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On the list
(2022)
This essay presents some thoughts about lists and draws on a range of material, from Lauren Berlant to George Perec. It acts as an introduction to a series of short meditations on individual instances of listing. Usually presented in a sequence and assembled according to some practical or conceptual necessity, lists offer the promise, perhaps the illusion, of keeping track, of bringing control to the flux of things and thoughts, of putting confusion to a halt. They relate to reduction in two ways: first, as a quantitative reduction - as a form of making smaller or less; and second, as a qualitative reduction - as a form of condensation to the most salient data.
The article investigates tonal, thematic, and textural aspects of sonata form in the movement structures of twenty-six symphonies from the 1730s and early-1740s by the Italian composer Antonio Brioschi (active ca. 1725–ca. 1750). It discusses expository events as well as aspects of development and recapitulation of the musical material. In addition, the article provides an account of the major eighteenth-century manuscript source of the works—a French collection known as Fonds Blancheton—and considers some general stylistic characteristics of the music.
This article investigates the function and reality of language in Niklas Luhmann's systems theory. How can one interpret the systems-theoretical assumption that language is based on communication? Luhmann describes language as a dynamic media/form relationship, which is able to couple the social and psychological system. This structural coupling, which constructs consciousness and language as two autonomous systems, raises problems if one defines language from a cognitive point of view. This article discusses these problems and aims to develop assumptions and questions within the systems-theoretical approach.
Repetition
(2019)
Serial texts must repeat, so that they can be recognized, but they must also change, so that they can remain interesting. Unusual temporal manipulations can emerge in such texts in order to balance these contradictory demands. This essay studies two serial texts whose need for self-extension produces a suspension of historical time: the contemporary animated sitcom "The Simpsons", and medieval romance as theorized by the twelfth-century poet Wace. I suggest that we might name this temporal constraint fiction.
Resolution
(2019)
Many parodies operate through temporal strategies that distort the narrative proportions of their targets. This essay discusses two texts that manipulate time for parodic purposes: the contemporary animated sitcom "Bojack Horseman" and the twelfth-century romance "Ipomedon". Their shared method involves the absurd prolongation of narrative structures of resolution and satisfaction in order to reveal these structures' arbitrary nature. But this method, in turn, shows that resolution - a retrospective determination of shape and meaning - can never be avoided entirely, even if it can be deferred.