Robert Johnson’s “Terraplane Blues” was a modest hit for the newly recorded bluesman. Notable mus... more Robert Johnson’s “Terraplane Blues” was a modest hit for the newly recorded bluesman. Notable musically for its elaborate intertwining rhythms and disjointed sections, interpretations of the song have revolved around its lyrical double entendres, which equate a woman to a car to discuss her infidelity and the narrator’s resultant inability to arouse or satisfy his partner sexually. Although the car in the title has been identified as a Hudson model, scant attention has been paid to the sociocultural significance of cars in the Mississippi Delta in the late 1930s.
Choderlos de Laclos’ novel, Les liaisons dangereuses, entices readers to transgress a boundary by... more Choderlos de Laclos’ novel, Les liaisons dangereuses, entices readers to transgress a boundary by offering confidential letters exchanged between libertines and their victims to a reading public. Even within the universe of the novel, confidential letters are intercepted and read in order to exert power and manipulate others. Recognizing the late eighteenth century and the cyber age as periods of historical transition, I read Les liaisons dangereuses as a cautionary tale about the uses of electronic communication in the context of an institutional setting such as a research university. Within the setting of the research university, confidential correspondence also circulates in ways that reinforce power, hierarchy and privilege. Questions about what is public and what is private, what is privileged and what is not, haunt Laclos’ novel, as they haunt us today. Reading Les liaisons dangereuses in light of social media, hacking and legal concepts of privileged communication yields fruitful lessons about the politics of our self-delusions concerning our private lives. Most importantly, thinking about the way in which the eighteenth-century novel stages relations of knowledge, power and critical insight in the context of breaches of confidentiality sheds light on the trade-offs between control and freedom, privilege and open-access that color our understanding of electronic communications and vulnerability today.
Spontaneity, immediacy and feeling characterize the blues as a genre. Whether it's the movement o... more Spontaneity, immediacy and feeling characterize the blues as a genre. Whether it's the movement of call and response, the expressive bends and wails of voice and instruments or the synergistic relationship between audience and performers, the blues embody a kind of "living in the moment" aesthetic. At the same time, the blues genre has always responded in a unique way to its historical moment, its formal characteristics, figures, and devices constantly emerging from--and speaking to--the social relations emanating from Jim Crow segregation, sharecropping, racist violence, and migration.
Insurance, and specifically life insurance, seems like an odd topic for the blues. Associated wit... more Insurance, and specifically life insurance, seems like an odd topic for the blues. Associated with urbanism and capitalism, the theme contests an understanding of the blues as an "authentic" expression of a rural folk culture. Focusing on a cluster of blues songs that reference life insurance reveals the consciousness of a long history of racialized exploitation and discrimination, including the everyday experiences associated with it. The representation of insurance in the blues also provides a window into polysemic modes of signifying and subtle forms of resistance. 1 Recognizing the potential for insurance to function as fertile lyrical subject matter for messages of resistance or struggle requires excavating its long, racialized history extending back to the antebellum world.
This chapter interrogates the construction of narrative out of lyrical and musical fragments and ... more This chapter interrogates the construction of narrative out of lyrical and musical fragments and scenes. Tracing displacements and condensations in the blues reveals a metonymic structure underpinning narrative articulations. Close examination of the contexts of reception—including the minstrel show, the juke joint, and most especially the print advertising of race record labels—unearths a system that guides listeners to construct narrative cohesion out of fragments and pieces. Analyzing Charley Patton’s “High Water Everywhere,” Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “Competition Bed Blues,” and Robert Johnson’s “Hellhound on my Trail” uncovers an unstable oscillation between synchronic and diachronic understandings of time that is foregrounded by the blues’ fundamentally fragmentary structure.
Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics, 2022
Blues has been used as a term to designate a broad musical category, in addition to an aesthetic ... more Blues has been used as a term to designate a broad musical category, in addition to an aesthetic that includes the visual arts and literature. Reasserting the significance of the blues as a form of Black vernacular music grounds the idea of a blues aesthetic in both a specific history and a performance practice. The genre was shaped by racialized socioeconomic conditions that influenced its formal and stylistic components. As a key feature of the blues, repetition delimits a field of creative activity. Despite formal and stylistic constraints, the blues models resistance to domination aesthetically, as the genre challenges the idea of the work of art as a fixed product. Valorizing process, the blues models a practice of resistance to domination using repetition with a difference as a form of agency.
ABSTRACT:Choderlos de Laclos' novel, Les liaisons dangereuses, entices readers to transgress ... more ABSTRACT:Choderlos de Laclos' novel, Les liaisons dangereuses, entices readers to transgress a boundary by offering confidential letters exchanged between libertines and their victims to a reading public. Even within the universe of the novel, confidential letters are intercepted and read in order to exert power and manipulate others. Recognizing the late eighteenth century and the cyber age as periods of historical transition, I read Les liaisons dangereuses as a cautionary tale about the uses of electronic communication in the context of an institutional setting such as a research university. Within the setting of the research university, confidential correspondence also circulates in ways that reinforce power, hierarchy and privilege. Questions about what is public and what is private, what is privileged and what is not, haunt Laclos' novel, as they haunt us today. Reading Les liaisons dangereuses in light of social media, hacking and legal concepts of privileged communic...
Beyond Contractual Morality Ethics, Law, and Literature in Eighteenth-Century France In recent ye... more Beyond Contractual Morality Ethics, Law, and Literature in Eighteenth-Century France In recent years, in the context of pluralistic democracies, liberal political theory has come under attack from all sides. Feminists, radicals, communitarians, and conservatives alike have been ...
Time in the Blues presents an interdisciplinary analysis of the specific forms of temporality pro... more Time in the Blues presents an interdisciplinary analysis of the specific forms of temporality produced by and reflected in the blues. Often described as immediate, spontaneous, and intense, the blues focus on the present moment, creating an experience of time for both performer and listener that is inflected by the material conditions that gave rise to the genre. Examining time as it is represented, enacted, and experienced through the blues engages questions concerning how material conditions in the early twentieth century shaped a musical genre. The formal characteristics of the blues—ostinato patterns, cyclical changes, improvisation, call and response—emerge from and speak to economic, social, and political relations under Jim Crow segregation. A close examination of the structuring of time under sharecropping, convict lease, and migration reveals their significance to aesthetic constraints in the blues. Likewise, contexts and frames of reception, such as traveling shows, advert...
This chapter delves into the ways in which sharecropping, as a ubiquitous structuring principle i... more This chapter delves into the ways in which sharecropping, as a ubiquitous structuring principle in the Jim Crow South, affected the perception and understanding of time, particularly for sharecroppers. Uncovering the simultaneous evocation of cyclical, vectored, and punctual forms of time in the blues reveals the radical effect that disparate yet interrelated conceptions of time have on the perception of agency. A close reading of Bumble Bee Slim’s “Fattening Frogs for Snakes” highlights the economic subtext of exploitation shaped by the temporal forms associated with sharecropping as they manifest themselves in form and content. This and other songs point to the ways in which time, as it was experienced under sharecropping, came to be reflected and represented in the blues, both formally and lyrically.
The final chapter addresses the temporality of a genre based on tradition. Working from conceptio... more The final chapter addresses the temporality of a genre based on tradition. Working from conceptions of tradition gleaned from the epic and historical chronicle, and of modern anxieties about the weight of the past, reveals a resonating, vibrant, multi-temporal field for the blues that employs meta-textual references to the tradition to create ironic distance. Tracing the genealogy of a riff from Robert Johnson’s “If I Had Possession Over Judgment Day” to Muddy Waters’s “Rollin’ and Tumblin’, ” through to Nick Moss and the Flip Tops’ “The Money I Make” reveals the dynamic forms of temporal simultaneity that define the blues as a genre. An investigation of improvisation foregrounds the historical rootedness of all creative expression, while the necessary interplay between tradition and reception enables a final interrogation of the relationship between individual and community in the blues.
Rousseau's strategic placement of the question of water diversion within his corpus signals t... more Rousseau's strategic placement of the question of water diversion within his corpus signals the importance of controlling the natural environment. For Rousseau, water diversion is important not only for the survival of the species, but also for providing an opportunity for communal effort and ethical and aesthetic experience. This essay analyzes passages from Rousseau's Confessions, Essai sur l'origine des langues
Page 1. NATURAL FREEDOM AND MORAL AUTONOMY: EMILE AS PARENT, TEACHER AND CITIZEN Julia Simon Je s... more Page 1. NATURAL FREEDOM AND MORAL AUTONOMY: EMILE AS PARENT, TEACHER AND CITIZEN Julia Simon Je suis trop pénétré de la grandeur des devoirs d'un précepteur, et je sens trop mon incapacité, pour accepter jamais un pareil emploi de quelque ...
Robert Johnson’s “Terraplane Blues” was a modest hit for the newly recorded bluesman. Notable mus... more Robert Johnson’s “Terraplane Blues” was a modest hit for the newly recorded bluesman. Notable musically for its elaborate intertwining rhythms and disjointed sections, interpretations of the song have revolved around its lyrical double entendres, which equate a woman to a car to discuss her infidelity and the narrator’s resultant inability to arouse or satisfy his partner sexually. Although the car in the title has been identified as a Hudson model, scant attention has been paid to the sociocultural significance of cars in the Mississippi Delta in the late 1930s.
Choderlos de Laclos’ novel, Les liaisons dangereuses, entices readers to transgress a boundary by... more Choderlos de Laclos’ novel, Les liaisons dangereuses, entices readers to transgress a boundary by offering confidential letters exchanged between libertines and their victims to a reading public. Even within the universe of the novel, confidential letters are intercepted and read in order to exert power and manipulate others. Recognizing the late eighteenth century and the cyber age as periods of historical transition, I read Les liaisons dangereuses as a cautionary tale about the uses of electronic communication in the context of an institutional setting such as a research university. Within the setting of the research university, confidential correspondence also circulates in ways that reinforce power, hierarchy and privilege. Questions about what is public and what is private, what is privileged and what is not, haunt Laclos’ novel, as they haunt us today. Reading Les liaisons dangereuses in light of social media, hacking and legal concepts of privileged communication yields fruitful lessons about the politics of our self-delusions concerning our private lives. Most importantly, thinking about the way in which the eighteenth-century novel stages relations of knowledge, power and critical insight in the context of breaches of confidentiality sheds light on the trade-offs between control and freedom, privilege and open-access that color our understanding of electronic communications and vulnerability today.
Spontaneity, immediacy and feeling characterize the blues as a genre. Whether it's the movement o... more Spontaneity, immediacy and feeling characterize the blues as a genre. Whether it's the movement of call and response, the expressive bends and wails of voice and instruments or the synergistic relationship between audience and performers, the blues embody a kind of "living in the moment" aesthetic. At the same time, the blues genre has always responded in a unique way to its historical moment, its formal characteristics, figures, and devices constantly emerging from--and speaking to--the social relations emanating from Jim Crow segregation, sharecropping, racist violence, and migration.
Insurance, and specifically life insurance, seems like an odd topic for the blues. Associated wit... more Insurance, and specifically life insurance, seems like an odd topic for the blues. Associated with urbanism and capitalism, the theme contests an understanding of the blues as an "authentic" expression of a rural folk culture. Focusing on a cluster of blues songs that reference life insurance reveals the consciousness of a long history of racialized exploitation and discrimination, including the everyday experiences associated with it. The representation of insurance in the blues also provides a window into polysemic modes of signifying and subtle forms of resistance. 1 Recognizing the potential for insurance to function as fertile lyrical subject matter for messages of resistance or struggle requires excavating its long, racialized history extending back to the antebellum world.
This chapter interrogates the construction of narrative out of lyrical and musical fragments and ... more This chapter interrogates the construction of narrative out of lyrical and musical fragments and scenes. Tracing displacements and condensations in the blues reveals a metonymic structure underpinning narrative articulations. Close examination of the contexts of reception—including the minstrel show, the juke joint, and most especially the print advertising of race record labels—unearths a system that guides listeners to construct narrative cohesion out of fragments and pieces. Analyzing Charley Patton’s “High Water Everywhere,” Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “Competition Bed Blues,” and Robert Johnson’s “Hellhound on my Trail” uncovers an unstable oscillation between synchronic and diachronic understandings of time that is foregrounded by the blues’ fundamentally fragmentary structure.
Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics, 2022
Blues has been used as a term to designate a broad musical category, in addition to an aesthetic ... more Blues has been used as a term to designate a broad musical category, in addition to an aesthetic that includes the visual arts and literature. Reasserting the significance of the blues as a form of Black vernacular music grounds the idea of a blues aesthetic in both a specific history and a performance practice. The genre was shaped by racialized socioeconomic conditions that influenced its formal and stylistic components. As a key feature of the blues, repetition delimits a field of creative activity. Despite formal and stylistic constraints, the blues models resistance to domination aesthetically, as the genre challenges the idea of the work of art as a fixed product. Valorizing process, the blues models a practice of resistance to domination using repetition with a difference as a form of agency.
ABSTRACT:Choderlos de Laclos' novel, Les liaisons dangereuses, entices readers to transgress ... more ABSTRACT:Choderlos de Laclos' novel, Les liaisons dangereuses, entices readers to transgress a boundary by offering confidential letters exchanged between libertines and their victims to a reading public. Even within the universe of the novel, confidential letters are intercepted and read in order to exert power and manipulate others. Recognizing the late eighteenth century and the cyber age as periods of historical transition, I read Les liaisons dangereuses as a cautionary tale about the uses of electronic communication in the context of an institutional setting such as a research university. Within the setting of the research university, confidential correspondence also circulates in ways that reinforce power, hierarchy and privilege. Questions about what is public and what is private, what is privileged and what is not, haunt Laclos' novel, as they haunt us today. Reading Les liaisons dangereuses in light of social media, hacking and legal concepts of privileged communic...
Beyond Contractual Morality Ethics, Law, and Literature in Eighteenth-Century France In recent ye... more Beyond Contractual Morality Ethics, Law, and Literature in Eighteenth-Century France In recent years, in the context of pluralistic democracies, liberal political theory has come under attack from all sides. Feminists, radicals, communitarians, and conservatives alike have been ...
Time in the Blues presents an interdisciplinary analysis of the specific forms of temporality pro... more Time in the Blues presents an interdisciplinary analysis of the specific forms of temporality produced by and reflected in the blues. Often described as immediate, spontaneous, and intense, the blues focus on the present moment, creating an experience of time for both performer and listener that is inflected by the material conditions that gave rise to the genre. Examining time as it is represented, enacted, and experienced through the blues engages questions concerning how material conditions in the early twentieth century shaped a musical genre. The formal characteristics of the blues—ostinato patterns, cyclical changes, improvisation, call and response—emerge from and speak to economic, social, and political relations under Jim Crow segregation. A close examination of the structuring of time under sharecropping, convict lease, and migration reveals their significance to aesthetic constraints in the blues. Likewise, contexts and frames of reception, such as traveling shows, advert...
This chapter delves into the ways in which sharecropping, as a ubiquitous structuring principle i... more This chapter delves into the ways in which sharecropping, as a ubiquitous structuring principle in the Jim Crow South, affected the perception and understanding of time, particularly for sharecroppers. Uncovering the simultaneous evocation of cyclical, vectored, and punctual forms of time in the blues reveals the radical effect that disparate yet interrelated conceptions of time have on the perception of agency. A close reading of Bumble Bee Slim’s “Fattening Frogs for Snakes” highlights the economic subtext of exploitation shaped by the temporal forms associated with sharecropping as they manifest themselves in form and content. This and other songs point to the ways in which time, as it was experienced under sharecropping, came to be reflected and represented in the blues, both formally and lyrically.
The final chapter addresses the temporality of a genre based on tradition. Working from conceptio... more The final chapter addresses the temporality of a genre based on tradition. Working from conceptions of tradition gleaned from the epic and historical chronicle, and of modern anxieties about the weight of the past, reveals a resonating, vibrant, multi-temporal field for the blues that employs meta-textual references to the tradition to create ironic distance. Tracing the genealogy of a riff from Robert Johnson’s “If I Had Possession Over Judgment Day” to Muddy Waters’s “Rollin’ and Tumblin’, ” through to Nick Moss and the Flip Tops’ “The Money I Make” reveals the dynamic forms of temporal simultaneity that define the blues as a genre. An investigation of improvisation foregrounds the historical rootedness of all creative expression, while the necessary interplay between tradition and reception enables a final interrogation of the relationship between individual and community in the blues.
Rousseau's strategic placement of the question of water diversion within his corpus signals t... more Rousseau's strategic placement of the question of water diversion within his corpus signals the importance of controlling the natural environment. For Rousseau, water diversion is important not only for the survival of the species, but also for providing an opportunity for communal effort and ethical and aesthetic experience. This essay analyzes passages from Rousseau's Confessions, Essai sur l'origine des langues
Page 1. NATURAL FREEDOM AND MORAL AUTONOMY: EMILE AS PARENT, TEACHER AND CITIZEN Julia Simon Je s... more Page 1. NATURAL FREEDOM AND MORAL AUTONOMY: EMILE AS PARENT, TEACHER AND CITIZEN Julia Simon Je suis trop pénétré de la grandeur des devoirs d'un précepteur, et je sens trop mon incapacité, pour accepter jamais un pareil emploi de quelque ...
The myth of the deal with the devil at the crossroads frames the reception of Robert Johnson'... more The myth of the deal with the devil at the crossroads frames the reception of Robert Johnson's corpus, particularly lyrics that directly or indirectly reference otherworldly forces. Setting aside the myth, I analyse the uncanny sonic qualities in his performances that evoke a spectral presence. A close examination of vocal and guitar timbre that considers harmonic resonance, chimera effect and other ‘eerie’ qualities of the music breaks down musical elements other than lyrics that evoke the myth of supernatural power. Humming, mumbling and talking, corner loading, falsetto, simultaneous rhythm and lead, among other acoustic effects, contribute to a complex soundscape with spectral resonances. Taking a lead from Johnson's mentor Ike Zimmerman and his fondness for practising in the cemetery, my analysis of timbral quality informed by Freud's concept of the uncanny seeks to explore what we hear, how it is produced and the origin that we construct for the sounds.
The myth of the deal with the devil at the crossroads frames the reception of Robert Johnson's co... more The myth of the deal with the devil at the crossroads frames the reception of Robert Johnson's corpus, particularly lyrics that directly or indirectly reference otherworldly forces. Setting aside the myth, I analyse the uncanny sonic qualities in his performances that evoke a spectral presence. A close examination of vocal and guitar timbre that considers harmonic resonance, chimera effect and other 'eerie' qualities of the music breaks down musical elements other than lyrics that evoke the myth of supernatural power. Humming, mumbling and talking, corner loading, falsetto, simultaneous rhythm and lead, among other acoustic effects, contribute to a complex soundscape with spectral resonances. Taking a lead from Johnson's mentor Ike Zimmerman and his fondness for practising in the cemetery, my analysis of timbral quality informed by Freud's concept of the uncanny seeks to explore what we hear, how it is produced and the origin that we construct for the sounds.
Rousseau's Emile ou de l'education proposes a "natural education," one intend... more Rousseau's Emile ou de l'education proposes a "natural education," one intended to yield a "natural man." Throughout most of that education--up until adolescence, at least--Emile spends the majority of his time alone. Even the preceptor represents a non-presence at best, ...
Reading Rousseau’s conversion narratives as a deliberate strategy aimed at imposing unity on his ... more Reading Rousseau’s conversion narratives as a deliberate strategy aimed at imposing unity on his thought, and using them as an analytical tool, Martin Stern explores the richness, complexity, and centrality of Rousseau’s reflections on music for his corpus. Stern meticulously traces the evolution of Rousseau’s thought about music, undermining his a posteriori narrative constructions of sudden conversion — the ‘illumination de Vincennes’ or the experience at the Venice opera — to unpack the tensions that underpin the slow development of his mature musical theory. Instead, he understands the preference for Italian over French music as a kind of determining judgement that conditioned choices and, ultimately, led to irresolvable contradictions in Rousseau’s music theory and philosophy of music. Sterns sees the evolution of his musical thought as a laboratory or matrix for his philosophical explorations, moving from reflection about national styles (French versus Italian) and physico-mat...
Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century Norwich, 2004
RefDoc, THE reference in scientific document supply / Refdoc, la référence en fourniture de docum... more RefDoc, THE reference in scientific document supply / Refdoc, la référence en fourniture de documents scientifiques ...
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