Thematic Section

2019-04, Thematic Section

Witkacy and His Doppelgängers

Abstract: The literary work of Stanisław I. Witkiewicz (Witkacy), whose world career began in the fifties of the last century, is considered today in many aspects as precursory to postmodernism. In his dramas and novels, this is manifested in the creation of characters who are internally broken up, who act like deregulated human machines and

2019-04, Thematic Section

Between images and fromages: Lyotard on Painting’s Critical Force

Abstract: In this essay I want to focus on Jean-François Lyotard’s interpretation of Marcel Duchamp’s “The Large Glass” which I confront with Duchamp’s idea of pictorial nominalism. I invoke the main thesis from Lyotard’s important essay “Freud selon Cézanne,” to draw a line between Lyotard’s analysis of artistic experience of space in Cézanne’s work and

2019-04, Thematic Section

“The Figure in the Carpet” as Theoretical Tool

Abstract: This study is based on the assumption that literary interpretations are explicitly or implicitly influenced by some philosophical system as a general system of thought. In this way, different literary interpretations often hide more general philosophical ideas. Nevertheless, this study tries to show that the interpretation of the given work of art need not

2019-03, Thematic Section

Listening to Different Texts: Between Reich and Eco with Nycz

Abstract: In this essay, the author considers intertextuality in contemporary musical work, conceptualizing it not only as a critical category and as an artistic convention, but also as an aesthetic strategy. Listening for texts, as it were, opens the work for influences and gives it new purposes. The multiple texts, which are mutually interdependent, alter

2019-03, Thematic Section

Meditating on the Vitality of the Musical Object: A Spiritual Exercise Drawn from Richard Wagner’s Metaphysics of Music

Abstract: In 1870, Wilhelm Richard Wagner (1813-1883) wrote an essay to celebrate the centennial of Beethoven’s birth. In this essay Wagner made the case that music is, unlike any other object we create or are attentive to in experience, in an immediate analogical relationship with the activity of the Schopenhauerian “will” and is always enlivened.

2019-03, Thematic Section

Postmodern Music and its Future

Abstract: The essay presents an attempt at characterizing contemporary music’s culture by identifying a dialectical tension between “modern” and “postmodern” currents in it. After initial considerations on the manifold usages of the term “postmodernism,” five composers’ approaches will be analyzed: John Cage, Philip Glass (and other minimalists), Bernhard Lang, Mauricio Kagel and Johannes Kreidler. However

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