James L. Rolleston, Duke University

The rise of Western music to its 19 th -century heights was interwoven with its new meanings for philosophy and literature. To the German Romantics “song” evoked the deep past, the dream of a coherent world, as well as the authentic history encoded in folksongs. For ETA Hoffmann, reviewing an early performance of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, the abstract intensity of symphonic music raised it above all other art-forms; Schopenhauer then argues that music is a representation of the primal Will, or life-force. Purity, power, comprehensiveness: these imagined qualities impel both literary images of music and the actual ambitions of composers. We will read texts by Novalis, Eichendorff and Hoffmann; then focus on the “total works of art” of the later 19 th century: Tristan and Isolde , by Wagner (who died in Venice), and Verdi's Otello , set in Cyprus during the Venetian Empire. No prior musical knowledge is required.

The power of music is increasingly viewed by the early 20 th -century modernists as a social phenomenon shaping human dreams, discontents, even everyday self-understanding. We will read stories on this theme by Thomas Mann ( Tristan ), James Joyce ( The Dead ), Kafka, D'Annunzio, and Virginia Woolf. In the 1920s the social became radically political: we will study Alban Berg's Wozzeck both in its political immediacy and its relation to its source, an 1837 drama by Georg Büchner. And from the Italian 1920s comes the little known opera Doktor Faust , by Ferruccio Busoni, whose libretto is a consciously fragmented version of Goethe's Faust .

Evaluation
The class is a seminar, with active student participation essential. No prior musical knowledge or skills required. Writing expectations: a midterm essay (4-5 pp) analyzing a single work; and a final paper (10-12 pp) comparing at least 2 historically diverse texts. No exams.

James L. Rolleston BA in French and German (Cambridge), MA in German (Minnesota), PhD in German (Yale). Professor of German Literature at Duke. Member of the editorial board of the “German Quaterly”. Taught at Yale University. Was president of the Kafka Society of America and of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association. He is author of, among other things: Rilke in Transition: An Exploration of His Earliest Poetry, Yale University Press 1970 ; Kafka's Narrative Theater , Pennsylvania State University Press 1974 ; Narratives of Ecstasy: Romantic Temporality in Modern German Poetry, Wayne State University Press 1987. Edited Twentieth Century Interpretations of The Trial, Prentice-Hall 1976 ; Contemporary German Poetry , special issue of “Studies in Twentieth Century Literature”, Vol. 21, no. 1 (Winter 1997); A Companion to the Works of Franz Kafka , Camden House 2002. Translated: Walter Benjamin: An Intellectual Biography , by Bernd Witte. Wayne State University Press 1991; The New Trial , by Peter Weiss. Duke University Press 2001.