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Central to the comparison between language and music is what Theodor Adorno termed a “wordless syntax,” such that the elements of a work of art might be held in relation to one another, rather than fixed relative to a static hierarchical form. In music, this syntax creates a tension between the expressive, voice-like aspects of melody, and the abstract, syntactical structures of harmony. The use of linguistic material further complicates the musical syntax, as there are multiple competing hierarchical structures at play. As an alternative to the word “hierarchy” in relation to musical form, the composer James Tenney offered “holarchy” as a replacement which sets elements in relation to one another, rather than to a fixed structure. The friction and instability created by multiple syntactical systems and the material nature of the music generates what I call in this dissertation holarchic flux.In addition to a theoretical overview of holarchic flux and its relation to language and music, this essay outlines a novel algorithm for interval and chord rationalization, using Tenney’s metric of harmonic distance. This essay also describes a number of compositions of mine, including a solo voice work How to Get There From Here and ensemble compositions We remember not the word, but the sound of the word, and Terrain, with regard to the concepts of holarchic flux and musical syntax.

This thesis explores a shift in the treatment of musical pastoralism by several English composers in the 1920s. The pastoral, whether literary or musical, carries with it connotations of tranquility, nostalgia, and idealism. In the early twentieth century, many composers in England became interested in their nation’s folksong revival, resulting in a musical idiom that often translated the expected affective connotations of the pastoral into their compositions. On the surface, these connotations seen to suggest a mode of expression antithetical to the goals of musical modernism. However, after the First World War, the composers analyzed in this thesis began to reformulate the techniques associated with musical pastoralism. By using Theodor Adorno’s lateness discourse as an interpretive framework, the writer shows how Frank Bridge, Gustav Holst, and Ralph Vaughan Williams fracture the conventions of the pastoral mode after the war, divorcing them from their expected relationships with teleological formal structures. This post-war pastoralism, rather than resting comfortably in the conventional associations of the pastoral, instead expresses the fragmentation and alienation of the subject in modernity. This reveals a striking critical distance, a distrust of the pastoral’s previous meanings, and a robust (yet subtle) manifestation of aesthetic modernism.

This thesis brings together writings of the critical theorist Theodor W. Adorno, and asks questions about the nature of mechanics and robotics within contemporary music. This is primarily situated in a standing collaboration I have with the composer and instrument-inventor Bryan Jacobs, in which we have developed a series of mechanical clarinets. Through readings of Adorno's Philosophy of New Music, Stravinsky: A Dialectical Portrait, The Form of the Phonograph, and Vers un musique informelle, I explore what the act of composing is with regards to these instruments, and how formerly a singular locus of composition has become articulated across multiple material locations. I explore different aspects of musical "writing" within the ecology of these instruments and their performing practice, I unpack the implications of the reckoning between a subjective breath and mechanical operation, and a subsequent antinomy of organic/mechanic that these instruments and the emergent vocabulary around these instruments imply. This thesis closes with two compositions of my own, that through rigorous and simple processes actuated over the course of three hours, ask in their own right questions about the human body mediated through a compositional mechanics.

This dissertation argues that foundational works of the English Renaissance, most notably the later books of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, proleptically model a key ambiguity in modern aesthetic theory concerning the work of art’s relation to external reality. On the one hand, these texts lay claim to a vital social efficacy, inserting themselves unmistakably into contemporary public controversy and holding out the possibility that imaginative literature could bring about a reformation of political subjectivity more radical and lasting than other forms of expression. On the other hand, the texts also fail to set forth a positive political program that could be translated from aesthetic experience to social activity. Instead, they train readers in a mode of cautious and attentive critical reflection, an interpretive agency that Spenser and others regard as the necessary precondition for enlightened praxis, but that falls short of—and, in many respects, actively complicates and confounds—a politics in itself. Such a critical disposition thus maintains a pre- or proto-political character, in which artistic experience becomes the simultaneously enabling and disabling condition for reformative social action. The project thus seeks to complicate the longstanding insistence, in early modern literary criticism, on the directly political character of artistic experience. Associating Renaissance literature with immediate didactic and ideological aims, in contradistinction to the putatively de-politicizing tendencies of post-Enlightenment art and aesthetic theory, historicist scholarship in recent decades has perpetuated a reductive narrative about the relationship between the aesthetic and the Real, one that an earlier tradition of Kantian and Marxist philosophy treats with greater subtlety. This dissertation analyzes Renaissance literature from just such a perspective, making the case for the semi-autonomy of The Faerie Queene from within an Adornian framework, and stressing the profound but attenuated relationship between the literary and the extra-literary in the early modern period. Through fine-grained analysis of Spenser’s Legends of Justice and Courtesy, alongside a number of related texts, I argue that the political and historical content of The Faerie Queene—and, by extension, any literary work of sufficient formal complexity and extra-textual ambition—is accessible only through an attentive engagement with the text at the level of the individual word. Such an analytical process, moreover, becomes both the mechanism for training subjects in the critical judgment necessary for redeemed political action, as well as a mode of deliberative caution that re-directs the concentrated urgency required for such action back into the patient work of literary analysis.

This dissertation focuses on what art in general and poetry in particular can reveal about sociopolitical history, and on the possible significance of such knowledge or understanding for human subjectivity and ethical-political agency. Following Marxian-inflected theory my claim is that the assumption that poetry and the other arts do not differ, first from already-conceptualized, purpose-driven thought, and then from actual action, is not only dangerously delusional, but also ignores the most radical potential of poetry. Poetry is an imaginative construction that is felt to be as if it were already an objective truth, als ob, in Kant's terms, but is in fact something not yet actually proven to be objective. This in turn makes aesthetic experience imaginatively and affectively available to us without the conceptual constraints that delimit objectively-oriented thought and action in the real, empirical world itself. It is in this sense that art allows for the activation of subjectivity and agency not already known and stipulated. More specifically, this dissertation identifies the role that Jewish poets ascribed to modern Hebrew and Yiddish poetry from a perspective wrought through a rich engagement with German literary culture. I show how both Yiddish and Hebrew modernist poetry provides and records unique evidence of historical experience. This study also examines how and why modern Hebrew Israeli poetry is haunted by the possibility that the newly established state of Israel might be moving away catastrophically from the imperative to achieve a genuinely democratic configuration. Finally, it examines how and why this legacy of critical examination of the sociopolitical reality still suffuses the aesthetic vocations of Israeli poetry today. This project follows three main routes. The first is an exploration of the work of the Yiddish poet Moyshe-Leyb Halpern (1886-1932), read in light of its engagement with the poetry of Heinrich Heine (1797-1856), the poet Halpern admired most; the second is a comparative study of David Avidan's poetry, and to a lesser extent Natan Zach's, with the poetry and thought of Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) and, through Brecht, Heine again; the third route is a study of the concept of poetry promoted by the American-born contemporary Israeli poet, Harold Schimmel (b.1935), in light of both Frankfurt School aesthetics and Halpern's poetics.The complex constellation of poetic works and histories that this dissertation undertakes reveals how poetry emerges out of self-other relations, and in what ways these dynamics facilitate an agency effect, that is, an agency that is never already established, but is always coming into being. It is this notion of felt-agency, I further show, that is vital for the establishment a non-violent public sphere, one that is urgently needed today.

"We must get rid of our superstitious valuation of text!" Antonin Artaud's disdain still echoes in an ongoing theoretical discussion: what role, if any, should writing be understood to play in theatrical performance? Current theater scholarship, in both German postdramatic theory and American drama studies, tends to promote a paradigm wherein actual performance inherently exceeds or surpasses any text it puts to use. Despite its great appeal, this model threatens to obscure the ways writing can, so to speak, produce its own theater: both by simulating the dimensions of theatrical experience and by constituting an alternative site that undermines the totality of performance's here-and-now. The modernist works analyzed here construct theater as a medium whose heightened exposure to the present provokes an equally heightened contestation of that present. In these texts, theatricality becomes a negative relation to the actual. More concerned with formal experimentation than with suspenseful storytelling, these works can benefit from the "postdramatic" critical framework that has developed in theater studies during the past two decades. Yet postdramatic discourse frequently identifies the postdramatic departure from storytelling with a liberation from the "dominance" of the script. Likewise, the postdramatic is often characterized as a theater where presence supplants representation. In order to challenge these assumptions, this dissertation returns to Peter Szondi's and Bertolt Brecht's critiques of drama. For these earlier theorists, drama itself relentlessly affirms the present; it thus becomes possible to reconceive the postdramatic as a theater that rejects presentness. Within such a theater, text acquires a heightened, not a diminished, importance. Directing us towards an "elsewhere" of poetic composition, and hence providing an intense sense of what is not present amidst performance, experimental playwriting constitutes a vital component of the postdramatic landscape. In order to conceptualize this development, I draw on Theodor W. Adorno's aesthetic theory. Although Adorno is rarely engaged as a resource for thinking about theater, his work provides a framework for understanding the written script as a negative, critical structure that resists the real-time event of performance. The first chapter of the dissertation introduces Adorno, Brecht, and Szondi as theoretical interlocutors, situating their work in relation to postdramatic discourse and the problematic status of the theater text. Having argued for a modernist theatrical tradition that is both postdramatic and highly literary, the study then traces this tradition through a series of modernist and contemporary works. A model of theater as distraction, rather than presentness, structures both the late fiction of Henry James and the landscape plays of Gertrude Stein. In Waiting for Godot, this negation of the present becomes dialectical: Samuel Beckett intensifies dramatic presence to the point of exhaustion, constructing theater as the utopian desire for that which is not yet present. In the last two chapters, I show how two contemporary American playwrights have adapted this modernist legacy. Suzan-Lori Parks finds ways to construct writing as a site of performance in its own right, alternative to the presence of the stage. Mac Wellman devises a text that consistently refuses the economy of communicative transaction, figuring a yet-unimagined mode of collectivity. Through close readings of their work, "Negative Theatrics" shows how all these writers enact a profoundly critical theatrics of the page.