Music, madness, and the unworking of language

"In this study, John T. Hamilton investigates how literary, philosophical, and psychological treatments of music and madness challenge the limits of representation and thereby create a crisis of language. He builds his theses around the decidedly autobiographical impulse of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Here, musical experience and mental disturbance disrupt the expression of referential thought, illuminating irreducible aspects of the self before language can work them back into a discursive system." "Hamilton begins in the 1750s with Diderot's Neveu de Rameau, situating the text in relation to Rousseau's reflections on the voice and the burgeoning discipline of musical aesthetics. Tracing the link between music and madness in the work of Herder, Hegel, Wackenroder, and Kleist, Hamilton then turns his attention to E.T.A. Hoffmann, whose writings in the first decades of the nineteenth century accumulate and qualify the preceding tradition. Throughout, Hamilton considers the particular representations that connect music and madness, investigating the underlying motives, preconceptions, and ideological premises facilitating the association of these two domains." "The gap between sensation and its verbal representation proved especially problematic for romantic writers concerned with the ineffability of selfhood. Authors who engaged in self-representation necessarily faced problems of language, which compromised the uniqueness they wished to express. Music and madness unworked the generalizing functions of language and marked a critical limit in linguistic capabilities. However, as Hamilton demonstrates, although various conflicts between music, madness, and language questioned the visibility of signification, they also raised the possibility of producing meaning beyond signification."--Jacket.