their responses to efferent and aesthetic reading in social media forums.Originality/valueThe paper pioneers by examining the potential of Rosenblatt’s theory in the study of sharing information about reading experiences in book blogs. The findings demonstrate that the categories of efferent and aesthetic reading can be elaborated further for the needs of information behaviour research.

El efecto de realidad y la política de la ficción. Apuntes sobre el modelo estético de lo político en Th. Adorno

The art-political relationship was one of the central theoretical points of the Frankfurt school, most recognized in some of its members as Walter Benjamin and Herbert Marcuse. Theodor Adorno's aesthetic stance, however, has been recognized for rejecting such a direct relationship between social praxis and artistic praxis. This argument, based on the interpretation of the autonomous nature of art as opposed to the political potential of technical reproducibility for its massification, left Adorno's aesthetic reflections on the development of contemporary art history, criticism and philosophy behind. This is the point I want to make here. I intend to show how the critical model of artistic praxis as political praxis is postulated in the adornian aesthetic, so much so that in the Aesthetic Theory of Adorno an aesthetic of the political can be found, an idea under which a great part of the current discourses on contemporary art are constructed.

Analysing the pitch content of the rapping voice

To date, scholars have engaged the rhythm of the rapping voice far more often than its pitch. I detail the construction of a corpus of pitch features of “post-Golden Era” emcees. Using tools of music analysis and intonational phonetics, I contrast these features with each other and with a corpus of speech. Distinctions between rapping and speaking amplify those between mainstream American English and African-American language; other distinctions position rapping closer to singing. These findings underlie close readings of three active emcees that demonstrate how details of pitch organisation can support broader aesthetic stances.

Picturesque Lost

William Martin Conway (1856-1937), art critic and mountaineer, made clear distinction between ‘geographical exploration’ and ‘geographical experiment’. If the former identifies ‘the investigation and record of the form of the earth’s surface in relation to man’, the latter simply refers to the practice of travelling – ‘Geographical experiment is called Travel’. In devoting himself to science, the ‘careful and observant traveller’ has to refrain himself from indulging in any picturesque appreciation of landscape scenery. The aesthetic dimension of travelling is filtered through a physical engagement with the landscape itself, elevating the body as the main instrument of both geographer and artist. In this paper, Conway’s experimental travel performances into geography is explored by looking at his approach to ‘climbing’ in his pioneering travel books, beautifully illustrated by A.D. McCormick: Climbing and Exploration in the Karakoram-Himalayas (1894), The Bolivian Andes: A Record of Climbing and Exploration in the Cordillera Real in the Years 1898 and 1900 (1901), Aconcagua and Tierra del Fuego: A Book of Climbing, Travel and Exploration (1902). In a time in which mountaineering performance was still linked to an Alpine Club ‘orthodoxy’, heavily influenced by the aesthetic stance of John Ruskin and the performative ethos of Leslie Stephen, Conway’s ‘experimental travels’ in the Andes and Himalayas were accused of challenging the ‘picturesque’ and of putting an end to the era of Romantic voyaging.

Estratégias biopolíticas de construção do corpo e vigilância da saúde: o caso “Medida Certa”

This research aimed to analyze the discursive practices about health and the body present in the first season of Right Measure – a part of the TV show Fantástico, on Rede Globo – and the book Right Measure, How We Got There!. The methodology used was a discourse analysis within the Foucaultian perspective. It concludes that the discursive practices both in the TV show and in the book result in a pedagogical device of the media which serves to prescribe us modi operandi of surveillance for the body and for the health. Thus, it is argued that such a device is a set of biopolitical strategies of life surveillance rather than an ethical and aesthetic stance on caring about health and the body.

IVAN STESHENKO: ARTISTIC INDIVIDUALITY IN THE FIELD OF ERA

The article is devoted to the artistic personality of Ivan Steshenko as an independent creative person of the early twentieth century, in which the poetic world reflected the stylistic and aesthetic contradictions inherent in the transitional era of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It was emphas ized that artistic thinking, literary style of the art is twas for me dinan atmosphere of communication and personal relation ships with many contemporary cultural figures: his biography is closely connected with Starytsky, Lesya Ukrainka, O. Konysky and others. Innovative features and conscientiousness of his poetry with works by M. Staritsky, Lesya Ukrainka and others canbetraced. The key images that reflect the complex system of Ivan Steshenko's spiritual life are considered and is a significant element of his artistic world, which combines neoclassical and neo-romantic elements, tangible relapses of positivism. It is proved that with out studying the artistic personality of Ivan Steshenko it is impossible to out line the true spiritual field of Ukrainian literature, toconstruct a complete model of the national literary process. It is noted that Ivan Steshenko's poetry is polyphonic. There is a desire in it to show the world in all its manifestations, to discover both aesthetic and civic stance. In his artistic word the actual and abstract, national and human, philosophical and social problems became firmly joined. In his writings, the poet reveals the tragic existence of man, reflects his temporality, shows the gap between dream and reality, demonstrates fatigue and frustration in search of happiness. In his poetry, the dramatic disharmony of the thinking man with the world of evil and violence is clearly embodied, the position of the rejection of the existing world order is clearly expressed. There is a synthesis of emotional and intellectual.

Brahms’s Sybel: The Politics and Practice of Prussian Nationalist History

Johannes Brahms’s well-known historical consciousness took a particularly formative turn in the mid-1850s when he embarked upon a self-imposed hiatus from composing to deepen his knowledge of the music-historical past. This conscious embrace of historical study was characteristic of his time. Following the 1848Märzrevolution, a growing contingent of German intellectuals, sceptical of the more speculative teachings of philosophy and theology, became increasingly receptive to the concrete lessons of history. Brahms’s reading habits suggest his inclination toward a politics of historical knowledge closely associated with the ‘Prussian School’. The writings of these historians, including Johann Gustav Droysen, Henrich von Sybel and Heinrich von Treitschke, exhibit a blend of idealist philosophy and dogmatic empiricism oriented above all toward the goal of legitimating German national unification under Prussia. Particularly influential was Sybel’s seven-volumeDie Begründung des deutschen Reiches durch Wilhelm I(The Founding of the German Reich through Wilhelm I), completed in the 1890s. Brahms, a Hamburg-born sympathizer of PrussianKleindeutschnationalism, who was a permanent resident of the Austrian capital of Vienna for the last 26 years of his life, was uniquely situated in relationship to the ‘German Question’. His well-marked copy of Sybel’s magisterial text adds illuminating granularity to our understanding of his personal and political values and ruminations on history spanning four decades. Brahms’s reading of Sybel makes legible a longer trajectory stretching from his ‘years of study’ in the 1850s, conveying how the studious historicism of his youth is best understood as an aesthetic stance densely interwoven with, and at the end of his life ratified by, the cultural and political agendas of Prussian School ideology and the meanings of the past forged in the crucible of the German historical imagination.

Cool Characters: Irony and American Fiction

Cool Characters: Irony and American Fiction

Taking an Aesthetic Stance Toward Teaching and Assessment

Taking an Aesthetic Stance Toward Teaching and Assessment

Advertisements in French and Belgian ‘Little Reviews’, 1890–1930: Visual Techniques and Design

Between the 1880s and the 1920s, advertising proved fundamental to art and literature reviews since it fostered a new link between visual and consumerist culture. This article is based on fin de siècle and avant-garde magazines read in dialogue. It samples French and Belgian magazines illustrating innovations to 1880s periodicals and 1920s modernist magazines. The paper highlights the use of visual techniques in advertisements (page design, typography, etc.) that strengthen aesthetic and political stances. Advertising rhetoric masks aesthetic manifestos but also social and political agenda, revealed by visual displays of text. Publicity is also an important medium for poetic experimentation, embedded in ordinary advertising design already in the 1890s. Its subversive use informs new means of artistic expression, considered avant-garde innovations (collage, cadavre exquis, or typographic combinations). Advertising later represents new modernist stances within avant-garde magazines. Surrealism and Dada exploited publicity to promote their revolutionary aesthetic. In the 1920s, advertising being increasingly professionalized, specific designers used new visual means, strengthened artistic exchanges, and gradually erased the division between art and commercial culture in magazines. Thus modernism became part of a visual culture resonant with consumer commodities. Advertising ultimately exemplifies an interesting change in periodicals’ patterns, across literature and art reviews to the mainstream press, through posters, and decorative or architectural designs.

Social and Relational Aspects of Comprehending in One Fourth Grader’s Unaided and Illustration-Aided Picturebook Retellings

In this article, we present one fourth grader’s unaided and illustration-aided retellings of The Other Side. Using a qualitative clinical case study approach, we examine comprehending activity in these retellings using microethnographic discourse analysis in conjunction with dialogic self theory and a transactional model of reading. Analysis indicates that illustration-aided retelling results in qualitatively different comprehending activity than unaided retelling. John’s illustration-aided retelling demonstrates relational involvement in the social world of the story and a more aesthetic stance characterized by movement between multiple character positions and their perspectives. John’s unaided retelling shows a nearly singular, outsider position and an efferent stance, characterized by summarizing and reporting. In addition, this study suggests that microethnographic analysis is a useful framework for noticing and understanding social and relational aspects of comprehending in illustration-aided retelling. Specifically, in illustration-aided retelling, the reader’s use of contextualization cues and dialogic activity of turn-taking were accompanied by social imagination and intersubjective relationships with characters. Other social and dialogic aspects of the illustration-aided retelling included intertextuality and narrative coherence both frequently involving polychronic activity. Implications of illustration-aided retellings as assessments of readers’ comprehending activity within picturebooks are discussed.

Musik und Rhetorik im frühneuzeitlichen Frankreich – Diskussionsstand und Forschungsperspektiven

Abstract The article provides a critical survey of the musicological literature on the relationship between rhetoric and music in early modern France. During the recent decades the topic aroused increasing interest in musical scholarship, especially regarding the repertory of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Yet, the pertaining studies largely adopt methodologies which have been developed within German musicology in regard to primarily German Baroque music. This approach which aims to discern formal structures analogous to the rhetorical dispositio and to discern musico-rhetorical figures faces several problems when applied to French music. In contrast, the relation between rhetoric and music, as far as it is made concrete in the contemporary theoretical discourse, relates to a complex of rhythmic phenomena (the so-called mouvement) and the basically declamatory nature of (vocal) music. Furthermore, several recent studies have began to uncover how rhetorical concepts and ideas informed aesthetic stances and notes related to music on a more general level and in an often implicit way.

Marcelijus Martinaitis’s Cultural “Crafting”

From a theoretical perspective, literary anthropologists (e.g., Stephen Greenblatt, Clifford Geertz) view poems, letters, and social behavior as cultural documents that are valuable in their own right; their careful reading can unpack a certain image or trope that functions as a self-interpretive concept in a culture. Reading Martinaitis’s text in this way reveals the poet’s sociocultural and aesthetic stance. The author of the article proposes that this stance can be seen as an instance of anthropological poetics, which she defines as poetry’s synergistic working on aesthetic levels and within social life. She sees poetry, on the other hand, as one of numerous and equivalent cultural modes of being which are capable of compensating for actual social practices.The images of woodworking, carpentry, and craftsmanship appear repeatedly in Martinaitis’s text. Martinaitis crafts his poetic world like an ensemble of wooden sculptures or a collage of objects. The author comes to the conclusion that Martinaitis’s poetry functions as a substitute for an inherited cultural movement – the practice of craftsmanship. This enables her to discuss Martinaitis’s cultural stance using Hannah Arendt’s concept of homo faber.

Of ‘Psychological Music’, Ciphers and Daguerreotypes: Joseph Joachim’sAbendglockenOp. 5 No. 2 (1853)

If as a performer and Brahms’s close collaborator Joachim promoted the music of Bach, Beethoven and Brahms, a process relatively unsympathetic to programme music of theNeudeutsche Schule, as a composer Joachim’s works do not display such an aesthetic stance. His own music, which he dubbed ‘psychological’, was intended to ‘detectandsave’, that is faithfully to perceive and record his emotions. As part of this process, Joachim’sAbendglocken, the second of theDrei Stücke, Op. 5, for violin and piano (1853), betrays a striking use of ciphers, taking Robert Schumann’s musical word games to a heightened level and using notational signs such as double bars as framing devices that suggest an intriguing link to the daguerreotypes of early photography.‘Psychological music’ describes a compositional approach Joachim pursued in the 1850s, when positivism began clashing with the existing idealist philosophy, as demonstrated in the emergence of empirical psychology from philosophy and metaphysics. Enrolled in philosophy at Göttingen University in 1853, Joachim would have encountered psychology from a pre-empirical, phenomenological perspective, which may have initiated his ‘psychological music’. The dedicatee ofAbendglockenand the constant subject of his thoughts – and arguably of his music – was Gisela von Arnim (1827–1889), daughter of Bettina von Arnim, with whom he was romantically involved and whose encrypted name – G♯–E–A – provides a valuable key to understandingAbendglockenin particular, and Joachim’s psychological music in general. This article considers the autobiographical, philosophical and cultural influences on Joachim to interpret ‘psychological music’ as it played out inAbendglocken.

“You Sleep with None and You Wake with Ghosts”: Emmylou Harris as the Widow of Nashville

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Emmylou Harris's solo musical career began with a death. On September 19, 1973, her duet partner Gram Parsons collapsed from a drug overdose and died in his hotel room in Joshua Tree, California. Harris and Parsons had just completed a successful tour earlier that year, and the two singers were eagerly anticipating a long-term musical partnership. At the time, Parsons was relatively obscure, best known for his brief tenure with the Byrds and for his countercultural country-rock group the Flying Burrito Brothers. Like many artists who meet an untimely end, Parsons's stature increased dramatically in the years following his fatal heroin binge. Flis unexpected death and its bizarre, body snatching aftermath--his road manager stole his corpse from the Los Angeles airport and burned it in the desert--sparked wider interest in Parsons as both a musician and an icon of the 1970s country-rock movement. (1) Emmylou Harris had been singing professionally since 1969, first as a folksinger and then on Parsons's albums GP (1973) and Grievous Angel (1974)- While Parsons was the dissolute scion of a wealthy Florida citrus family, Harris's background was decidedly less gothic: her father was a career military officer who spent much of his career in and around Washington, D.C. Although she admired folksingers like Joan Baez, Harris often found herself torn between the left-leaning pacifism of the 1960s folk scene and venerating her father's achievements. (2) Harris often credited Parsons with introducing her to the artistic possibilities of country music, and her work with him constituted her first national exposure as a musician. Duets composed much of that work, performed with enough sexual tension to fuel speculation about their offstage relationship. (3) Given this close personal and professional association, it is hardly surprising that much of Harris's later work would be viewed through the lens of Parsons's Joshua Tree overdose. By the 1980s, Harris had become a star in her own right, achieving the mainstream acceptance that Parsons had sought but never attained. Her singles came from diverse sources--the Chordettes' Mister Sandman, the folk hymn Wayfaring Stranger, and English singer-songwriter Paul Kennerley's Born to Run all made it into the Top Ten on the Billboard Hot Country charts when she sang them--and she became known for collaborating with artists from across the spectrum of country, folk, rock, and pop music. This ability to work with musically and politically diverse artists made Harris into something of a bridge between two increasingly distant poles: scholarly, urban folk-music audiences and rural, working-class country listeners. Harris's crossover image was rooted in loss: the particular loss of Gram Parsons, but also the idea of loss more globally. Placed in the difficult position of being forced to react to Parsons's death in public and on stage, Harris used the concepts of mourning and widowhood as foundations for her burgeoning career. While much of the melancholy in her public persona has its roots in the Gram Parsons story, Harris has transformed this sadness into an independent aesthetic stance. This article explores what it means for Harris to build her persona on loss that is simultaneously literal (Gram Parsons's death) and conceptual (grief more generally). It will begin with a brief discussion of the ways that bereavement resonates in the country-music culture that Harris draws upon as a performer. It will continue with an overview of the Harris/Parsons duets and their place in the context of country romantic duet singing. From there, the article will explore the ways that Harris shaped her early career in the shadow of Parsons's death, especially on the album Pieces of the Sky (1975). It concludes with some of Harris's post-Parsons duet work, illustrating her negotiation of this genre full of romantic conventions as a woman forever without her true singing partner. …

“A Disturbing Lack of Musical and Stylistic Continuity”? Elliott Carter, Charles Ives, and Musical Borrowing

Elliott and Charles Ives shared complex personal and professional relationship. Ives supported Carter's musical pursuits as young man and remained guiding influence throughout his career. As Jan Swafford writes, however, Carter, whose mature music would owe great deal to Ives ... would pay back his mentor with baffling mixture of admiration, advocacy, and cold repudiation (Swafford 1998: 334). Although he eventually softened his early criticism of Ives and acknowledged his musical debts, was consistently puzzled by the stress in Ives's music on musical borrowing--i.e., the procedures by which composer includes material from or refers to pre-existing musical pieces in the context of an original work. (1) As put it, Ives's reliance on quotations accounted for a disturbing lack of musical and stylistic continuity (Perlis 1974: 145). On another occasion, described Ives's inclusion of popular songs and hymns as constantly (Edwards 1971: 63). (2) In view of these and numerous other statements, it is equally perplexing that borrows from Ives's music on several occasions, most overtly in his 2001 Figment No. 2 (RememberingMr. Ives) for solo cello. This composition contains literal snippets and gestures from, as well as stylistic allusions to, two Ives pieces: the Concord Sonata and Hallowe'en. In what follows, I explore the ways in which borrows from Ives both literally and figuratively; how he incorporates those quotations into his music; and how he evokes Ives's memory and musical style in several works. Along the way, I illuminate some contradictions of Carter's aesthetic stance and connect them to broader problematics in late twentieth-century modernism. The Quotation Problem In nearly all of his writings on Ives, acknowledges and admires Ives's musical innovations, particularly those in rhythm and temporality. For example, in 1973 letter to John Kirkpatrick, observes: What is interesting about Ives, today, are the many different procedures he thought up, so it seems, to produce his polyrhythmic and dissonant (quoted in Meyer and Shreffler 2008: 210). Several scholars have previously investigated Carter's interest in Ives's abstract compositional techniques. Felix Meyer and Anne Shreffler explain that Carter the composer continued to find solutions for the same musical problems that Ives had posed: the combination of different groups of instruments moving at different speeds, new formal concepts, new ways to control the flow of time, and ways of orchestrating so that complex polyphonic could be clearly (6). David Schiff also notes that textures reminiscent of Ives's music can be heard throughout Carter's mature works, in abstract form (Schiff 1983: 35). Considering his admiration for such compositional procedures in Ives's music, it is peculiar that seldom comments on the large body of music Ives composed without any trace of musical borrowing. Many of these pieces such as the piano studies were intended as compositional experiments and show Ives's imagination at its most fertile. In them, he creates and solves particular musical problems of rhythm, pitch, and temporality in smaller settings. (3) In fact, majority of these works would have interested in light of their compositional rigor, but he chose not to comment on them, highlighting instead his disagreements with Ives's music that contains quotations. To take an example of his problematic stance toward quotation in Ives's music, consider what wrote in an essay from 1974: As for myself, I have always been fascinated by the polyrhythmic aspect of Ives's music, as well as its multiple layering, but perplexed at times by the disturbing lack of musical and stylistic continuity, caused largely by the constant use of musical quotations in many works. To me composer develops his own personal language, suitable to express his field of experience and thought. …

Proust et le paysage: des écrits de jeunesse à la ‘Recherche du temps perdu’

Proust's 1908 musing as to whether his work in progress was to be a novel or a philosophical essay is well known. Perhaps less so is the writer's 1913 description of the novel to Robert de Flers as ‘un roman à la fois plein de passion et de méditation et de paysages’ (p. 241). Just as the former statement continues to inspire studies on the unique form of the novel, so the latter invites us to ask what a novel ‘plein […] de paysages’ may imply. This is the question that Keiichi Tsumori raises in a three-part book written originally as a doctoral thesis. Tsumori follows in the footsteps of André Ferré, Georges Poulet, and Jean-Pierre Richard, who dealt respectively with geography (Géographie de Marcel Proust (Paris: Sagittaire, 1939)), space (L'Espace proustien (Paris: Gallimard, 1963)), and the fragmentation and unification of the sensible world (Proust et le monde sensible (Paris: Seuil, 1974)), among other renowned commentators. More than one notion of landscape operates in Tsumori's book depending on whether the author draws from literary theory, aesthetics, phenomenology, or other literary works. To the rather flat question as to whether Proust ‘expresses landscape in his writing’ (p. 19), Tsumori provides rich analyses and a creative typology of landscapes that include ‘sonorous landscapes’ for example, by attending ‘chronologically’ to Proust's tâtonnements around them, from the early fictional and critical writings to À la recherche, against the backdrop of diverse aesthetic stances (from romanticism to modernism). The land, the countryside, and nature are prevalent in Proust, and not only as a result of the writer's interest in John Ruskin's work on Venice and French gothic architecture. Remembering, itself, coincides with the transformation of things into landscape (p. 374). Among many significant critical topoi raised by landscape is the opposition between objectivism and subjectivism. A landscape, so one of its definitions goes, emerges with the subject's perception of the external world more or less independently from its physical and geographical characters. Proust has inventively integrated the subjectivist conception into the story of a literary vocation, through a division of labour between the hero and the narrator with respect to perception. While landscapes emerge in the hero's consciousness through misperception and memory, the narrator develops a transcendent point of view on the hero's remembered landscapes that will form the basis of poetic creation. Landscapes, notably those of Paris during the Great War, concretize the hero's changing perceptions and aesthetic consciousness. These arguments are developed in the third and strongest part of the book, through the opposition between static and dynamic landscapes, where Proust has recourse to panoramic visions and elevated locations in order to create temporal continuity out of spatial discontinuity, and to integrate the subjective and objective outlooks. If Proust's travels helped form his depiction of places in his early writings, it is the motorcar and speed which have played that role in his late work. The book enlarges our knowledge of Proust, in addition to making us experience À la recherche as a novel almost exclusively made out of compelling landscapes.

Dancing to the Devil's Tune

Abstract Despite its popularity with pianists, Liszt9s first Mephisto Waltz (pub. 1862) has been largely glossed over in musicological studies. In this article, I reconsider the relationship between the piano piece and the excerpt from Lenau9s Faust (pub. 1836) that inspired it, and I explore potential programmatic interpretations of the rhetorical features and idiosyncratic structure of the music, informed by knowledge of Liszt9s aesthetic stance around this period. This hermeneutic approach is framed in terms of certain important sociocultural concerns of the time, including the widespread fascination with the virtuoso as a daemonic agent. The poetic excerpt tells of a crowd being roused to frenzy by the playing of a diabolical instrumentalist, a process that the piece both depicts and (in the act of performance) reenacts. This also links back to Liszt9s mercurial career as a performer, during which period such scenes were commonplace. Written long after he had ceased his tours as a virtuoso to concentrate on composition, the Waltz may use Liszt9s own remembered experiences, but more importantly it is part of the legacy whereby he hoped to ensure his own lasting place in the cultural memory.

Haniel Long’s Pittsburgh Memoranda : Documentary Form and 1930s Political Poetry

Recent studies of 1930s political poetry understandably tend to look at the period through a Marxist lens, but as a result they neglect Haniel Long’s innovative documentary poem Pittsburgh Memoranda (1935). This essay seeks to recover Long—who was not a Marxist, though certainly a political radical—in order to arrive at a more complete picture of both the documentary genre and the cultural work of the times, complementing and complicating the existing scholarship. It argues for the importance of Long’s idiosyncratic political and aesthetic stances and puts him in conversation with contemporary Marxist poets and critics, utilizing Edwin Rolfe and Stanley Burnshaw as examples. Further, it positions Long’s work as a forerunner to and possibly an influence on Muriel Rukeyser’s “The Book of the Dead” (1938). Thus, this essay restores Long to the discussion about the political poetry of the Thirties generally and the documentary political poem more specifically.

Conlon Nancarrow, “Hot” Jazz, and the Principle of Collective Improvisation

This paper explores the possibility that Conlon Nancarrow’s connection to jazz runs more deeply and widely throughout the Studies for Player Piano than is typically recognized through the clear stylistic allusions to jazz found in a few of the Studies. I propose that an awareness of this deeper connection—as suggested by Nancarrow’s profound appreciation for early jazz, especially that of Louis Armstrong and Earl Hines—might prompt a new and rewarding mode of listening to the Studies, an improvisational mode. The principle of collective improvisation, important in both early jazz of the 1920s and in “free jazz” of the 1960s, was valued by Nancarrow, and his discussion of it intimates an aesthetic stance that runs through his music.