Night Passages: Philosophy, Literature, and Film

A new study from Elisabeth Bronfen

Elisabeth Bronfen, Night Passages: Philosophy, Literature, and Film

From Columbia University Press:

In the beginning was the night. All light, shapes, language, and subjective consciousness, as well as the world and art depicting them, emerged from this formless chaos. In fantasy, we seek to return to this original darkness. Particularly in literature, visual representations, and film, the night resiliently resurfaces from the margins of the knowable, acting as a stage and state of mind in which exceptional perceptions, discoveries, and decisions play out.

Elisabeth Bronfen investigates the nocturnal spaces in which extraordinary events unfold, and casts a critical eye into the darkness that enables the irrational exploration of desire, transformation, ecstasy, transgression, spiritual illumination, and moral choice. She begins with an analysis of classical myths depicting the creation of the world and then moves through night scenes in Shakespeare and Milton, Gothic novels and novellas, Hegel’s romantic philosophy, and Freud’s psychoanalysis. Bronfen also demonstrates how modern works of literature and film, particularly film noir, can convey that piece of night the modern subject carries within. From Mozart’s “Queen of the Night” to Virginia Woolf ’s oscillation between day and night, life and death, and chaos and aesthetic form, Bronfen renders something visible, conceivable, and comprehensible from the dark realms of the unknown.

About the Author:

Elisabeth Bronfen is professor of English and American studies at the University of Zürich. Her numerous books include Specters of War: Hollywood’s Engagement with Military Conflict; Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity, and the Aesthetic; The Knotted Subject: Hysteria and Its Discontents; and Home in Hollywood: The Imaginary Geography of Cinema. [Read More]

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Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Mark C. Taylor, Rewiring the Real
• Gothic tradition in Alien and Blade Runner
• Queer Fear: Queer Gothic Literature, Culture & Criticism
• Freud and Love
• Diurnal vs. Nocturnal Writers: Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky

When Mozart met Beethoven

A 17-year-old Beethoven plays for the respected composer

Paul Allais, 'Beethoven with Mozart' (Details)

From Otto Jahn's Mozart, quoted in Michael Hamburger's Beethoven: Letters, Journals and Conversations:

Beethoven, who as a very promising young man came to Vienna in the spring of 1787, but had to return home (to Bonn) after a brief stay, was taken to see Mozart, who asked him to play something. Mozart, thinking that he was listening to some studied show-piece, praised it rather coolly. Beethoven, who noticed this, asked Mozart for a theme suitable for improvised variations. As he always played excellently when excited and, at this moment, was also inspired by the presence of a master whom he respected greatly, Beethoven began to perform the piano in such a manner that Mozart, whose attention increased to the point of fascination, at last went quietly to his friends sitting in the next room and said emphatically: "Keep your eyes on that fellow; one day he'll give the world something to talk about."

Plunged in thought: Thomas Bernhard on Music

An excerpt from Thomas Bernhard's novel, Correction

Thomas Bernhard

From Thomas Bernhard's Correction, translated by Sophie Wilkins:

[...] for even at the age of eleven or twelve Roithamer had instinctively perceived that music and the knowledge of music was a necessary condition for his ability to enter into the natural sciences, and so he had even then seized upon every opportunity to improve his knowledge of music and, with only that basic instruction in musical theory and practice and in piano playing, he had achieved a mastery of his subject all on his own, and had not only retained that mastery all his life but had even managed to expand and intensify it. Listening to music had always meant the same to him as studying music, so listening to music was for him not only a way of raising his spirits but, by the way he combined hearing and studying the music, he became plunged in thought. While others listen to music and, when they hear, they feel it, it was possible for Roithamer to hear music and to feel and to think and to study his science. His chief musical interest had been, on the one hand, Purcell and Handel and Mozart and Bruckner, and on the other hand, the newer and newest music such as Hauer, Webern, Schönberg and their successors. The opening bars of the Webern string quartet which he'd hand-copied on the back of a bill, he'd tacked on the wall above his desk in Hoeller's garret. He loved this opening, it had always meant much to him.