Date: Friday, September 27, 2024
Time: 4:00 PM
Location: Harkness Chapel, Classroom
Free – open to the public
Our weekly Friday afternoon colloquia feature current research presentations by distinguished visiting scholars, as well as by our own faculty and graduate students in musicology, historical performance practice, and music education.
Following each session, receptions offer a valuable opportunity for social interaction, helping to foster a strong sense of community, camaraderie, and mutual support within the department.
About The Talk
“On the Musically Kafkaesque”
Although the Kafka famously insisted that he was unmusical, Theodor W. Adorno upheld him as the first writer to treat language as music, and Stanley Corngold suggested that music was the originary “traumatic event” from which Kafka spent the rest of his life running. This talk develops the notion of Kafka as an unmusical-musical writer to advance a larger claim: the musically Kafkaesque offers a yet unheard auditory diagnostic for pathologies of the modern condition, whose abiding symptoms range from the obscure to the obvious and from the acute to the chronic. It will feature works that consider crises of musical communication in postwar Germany, sonic distortions that are both glitch and feature, and existential dread in rock music.
About The Speaker
Samantha Heinle works on the intersection of music and literature from 1800 to the present. She received her Ph.D. from Cornell University with a dissertation on music as a medium of communication in three compositions on texts by Franz Kafka. Her current book project, On the Musically Kafkaesque, listens in to Kafkaesque facets of the modern condition made audible through the sonic reception of Kafka’s work.
After earning an A.B. in music and comparative literature from Harvard University, Heinle was awarded a Fulbright Grant to conduct research at the archive of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna, Austria. Her scholarship has also been supported by grants from the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts at the University of Notre Dame, the Austrian Cultural Forum, the Institute for European Studies at Cornell University, and a Don M. Randel Teaching and Research Fellowship.
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