Arnold Schoenberg Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Robin Gail Schulze

Critical Essay by Robin Gail Schulze

SOURCE: "Design in Motion: Words, Music, and the Search for Coherence in the Works of Virginia Woolf and Arnold Schoenberg," in Studies in the Literary Imagination, Vol. XXV, No. 2, Fall, 1992, pp. 5-22

In the following essay, Schulze examines the influence of Schoenberg's musical theory on the works of Virginia Woolf

Academics, alas, can be surprisingly narrow-minded. Shaped by our institutions, we have a tendency to divide ideas into neat little teachable, publishable packages, defining ourselves and our thoughts in terms of time periods, genres, continents, languages, theories, departments, and disciplines. Such separations certainly make the work of knowing easier, but they often lead us to read only part of a complex story. The period now roughly defined as "modern," from the late 1800s to the Second World War, happily and frustratingly resists every arbitrary boundary the academy attempts to draw. Modernism, modernist literature, call it what you will,...
(read more)