The Humanities and Arts Research Centre at Royal Holloway University of London (HARC)
and the School of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures at Royal Holloway University of London
Event Date: Friday 11 June, 2010 – 10am-6pm
The Boardroom, 2 Gower Street, London
Unsettling Scores: A Study Day on French Musico-Poetics from Banville to Duras
Organised by Dr Claire Launchbury (e-mail)
Abstract: Encounters with music and the musical in French cultural practice are marked by their difficulty. Music is found to be an impenetrable, mysterious, and evasive art that confounds meaning in its multiplicity and subsequent resistance to firm conclusion. By highlighting problems such as listening, particularly in terms of entendre which carries with it a sense of understanding, we ask what music might be heard to encode; how we might fail to account for it with wrong metaphors, or how music transfigures meaning in a way that is impossible to render due justice in discourse. The study day brings together a selection of papers that each in their own way work in a theoretical field of words and music studies outlined particularly in the work of Jankélévitch, Lawrence Kramer, Peter Dayan and Malcolm Bowie to explore the different perspectives on the boundaries between textual practices and their engagement with music in French literary culture.
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Claire Launchbury (RHUL)
Douleurs Exquises :Tears, Telephones and Music transgressed in Cocteau/Poulenc, La Voix humaine, and Duras, La Musica deuxième” (AUDIO HERE)
(AUDIO NOT AVAILABLE)
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