Through a combination of general reflections, studies of important
critics, and both comprehensive and specific analyses of cultural
change in literature, music, art, and philosophy, "Turning Points
"demonstrates the role of style and form in promoting and shaping
cultural development.
The book proposes that works do not timelessly abstract,
retrospectively reflect, or passively express; instead, they
promote and shape historical change. Moving rather than
consolidating, cultural expressions advance cultures not through
what they say (musical works, in particular, say nothing) but
through inventing new ways of communicating. Styles and forms are
the vessels imagined by cultural works to convey ideas, ideologies,
and structures of feeling and society. Hence, in contrast to much
recent work in cultural studies, "Turning Points "argues that works
of the imagination anticipate and produce the intellectual contexts
adduced to explain them.
The book offers new insights into both the theory and the practice
of cultural history by combining general meditations with studies
of representative theorists and of works and periods in movement.
Two framing chapters reflect on the constant flow of history as
guided by the energy of form. Of the remaining nine chapters (two
of which are previously unpublished), three chapters analyze
important theorists: the concept of style in the work of Hippolyte
Taine, expressive flux in the formalism of the art historian
Heinrich Wolfflin, and stylistic energy in the work of the Marxist
literary critic Jerome J. McGann.
Six critical studies sample works and periods ranging in time from
the Renaissance through modernism, with close readings of passages
and works by Coleridge, the neo-Latin poet Casimir Sarbiewski,
Kant, Descartes, Thomas Parnell, and Mozart, and general
considerations of style change in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries. In sum, "Turning Points" presents an interdisciplinary
perspective on the achievements of modern European culture that
blends fine-grained examples with broad considerations of both
intellectual history and trends in literary criticism.
General
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