Trans Sonorities in Grey Grant's “Drones for the In-Between Times”

Composer intent has generally been downplayed by contemporary music analysts, often being regarded as an example of an intentional fallacy at best and misleading at worst. This analysis of Grey Grant's choral work posits that such a dismissal not only ignores the potential for an enhanced expressive context afforded by composers' own assessments, but it also contributes to the silencing of already marginalized voices, such as in the case of transgender composers. The author proposes a methodology that incorporates the voices of living composers while circumventing concerns about confirmation bias by building on the framework of music theory, queer musicology, and queer theory. The article demonstrates this theoretical framework using an interview of a transgender composer to supplement an analysis of their contemporary choral piece. By analyzing the work with the added context of the composer's statements about their own music, the author paints a more complete picture of the work, one that reinvests music analysis with the trans voice behind the composition.

New Historicism: Kajian Sejarah dalam Karya Imajinatif Ukhruj Minha Ya Mal’un Saddam Hussein

Penelitian ini membuktikan bahwa kajian kesusastraan dengan menggunakan new historicism mampu mengungkap pelbagai kekuatan budaya, sosial, ekonomi, dan politik yang menyetubuh dan menyelinap dalam setiap sela teks sastra yang merupakan ranah estetik (aesthetic richness). Penelitian ini mengungkapkan bahwa karya sastra tidak dapat dipisahkan dengan pelbagai konteks zaman dan praksis budaya, sosial, ekonomi, serta politik yang melingkupinya. Penelitian ini tidak sependapat dengan konsep new criticism John Crowe Ransom (The New Criticism, 1941 dan Criticism as Pure Speculation, 1971) dan William K. Wimsatt dan Monroe Beardsley (The Intentional Fallacy, 1946 dan The verbal Icon, 1954) yang mengatakan bahwa karya sastra merupakan autotelic artefact. Sehingga menjadi tidak tepat ketika pemahaman terhadap sastra dikaitkan dengan pengarang, pembaca, maupun konteks di luar karya sastra. Penelitian ini mendukung konsep new historicism Stephen Greenblatt (Practicing New Historicism, 2000) yang menyatakan bahwa dunia imajinatif-estetis tidak pernah terlepas dari relasi kekuasaan dunia realitas yang termanifestasi dalam karya sastra sebagai apresiasi estetis individu dan praksis budaya, sosial, ekonomi, dan politik. Berdasarkan interpretasi kritis new historicism Greenblatt terhadap novel Ukhruj Minha Ya Mal’un diperoleh hasil penelitian berupa pemahaman karya imajinatif yang penuh dengan simbol yang lebih lengkap dan dalam (deeper understanding of value) dengan melibatkan konteks ekstrinsikalitas karya sastra di dalamnya dan novel Ukhruj Minha Ya Mal’un hadir sebagai tanggapan reflektif-imajinatif Saddam Hussein sebagai pengarangnya.[This research proves that literary studies using new historicism can reveal the various cultural, social, economic, and political forces that intercourse and sneak in every literary text: aesthetic richness. This research reveals that literary works cannot be separated from the various contexts of the era and the cultural, social, economic, and political praxis that surround them. This study disagrees with the concept of new criticism John Crowe Ransom (The New Criticism, 1941 and Criticism as Pure Speculation, 1971) and William K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley (The Intentional Fallacy, 1946 and The verbal Icon, 1954) literature is an autotelic artifact. So it is not appropriate when the understanding of literature is associated with authors, readers, and contexts outside of literary works. This research supports Stephen Greenblatt's new historicism concept (Practicing New Historicism, 2000), which states that the imaginative-aesthetic world is never separated from the power relations of the world of reality which are manifested in literature as an individual aesthetic appreciation and cultural, social, economic, and political praxis. Based on the critical interpretation of Greenblatt's new historicism of the Ukhruj Minha Ya Mal'un novel, the research results are in the form of a deeper understanding of imaginative works of symbols (deeper understanding of value) involving the context of the extrinsicality of literary works in it and the novel Ukhruj Minha Ya Mal. 'un appears as the reflective-imaginative response of Saddam Hussein as the author.]

The Ethical Implications of The Intentional Fallacy

I argue that biographical information is akin to other non-aesthetic, social, historical, or political information. As such, artist’s biographies are always relevant and important when interpreting art. While the meaning and value of a piece of art is not determined by any single piece of contextual information, neither is its meaning and value ever entirely separated from context. In some cases, however, a piece of art that is technically magnificent may be experienced as repugnant when the artist has committed egregious acts.

John Farrell, The Varieties of Authorial Intentions: Literary Theory Beyond the Intentional Fallacy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017)

John Farrell, The Varieties of Authorial Intentions: Literary Theory Beyond the Intentional Fallacy. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.

Modernist Fraud

Focusing on literature and visual art in the years 1910–1935, Modernism and Deception begins with the omnipresent accusations that modernism was not art at all, but rather an effort to pass off patently absurd works as great art. These assertions, common in the time’s journalism, are used to understand the aesthetic and context which spawned them, and to look at what followed in their wake. Fraud discourse ventured into the aesthetic theory of the time, to ideas of artistic sincerity, formalism, and the intentional fallacy. In doing so, it profoundly shaped the modern canon and its justifying principles. Modernism and Deception reaches broadly. It goes to reviews and newspaper accounts of art scandals, such as the 1913 Armory Show, the 1910 and 1912 Postimpressionist shows, and Tender Buttons; to daily syndicated columns; to parodies and doggerel; to actual hoaxes, such as Spectra and Disumbrationism; to the literary criticism of Edith Sitwell; to the trial of Brancusi’s Bird in Space; and to the contents of the magazine Blind Man, including a defense of Duchamp’s Fountain, a poem by Bill Brown, and the works of and an interview with the bafflingly unstable painter Louis Eilshemius. In turning to these materials, the book reevaluates how modernism interacted with its publics and describes how a new aesthetic begins: not as a triumphant explosion that initiates irrevocable changes, but as an uncertain muddling and struggle with ideology.

Modernists Reading Themselves

Chapter 5 begins with an extended examination of Edith Sitwell’s interactions with her critics and her baffling formalist analyses of her own works. Sincerity, in early modernism, was under contestation. While initially apologists tended to claim sincerity for modernism either as self-expression or as accurate rendering of perception, sincerity became increasingly based on self-consciousness and methodology, based on ideas of development and professionalism. Modernism’s defenders increasingly moved intent to the sidelines, with the following arguments: that modernist works had articulable meaning; that the province of real criticism proceeded from a general acknowledgement of the artwork’s autonomy; that it was inappropriate for criticism to consider intent; and that forms of doubleness like contradiction, paradox, and irony were central not just to modernism but to all great art. In short, the defenses of modernism’s apparent fraud modulated into an aesthetic discourse based on formalism, New Criticism, and the intentional fallacy.

The Ethical Implications of the Intentional Fallacy

I argue that biographical information is akin to other non-aesthetic, social, historical, or political information. As such, artist’s biographies are always relevant and important when interpreting art. While the meaning and value of a piece of art is not determined by any single piece of contextual information, neither is its meaning and value ever entirely separated from context. In some cases, however, a piece of art that is technically magnificent may be experienced as repugnant when the artist has committed egregious acts.

Artist’s intention

W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley’s famous paper ‘The Intentional Fallacy’ (1946) began one of the central debates in aesthetics and literary theory of the last half-century. By describing as a fallacy the belief that critics should take into account the author’s intentions when interpreting or evaluating a piece of literature, they were rejecting an entrenched assumption of traditional criticism – and a natural one, since we normally take it for granted that understanding actions, including acts of speech and writing, requires a grasp of the intentions of the agent. But they were expressing an idea that has been greatly influential; it was a central claim of the ‘new criticism’, while the marginalization of the author is also a marked feature of structuralist and poststructuralist literary theory. Most of the debate over the artist’s intentions – ‘artist’ here being used as a general word for writer, composer, painter, and so on – has centred on their relevance for interpreting art works. More particularly, the question has been whether external evidence about the artist’s intentions – evidence not presented by the work itself – is relevant to determining the work’s meaning.