Word and Music Studies : Essays on Performativity and on Surveying the Field

The main section of this volume of essays addresses the topic of 'Performativity in Literature and Music', a subject of high contemporary relevance since a substantial part of recent reflections in the humanities are concerned with the performance aspect of cultural activities, particularly in the arts. This decisive reorientation of scholarly interests in the arts, trendily called the 'performative turn', has yielded significant contributions to an increasingly refined understanding of artistic processes from an up-to-date perspective, and specifically what has been called the 'crisis of the work concept' has sharpened our awareness of the need of finding the 'proper' object of such scholarly investigations, which, as in most traditional studies, cannot be exclusively the written documents of our cultural heritage, but additionally, and essentially so, their actualizations in performance situations.