By Gillian Beer (Author), Malcolm Bowie (Author), Beate Perrey (Author)
Hardcover: 250 pages
Publisher: Oxford Legenda (10 Dec. 2007)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1905981139
ISBN-13: 978-1905981137
‘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.
This volume forms part of the outcomes of the Cambridge interdisciplinary Project New Languages for Criticism: Cross-Currents and Resistances, seeking new links between different forms of cultural expression.
Instigated by Gillian Beer (English Literature, Science Writing), Malcolm Bowie (French Literature, Psychoanalysis) and Beate Perrey (Music, Poetry, Psychoanalysis) in 2002, it has been under the auspices of CRASSH, the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities at the University of Cambridge.
“The ambition, expertise and disciplinary breadth of this collection are exhilarating”
“The ‘wonderfully impure acts of translation, of provocation, of risk-taking, and of abyssmanship that musical experience involves’ (p. 72) equally describes this collection of essays.”
“Often lyrical and innovative in their critical style, these essays by distinguished contributors… are an important contribution to the definition and exploration of interdisciplinarity itself.”
Forum for Modern Language Studies
“Genuinely innovative and coherent”
External Expert Report, Oxford Legenda Press
“This compendium addresses the question of the search within the modern humanities for new languages for criticism in the light of a broadening awareness of the increasingly interdisciplinary or intermedial nature of cultural production and research.”
David Scott, Professor of French, Textual and Visual Studies, Trinity College Dublin
“The adjectives ‘refreshing‘ and ‘exciting‘ trip all too easily off the tongue in connection with academic projects but in this case they really do apply”
“It will make quite a splash…”
External Expert Report, Oxford Legenda Press