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Red Sea-red square-red thread : a philosophical detective story / created by Lydia Goehr.

By: Material type: TextTextPublisher: Oxford University Press, 2022Copyright date: ©2022Description: xlii, 677 pages : illustrations (some coloured) ; 25 cmContent type:
  • text
Media type:
  • unmediated
Carrier type:
  • volume
ISBN:
  • 9780197572443
Subject(s): LOC classification:
  • HM1266 GOE
Contents:
Part I 1. Thought Experiment 2. Emancipation Narrative 3. From Sea to Square to Sea Part II 4. Passages of Bohème 5. Testament and Table 6. Contesting Opera 7. Sea Scenes 8. Between Fact and Fiction Part III 9. Refiguring Exodus 10. Bohemia-​Bohemian-​Bohème 11. Egyptian-​Jewish Bohème 12. Mastering the Cant in Cafés of Complaint Part IV 13. Reds of Art and War 14. Grey Days for a Gay Science 15. Proverbs on the Path to the Absolute 16. Thought Experiments in Color 17. Red Thread Part V 18. Painter of Moods, Poverties, and Professions 19. Street Signs of Libation and Liberation 20. Spreading the Anecdote 21. Tying the Knot Bibliography (Non-​Fiction since 1900) Index
Summary: "RED SEA-RED SQUARE-RED THREAD is a work of passages taken, written, painted, and sung. It offers a genealogy of liberty through a micrology of wit. It follows a very long history of a very short anecdote. Commissioned to depict the biblical passage through the Red Sea, a painter covered over a surface with red paint, explaining thereafter that the Israelites had already crossed over and that the Egyptians were drowned. Clearly, not all you see is all you get. Who was the painter and who the first teller of the tale? Designed as a philosophical detective story, the book follows the extraordinarily many thinkers and artists who have used the Red Sea anecdote to make so much more than a merely anecdotal point. Leading the large cast are the philosophers, Arthur Danto and Søren Kierkegaard, the poet and playwright, Henri Murger, the opera composer, Giacomo Puccini, and the painter and print-maker, William Hogarth. Strange companions perhaps, until their use of the anecdote is shown as working its extraordinary passage through so many cosmopolitan cities of art and capital. What about the anecdote brings Danto's philosophy of art into conversation with Kierkegaard's stages on life's way, with Murger and Puccini's la vie de bohème, and with Hogarth's modern moral pictures? The book explores narratives of emancipation in philosophy, theology, politics, and the arts. What has the passage of the Israelites to do with the Egyptians who, by many gypsy names, came to be branded as bohemians when arriving in France from the German lands of Bohemia? What have Moses and monotheism to do with the history of monism and the monochrome? And what sort of thread connects a sea to a square when each is so purposefully named red?"--
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Holdings
Item type Current library Call number Copy number Status Date due Barcode
Book Book Main Library Open Shelf HM1266 GOE (Browse shelf(Opens below)) 158592 Available BK146391

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Part I
1. Thought Experiment
2. Emancipation Narrative
3. From Sea to Square to Sea
Part II
4. Passages of Bohème
5. Testament and Table
6. Contesting Opera
7. Sea Scenes
8. Between Fact and Fiction
Part III
9. Refiguring Exodus
10. Bohemia-​Bohemian-​Bohème
11. Egyptian-​Jewish Bohème
12. Mastering the Cant in Cafés of Complaint
Part IV
13. Reds of Art and War
14. Grey Days for a Gay Science
15. Proverbs on the Path to the Absolute
16. Thought Experiments in Color
17. Red Thread
Part V
18. Painter of Moods, Poverties, and Professions
19. Street Signs of Libation and Liberation
20. Spreading the Anecdote
21. Tying the Knot
Bibliography (Non-​Fiction since 1900)
Index

"RED SEA-RED SQUARE-RED THREAD is a work of passages taken, written, painted, and sung. It offers a genealogy of liberty through a micrology of wit. It follows a very long history of a very short anecdote. Commissioned to depict the biblical passage through the Red Sea, a painter covered over a surface with red paint, explaining thereafter that the Israelites had already crossed over and that the Egyptians were drowned. Clearly, not all you see is all you get. Who was the painter and who the first teller of the tale? Designed as a philosophical detective story, the book follows the extraordinarily many thinkers and artists who have used the Red Sea anecdote to make so much more than a merely anecdotal point. Leading the large cast are the philosophers, Arthur Danto and Søren Kierkegaard, the poet and playwright, Henri Murger, the opera composer, Giacomo Puccini, and the painter and print-maker, William Hogarth. Strange companions perhaps, until their use of the anecdote is shown as working its extraordinary passage through so many cosmopolitan cities of art and capital. What about the anecdote brings Danto's philosophy of art into conversation with Kierkegaard's stages on life's way, with Murger and Puccini's la vie de bohème, and with Hogarth's modern moral pictures? The book explores narratives of emancipation in philosophy, theology, politics, and the arts. What has the passage of the Israelites to do with the Egyptians who, by many gypsy names, came to be branded as bohemians when arriving in France from the German lands of Bohemia? What have Moses and monotheism to do with the history of monism and the monochrome? And what sort of thread connects a sea to a square when each is so purposefully named red?"--

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