Herbert Lindenberger

On Wordsworth's Prelude

A significant critique which does not seek to propound a thesis but to illuminate a single major literary work from a number of points of view. Wordsworths book-length poem--the work he considered his realization of his powers--is treated in all its freshness as a work of living literature.

Opera in history : from Monteverdi to Cage

Looking at operatic history from new and unexpected angles, this book examines the ways the operatic canon has been reshaped at key moments in the history of the form. Written with clarity and wit, it provides a richly rewarding experience for operagoers and scholars alike. Opera in History examines the achievements of composers such as Monteverdi, Handel, and Rossini, whose operas were long neglected because of changes in performance practices, audience tastes, and musical aesthetics. It also looks at such well-established works as Wagner s Ring and Verdi s Aida in unconventional ways. Thus, the Ring emerges as a product of nineteenth-century philology, Aida, as an embodiment of the new science of archaeology.

Presidential Address 1997: Teaching and the Making of Knowledge

last three centuries. I T HAS BEEN at once an honor and a challenge to serve for the past three years as an officer of this venerable though not quite universally venerated organization. These have not been easy times for our profession. We have labored within a job system that privileges a few, that relegates all too many dedicated scholars and teachers to work in which they cannot develop their full intellectual potential, and that refuses year after year to improve. Compounded with this, we have faced the continuing need to reassure a public skeptical about the humanities that we have something vital and necessary to offer the students of North America. My object in this address is neither to bemoan the unfavorable climate within which we have worked in recent years nor to voice false encouragement that we can recapture the growth rate and the accompanying optimism that, as the older ones among us still remember, marked the academic world for a brief while a long generation ago. Rather, I take this occasion to suggest a wider-range view of what we are doing-first, to examine the roles in which we cast ourselves within the academic institution and, in the second part of this talk, to redefine the relation of teaching to the making of knowledge within this institutional framework. For those of us who teach, the professional life we know took shape soon after the Second World War with the emergence of governmentfunded research in the natural and some of the social sciences. This was a world in which great scientific discoveries could regularly be expecteddiscoveries that, so went the rationale, could improve the quality of life for vast numbers of people and gain prestige for a country locked in cold battle with a distant enemy. We are all familiar with the spectacle: laboratories constantly in need of new facilities; senior professors busily courting the funding agencies that enabled the continued growth of these laboratories. Even if our field did not directly participate in this project (except to provide service courses, along with some liberal arts enrichment to stu-

Georg Trakl and Rimbaud: A Study in Influence and Development

VEN IF Rimbaud had not influenced Trakl, there would be obvious parallels between the two poets. Both came from respectable provincial families, and both rebelled against their middle-class background. In their addiction to drugs, their sexual deviations, and their inability to feel at home even in the literary community, their lives are obvious models of the poete maudit. Moreover, both experienced a short, intense period of creative activity followed by a sudden breaksuicide in one case, the abandonment of literature in the other. However, such comparisons are scarcely meaningful except as a part of some larger investigation in, say, the sociology of literature. For a more directly literary comparison, one could cite their common use of themes such as childhood and metropolitan life and the voyant concept (explicit in Rimbaud, implicit in Trakls prophetic tone and in the figures of seer and magician who appear in his poetry) that underlies their work. But more significant than parallels of personality or theme is a parallel in poetic technique-technique in its widest sense, as an expression of sensibility and as a qualification and definition of theme. For, despite the fact that the revolutionary elements in Trakls work have not been acclaimed as have those in Rimbaud, the technical achievements of the two poets are part of a single chapter in the history of European literary styles. A mere listing of techniques common to them would afford us some insight into the manner in which modern poetry developed from traditional forms. But comparison need not stop here; there is evidence of a decisive influence of one poet upon tlhe other, and we are thus given a unique opportunity to observe the waycomparable to the influence of Laforgue on Pound and Eliot-in which the technical innovations of one literature were adopted in another. Not that Rimbauds influence on Trakl has remained unknown all

Anti-theatricality in Twentieth-Century Opera

An anti-theatrical opera would seem to be a contradiction in terms. Theatricality, after all, suggests an exaggerated perspective on what we take to be reality, a certain inauthenticity that, as Jonas Barish demonstrated in his magisterial book The Antitheatrical Prejudice, has been an issue within Western thought since its beginnings. The term operatic implies the exaggeration of a theatrical stance already assumed to be exaggerated. Thus, an opera that questions the nature and value of theatricality would seem to put enormous constraints on composers and performers, not to speak of audiences eager to experience the enactment of those high emotions that they would not dare to reveal in their everyday lives.