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Malcolm Bowie
(1943-2007)
English critic
 2 other titles

Legenda: Oxford, 2007
£48.00 ($89.50 US)  Hardback  263pp
ISBN: 978-1-905981-13-7

’Interdisciplinarity’ has dynamised the Modern Humanities like no other recent academic trend. Yet, this presents serious challenges involving both translation and affect: how can we transmit facts and interpretations, sense and sensations between disciplines, between different artistic media, between cultures, between the private and the public sphere? What are the advantages, the difficulties, and risks? Another challenge concerns language: if single disciplines have produced their own technologies of reading and writing, this book examines and breaks the routine to propose alternative languages. Some of the most distinctive voices in criticism, both established and upcoming, from literature, music, the visual arts, psychoanalysis and philosophy, amongst others, show here their commitment to comparative thinking. The challenge has been to reach beyond the jargon and the epistemological constraints of individual disciplines while remaining coherent and incisive. The outcome successfully reveals new links between different forms of cultural expression.

Gillian Beer (English Literature, Science Writing), Malcolm Bowie (French Literature, Psychoanalysis) and Beate Perrey (Music, Poetry, Psychoanalysis) are the instigators of the interdisplinary research project New Languages for Criticism: Cross-Currents and Resistances, which since 2002 has been under the auspices of CRASSH, the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities at the University of Cambridge.

With the contributions:

Gillian Beer, Malcolm Bowie, Beate Perrey — Preface
Mieke Bal — What If? The Language of Affect
Adam Phillips — Nuisance Value
Beate Perrey — Borges’s Blindness and Giacometti’s Eyes
Lawrence Kramer — Wittgenstein’s Chopin: Interdisciplinarity and ‘the Music Itself’
Gabriele Brandstetter — Preserving the Performance: Scholarship as Art?
Peter Szendy — Echoing the ‘Mortal Ear’: Orfeo’s Indiscipline
Malcolm Bowie — Is Music Criticism Criticism?
Gillian Beer — Modernist Futures
Katrin Kohl — Conversation, Sport, or Hatchet Job? Criticism and the Power of Metaphor
Catherine M. Lord — Set Adrift in Style: The Scholar as Fiction and Film-Maker in Jacob’s Room
Joanne Lee — Languages for Learning to Delight in Art
Anthony Gritten — Loopholes in Performance
Daniel Blake Rosenberg — Etymology and its Others
Victoria Best — Yves Bonnefoy’s Récits en rêve: The Intersection of Creativity and Critique
Santanu Das — On Touching: War, Art, and the Realm of the Senses
Carolin Duttlinger — Snapshots from the Hereafter: Benjamin, Adorno, and the Critic as Photographer
Patrick Gray — Faith and Doubt: An Alternative Dialectic
Tim Mehigan — Literature and the Theory of Games: Kleist’s Verlobung in St Domingo as an Example
Lucia Ruprecht — Towards Discursive Discipline: Dance beyond Metaphor in Critical Writing
Katy Price — Interdisciplinarity and Public Engagement