Arts of Incompletion: Fragments in Words and Music (Word and Music Studies, 18)

Incompletion is an essential condition of cultural history, and particularly the idea of the fragment became a central element of Romantic art. Through its resistance to classicist ideals it continued being of high relevance to the various strands of modernist and contemporary aesthetics. The fourteen essays in this volume, based on the 2017 Stockholm conference of the International Association for Word and Music Studies (WMA), for the first time address incompletion in a wide range of literary and musical texts, from Baudelaire and Flaubert through Tolstoy and Henry James to Bachmann, Jelinek and Janet Frame, from Nietzsche and Chopin through Russolo and Puccini to Rihm and Kurtàg. Two further essays deal with topical general issues in the field of word and music studies.

Contributors:

Delia da Sousa Correa, The Open University, United Kingdom.
Peter Dayan, The University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom.
Ivan Delazari, HSE University in St. Petersburg, Russia.
Rolf J. Goebel, The University of Alabama, USA.
Michael Halliwell, The University of Sydney, Australia.
Christin Hoene, Maastricht University, The Netherlands.
Ruth Jacobs, The University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom.
Lawrence Kramer, Fordham University, USA.
Bernhard Kuhn, Bucknell University, USA.
Margaret Miner, The University of Illinois Chicago, USA.
Beate Schirrmacher, Linnaeus University, Sweden.
David Francis Urrows, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong.
Laura Vattano, The University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom.
Erik Wallrup, Stockholm University, Sweden.
Werner Wolf, University of Graz, Austria.

Walter Bernhart is retired Professor of English Literature, University of Graz; he was long-term President of the International Association for Word and Music Studies (WMA) and is executive editor of Word and Music Studies (WMS). His collected essays on literature and music were published in 2015.

Axel Englund is Professor of Literature and Wallenberg Academy Fellow at the Department of Culture and Aesthetics, Stockholm University. He is the author of Deviant Opera: Sex, Power, and Perversion on Stage (2020) and Still Songs: Music In and Around the Poetry of Paul Celan (2012).