2. This chapter gives an original account of Coetzees multiple attempts to start a second fiction and reads In the Heart of the Country with relation to Barthes notion of the Sadian.

In 1922, a year that saw the publication of landmark works such as James Joyce’s Ulysses, Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, the sixth-form student Samuel Beckett read plays by William Shakespeare. His copies of editions of Shakespeare’s plays like the one of Macbeth1 contain many underlined or marked passages, but the reading trace very often found in their margins is: ‘Learn by heart’.2

The modern period (1800–1500) saw important innovations as philosophy of music moved in dramatically different directions. The first innovation was the incorporation of philosophy of music into philosophical systems, either absolute idealist or Marxist. These philosophers also held that music provides important insights into reality. In this stream of philosophy of music are found the seeds of Continental philosophy of music. The other, diametrically opposed, development was the rapid rise of formalist approaches to philosophy of music. These writers stressed the autonomy of musical beauty. A third stream within modern philosophy of music is continuous with earlier thinking about music. It opposed formalism without adopting a grand weltanschauung. Ontology of musical works emerges as a topic for philosophical discussion. Thinkers discussed include Hegel, Schelling, Schopenhauer, Wagner, Nietzsche, Ernst Bloch, Adorno, Friedrich Schleiermacher, Nicolai Hartmann, Carroll C. Pratt, Susanne Langer, Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, Vladimir Jankélévitch, Darwin, Herbert Spencer, Hanslick, Edmund Gurney, Vernon Lee (Violet Paget), R. G. Collingwood and Roman Ingarden.

The Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School was a child of total war. In the aftermath of World War I, its founding members sought to understand the new phenomenon of total mobilization, the integration of all aspects of state, society, and economy into a war effort that effectively erased traditional distinctions between war and peace. Their conception of Marxism, and the development of their critiques of mass culture and fascism, were shaped by the outcome of this effort at understanding total warfare. This chapter reconstructs the trajectory of the critical responses to total warfare in the Weimar period by the founders of Critical Theory and their counterparts on the German Right. It reviews core texts by Horkheimer and Adorno to see how their critique of mass culture in the United States and fascist mobilization in Germany are informed by their encounter with total mobilization. In its concluding section, the chapter argues that the power of this critical project came at a steep price: convinced of totalizing nature of modern warfare, critical theorists had few resources to respond to new, lower-intensity armed conflicts characteristic of decolonization struggles.

My introduction begins with Dorothy Richardson who, in the second volume of Pilgrimage, gives us a scene straight out of Jane Austen, which she then quickly abandons. Richardson’s particular form of modernism, I suggest, requires an engagement with realism in order to foreground its own interests. Using Richardson as a jumping off point, I outline the way modernism’s earliest critics reproduced arguments from the modernists themselves that emphasized their distinction from their realist predecessors. This debate then carried over to the seminal Marxist arguments of the 1930s between Lukács and Adorno, through which the terms modernism and realism hardened into an opposition that is still with us today. This reified divide cannot be simply wished away: we can still meaningfully distinguish works dominated by a realist impulse from those that use modernist’s characteristic disruptions. What we cannot do, I argue, is: (1) array these two movements simplistically via a false divide between form and content; (2) draw a straight line between politics and form. Instead, we must look to the ways in which specific aesthetic techniques combine to produce the form of each particular work of art.

This chapter discusses David Jasper’s notion of theological thinking, as this concept is briefly outlined in the 1995 text “From Theology to Theological Thinking”. It does so by relating sketchily to an early personal encounter with David Jasper on the part of the author, when he faced Jasper with an idea of writing a dialectical post-Christian theology. Jasper was somewhat sceptical about the idea and suggested that theology should rather be post-Ecclesial. The author was rather perplexed by this comment at the time, but in due course realized that they each had very different emphases, despite a profound agreement on certain fundamental cultural issues. This chapter describes Jasper’s notion of theological thinking and puts it in contact with his later works, which may be seen as a kind of post-Ecclesial liturgical writing. This complex is put in relation to the author's own notion of post-Christian theology. The author aims for a more comprehensive critical theoretical perspective that may open up new horizons in radical theology.

This essay outlines Brecht’s relation to Marxism along three dimensions. First, it examines his Marxist influences including Karl Marx, V. I. Lenin, Karl Korsch, and Fritz Sternberg. Second, it explores Marxist reactions to him, particularly those of Georg Lukács and Theodor Adorno. Lastly, it investigates his influences on Marxist thought vis-à-vis Walter Benjamin, Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Rancière, and others. It shows that not only was his work heavily influenced by the movement, his thought also occupies an often-unrecognized central position within it.

Chapter Three, “Crowds and Transformation,” synthesizes concepts of self-recovery, play, and collective intellect to explore what transformative tools and practices crowds were developing (in modernist fictional worlds) in order to identify and represent themselves, or to have as tactical weapons during their conflicts with elite authority. Conventional identity is creatively reworked by disarticulated performances such as Clarissa’s or the unnamed Captain in The Secret Sharer. The chapter maps mechanisms that produce modernity’s porous and transmissible social mind, exemplified in readings of Jacob’s Room and “Ithaca,” for example. Historical examples of street demonstrations and popular movements in the first decades of the twentieth century in England and Ireland are compared with readings of the permeable and suggestible crowds of “Wandering Rocks” and Wyndham Lewis’ writings, to differentiate what the book identifies as rising crowds from Lewis’ crowds of “extinction.” Finally, the chapter transitions to the concept of crowdedness as an ethical experience.

Theodor Adorno was the most erudite and most challenging of Mahler’s critical apologists. A deeply cultured thinker whose family background represented a coming together of the twin poles of German rationalism and Italian lyricism, he acquired in his youth a vast knowledge of European classical musical repertoire (mostly by playing piano duets), which he deployed in profound critical readings of a wide range of music. His principal statements on Mahler are surveyed here, from early attempts such as “Mahler Today” (1930) – a concise but wide-ranging essay challenging the prevailing view that Mahler was a late Romantic who had been superseded by the modernist trends of the 1920s – to the monograph Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy (1960) and the centenary address that served as its distillation. A distillation of Adorno’s broader project vis-à-vis late capitalism serves as introduction.

Though Mahler by no means embraced a Nietzschean worldview, the philosopher-psychologist was an important presence in his thinking, both in his student days in Vienna and during his maturity (particularly with the Third Symphony [1896]). This chapter offers a fresh perspective on those ideas of Nietzsche that would have been available to Mahler, whether he interacted with them explicitly or not. These include Nietzsche as idiosyncratic philo-Semite, as left-wing liberator keen to undermine sclerotic social and political conventions, as prophet of the rebirth of ancient dramatic culture in the contemporary German-speaking world, as antagonist of liberalism’s individualist greed through reawakening the emotional elements of a culture, as advocate of the twin impulses of utopianism and self-destruction, and as a post-Wagnerian hoping to supplant the Christian myth of delivery through the Redeemer by his return to ancient Greece.

In the years since its inception, Wagner’s Ring has generated significant commentary and controversy. Critics of the Ring asserted its influence in public discourse (beyond music criticism of the work and its performances) and generated ambitious intellectual and ideological debates about art, society, and politics. This chapter charts some milestones in these debates, including the contributions of well-known thinkers such as Nietzsche, Shaw, and Adorno, but also some of their French, German, or Russian contemporaries whose influence has waned since the fin de siècle. In the twentieth century, seminal musicological approaches emerged that transcend analytical-technical matters, such as Alfred Lorenz’s ideologically charged investigations of Wagnerian form or Richard Donington’s psychoanalytic explanations. More recently the task of interpreting the Ring has shifted from the written word to the operatic stage, where directors explore and expose its various and conflicting layers of meaning. Whether formulated by philosophers, writers, musicologists, or artists, two basic approaches emerge from these interpretations: They either develop a social or political interpretation from the Ring outward, or they insert the tetralogy into a preexisting worldview.

It is hardly surprising that the long tradition of partimento schemata is apparent in the music of Beethoven. Many of his teachers, including Haydn and Salieri, were raised in that pedagogic tradition, and the musical patterns surface consistently in Beethoven’s output. They are particularly evident in works that focus on the performer, such as concertos and fantasias, but their grammatical and syntactical features also contribute to the rarefied language of the late quartets.

James MacMillan contends music should awaken the senses to the possibility of beauty. To do this, he crafted his own form of ‘modernist lament’ (David Metzer), thus creating a form of beauty capable of embracing the dark elements of human experience without descending into nihilistic despair. MacMillan’s lament compositions fit into three themes: (1) the death of Jesus, (2) the life and death of particular historical persons, and (3) memorial works that either lament particular persons or commemorate communal tragedy. This chapter will focuses on the third classification through MacMillan’s Violin Concerto (2009), written in memoriam of his mother, Ellen MacMillan. The first section will adumbrates the category of late modernist lament. The next section will examines a number of themes from MacMillan’s memorial works, which often pull from the traditions of Gaelic keening and heterophonic psalm singing. The final section will applies these ideas to the Violin Concerto. The concerto does not prioritize grief but, instead, moves between mourning and celebration. The dance between the violin’s virtuosity and the orchestra’s vibrant tapestry of color takes the listener on a journey through a whirl of emotions: the sweet, the nostalgic, the festive, and the anguish of memory and loss.

An analysis of MacMillan’s The World’s Ransoming presents an underlying conflict between modernity and tradition, observed on three levels, and focused to form the chapter’s main issue: how to configure MacMillan’s relationship with modernism, particularly given his characteristic stylistic mixture of modernist and traditional elements. Dominic Wells’s label for MacMillan (‘retrospective modernism’) highlights two questions: do the modernist and traditional co-exist as comfortably as this suggests? Can modernism be ‘retrospective’ so easily? I propose ‘conflicting modernities and a modernity of conflict’ as a better description. ‘Conflicting modernities’ highlights the centrifugal aspects of MacMillan’s style in three ways: the conflict between modernist and traditional elements, categorising them as examples of conflict first, before they are rapprochements with modernity; the inclusion of traditional elements stems from a modernist impulse, evidenced in MacMillan’s essay ‘Music and Modernity’; and the multiplicity of modernist influences in MacMillan’s style. ‘Modernity of conflict’ suggests a conclusion that conflict in MacMillan must be defined overall as modernist, explored through two strands of Adorno: meaning as contradiction; and Adorno’s aim to expose totalitarian tendencies, restrictions, and blindspots. In MacMillan this takes the form of a desire to turn modernity’s critique onto itself, exposing its atheistic elements and nihilistic worldview.

Chapter 1 discusses the structure of ideology in capitalism. According to Adorno, ideology is a “socially necessary illusion” that is embodied in the legal, social, and political institutions constitutive of capitalism. Using Hegel’s category of “semblance” (Schein) in the logic of essence, I argue that although individuals take themselves to be free and equal in capitalism, such moral intuitions are in fact grounded on, and therefore conceal, the deeper relation of domination. Finally, I discuss Marx’s account of the objectivity of the ideology of equality and freedom in capitalism. In contrast to slave or feudal societies, where there was no claim to equality and freedom, domination by capital is mediated by the institution of wage-labor, which requires equality and freedom.