\"Beyond Feminist Aesthetics\" has a dual focus. First, Rita Felski gives a critical account of current American and European feminist literary theory, and second, she offers an analysis of contemporary fiction by women, drawing in particular on the genres of the autobiographical confession and the novel of self-discovery, in order to show that this literature raises questions for feminism that cannot be answered in terms of a purely gender based analysis.Felski argues that the idea of a feminist aesthetic is a nonissue that feminists have needlessly pursued; she suggests, in contrast, that it is impossible to speak of \"masculine\" and \"feminine,\" \"subversive\" and \"reactionary\" literary forms in isolation from the social conditions of their production and reception. The political value of such works of literature from the standpoint of feminism can be determined only by an investigation of their social functions and effects in relation to the interests of women in a particular historical context. This leads her to argue for an interdisciplinary approach to the analysis of literature which can integrate literary and social theory, and to develop such an approach by drawing upon the model of a feminist counter-public sphere.Rita Felski has produced a closely reasoned, stimulating book that creates a new framework for discussing the relationship between literature and feminist politics. It will interest students and teachers of women's studies, comparative literature, cultural studies, and fiction.

Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change

In \"Poetic Closure\", distinguished literary scholar Barbara Herrnstein Smith explores the provocative question: How do poems end? To answer it, Smith examines numerous individual poems and examples of common poetic forms in order to reveal the relationship between closure and the overall structure and integrity of a poem. First published in 1968, Smith's book remains essential reading in poetic theory.

"Poetic Closure. A Study of How Poems End", Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Chicago-London 1968, The University of Chicago Press, ss. XVI, 290 : [recenzja] / Jerzy Paszek.

Women in German Yearbook I. Feminist Studies and German Culture@@@The New Feminist Criticism. Essays on Women, Literature, and Theory

The Rhetoric of Genre: Chopin's Nocturne in G Minor

It is probably no overstatement to say that Carl Dahlhaus's Nineteenth-Century Music' could alter the horizon of English-language musicology. Whether we wish to take issue with it or to build upon it, the book provides a needed focus for discussion, and it seems likely to remain for some time the single broad argument about the century that professionals will be expected to have confronted. Yet the book is not self-explanatory, particularly for American readers. Much of its raison d'etre lies beneath the surface of its compact, often oblique prose, and it presumes a readership involved in methodological disputes taken for granted in West Germany in the 1960s and 70s. Not surprisingly, the American response to date has been to sidestep the contextual engagement of its arguments in favor of noting the disturbing contrast between the brilliance of Dahlhaus's intellectualist approach to the history of music and the vexing reality of his apparent unwillingness to consider non-Germanic music on its own terms, his rigorously judgemental pronouncements, and his occasional errors of factual detail. Thus Philip Gossett, Dahlhaus's sharpest American critic to date, recently concluded that \"the errors [of Nineteenth-Century Music] reveal a systemic failure. Dahlhaus's central vision is so pervasive that it tends to misrepresent or demean the music it treats.\"2 These are serious charges, and they will take some time to assess. To be sure, \"central vision\" is the dominating factor of the Dahlhaus 19th-Century Music XIV/3 (Spring 1991). ? by the Regents of the University of California.

The Dahlhaus Project and Its Extra-Musicological Sources

Chopin cuts a curious figure in contemporary culture. A Pole working among Frenchmen, he exudes exoticism even as he partakes of European tradition. A male composer who wrote in "feminine" genres like the nocturne for domestic settings such as the salon, he confuses our sense of the boundaries of gender. Central to our repertory, he nevertheless remains a marginalized figure. The complex and unsettling status of Chopin in our culture - what it means and how it came about - is Jeffrey Kallberg's subject in this book. Combining social history, literary theory, musicology and feminist thought, "Chopin at the Boundaries" situates Chopin's music historically within his native Polish and adopted French cultures and to demonstrate the effects of these historical constructions on present experience. "Raphaelesque", "an airy apparition", "small fairy voices sighing under silver bells" - these and other ethereal images were conferred on Chopin's music in his lifetime, all of them evoking notions of the feminine in the minds of contemporary listeners. Why this was - how Chopin, well before the late-19th century, came to be seen as a "woman's composer" - what this might have to do with Chopin's own somewhat marginal sexual identity, and what it can tell us about constructions of gender at the time are central concerns of this book. Kallberg also shows how the nocturne as a genre became freighted with ideological significance and, focusing on the Polonaise-Fantasy, the "last" Mazurka, and the Preludes, examines certain social constructions that should figure in our understanding of Chopin's compositional methods and purposes. Kallberg's approach to the composer reveals a new Chopin, one situated precisely where questions of gender open up into the very important question of genre.

Chopin at the Boundaries: Sex, History, and Musical Genre

IN THE FLOURISHING BUT fledgling literature on constructions of gender in music, instrumental music reposes in relative neglect. Guided by the premise that, in Teresa de Lauretis's words, "gender is both a sociocultural construct and a semiotic apparatus, a system of representation which assigns meaning ... to individuals within the society,"' and nourished by theoretical models developed by critics of literature, art, and film, music historians have most readily explored the ramifications of gender in opera and song. The attraction is obvious. Gender may initially be broached through the semantic content of the text, which then serves as a kind of lens through which is filtered the critic's reading of the music. Instrumental music, on the other hand, poses its ever familiar quandary: lacking an evident semantic content, it would seem to stymie efforts to understand "systems of representation" at work within it. Music historians have shied away from trying to recover and explicate these gendered systems partly because the idea that instrumental music occupies an autonomous realm still remains a powerful ideological force in the discipline. Those of us who would seek to lessen the stranglehold of this ideology on modern critical discourse encounter particular difficulties. We might recognize that the language of formalist musical criticism-a twentieth-century stepchild of the aesthetics of autonomy-does not adequately serve the purposes of an inquiry into gender.2 But shorn of this customary prop, we face an apparent conceptual void, for the ideology of autonomy still seems to command our linguistic possibilities. How can we speak of gender when constrained by the analytical demands of "the music itself"? The few efforts to treat gender in instrumental music all seem most awkward precisely when discussion shifts from feminism to traditional musical analysis. We can trace this sense of incongruity primarily to an implicit dissonance between the aims of the two systems of thought. The vocabularies of musical analysiswhether they label harmonic and contrapuntal processes, detect Schenkerian Urlinien, or identify pitch-class sets-typically represent implicit or explicit distillations of individual viewpoints, usually those of a composer, analyst, or "ideal" listener. (And assertions that these analyses are or were generally perceived by

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2928597.pdf

The Harmony of the Tea Table: Gender and Ideology in the Piano Nocturne

Chopin was a master of small forms. Few beliefs more centrally govern modern perceptions of Chopin than this one. It supports not only the myriad manifestations of his high stature in our culture (performances and critical analyses alike can be read as endorsements of the composer's extraordinary skill at miniatures), but also the occasional barbs that are thrown his way (some writers profess a complementary axiom that mastery of large forms eluded him). But while the centrality of this belief may lend it the appearance of a timeless truth, it seems instead that the meaning of its fundamental term, form , has altered substantially over the past century and a half. When we unreflectively discuss form in Chopin's music as if its intent were self-evident, we therefore at least to some degree misrepresent its significance to his culture. All of us – pianists and amateur enthusiasts as well as musicologists – need to be aware of this disjunction between past and present: before we can probe aspects of form in Chopin's miniatures, we need to explore some of the ways in which the ideas of form and (to a lesser extent) smallness were construed in the first half of the nineteenth century. That these explorations can have very practical applications I hope to show in the second portion of my essay, which will focus on Chopin's smallest forms, the preludes.

Small ‘forms’: in defence of the prelude

Chopin published many of his works in sets of two or more, and with increasing frequency both writers and performers assert that these sets should ideally be played integrally, rather than treated only as gatherings from which one should select individual works. Though the practice has currency, its propriety remains untested: modern attitudes have been shaped by intuition rather than by investigation. The matter deserves scrutiny, not only because it addresses an interesting aspect of performing practice, but more importantly because it illuminates a larger issue: the degree to which Chopin shared the contemporary fascination with drawing together by musical means the various movements, numbers or parts of sonatas, symphonies, concertos, operas or other works published together under one heading. Brevity characterizes the works gathered in sets. Chopin published groups of Mazurkas, Nocturnes, Etudes, Preludes, Polonaises and Waltzes (occasionally he issued works of these types singly as well).' That short works ordinarily came to be released in sets rather than individually may reflect financial concerns. Publishers may have thought one Mazurka, Nocturne, or Etude too brief to justify publication on its own; production and marketing costs for a single, short work might have exceeded the returns that could be garnered from what would necessarily have been a low selling price, or perhaps experience had shown that sales to the public of two or more brief works were greater than those for individual short compositions. (Unfortunately I know of no documentation to support these speculations. la) Whatever the original reason for gathering together several works under one opus number, Chopin took the responsibility of ordering the works himself, hence the question remains whether any artistic purpose was served

Jeffrey Kallberg

Papers

Chopin at the Boundaries: Sex, History, and Musical Genre

The Rhetoric of Genre: Chopin's Nocturne in G Minor

The Harmony of the Tea Table: Gender and Ideology in the Piano Nocturne

Small ‘forms’: in defence of the prelude

Compatibility in Chopin's Multipartite Publications