ABSTRACT
Polyphony and the Modern asks one fundamental question: what does it mean to be modern in one’s own time? To answer that question, this volume focuses on polyphony as an index of modernity.
In The Principle of Hope, Ernst Bloch showed that each moment in time is potentially fractured: people living in the same country can effectively live in different centuries – some making their alliances with the past and others betting on the future – but all of them, at least technically, enclosed in the temporal moment. But can a claim of modernity also mean something more ambitious? Can an artist, by accident or design, escape the limits of his or her own time, and somehow precociously embody the outlook of a subsequent age?
This book sees polyphony as a bridge providing a terminology and a stylistic practice by which the period barrier between Medieval and Early Modern can be breached.
Chapter 1 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license available at https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/edit/10.4324/9781003129837
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part One|49 pages
Machaut and Musical Polyphony
part Two|103 pages
Polyphony in Medieval Europe
chapter 4|22 pages
Polyphonic Effects in the Fixed-Form Verse of Eustache Deschamps
chapter 5|13 pages
“Galeotto fu il libro e chi lo scrisse”
part Three|49 pages
From Medieval England to the Early Modern
chapter 9|23 pages
Chaucer's Speech and Thought Representation in Troilus and Criseyde
part Four|45 pages
Towards Modernity