I am developing this nascent website partly as an anthology of some of my earlier articles, but mostly as a platform for my newly written and upcoming ones.
Throughout, the critical approach is largely multidisciplinary and freely operates across media. For example, in my writing about the stage, an actor may be compared to an opera singer rather than to another actor (see “Irving and Chaliapin”). When I discuss Alfred H. Barr Jr., founding director of the Museum of Modern Art, I treat him as a literary figure more than as a curator (see “Alfred H. Barr Jr. as a Writer of Allegory: Art History in a Literary Context”). With Vasily Kandinsky, my essay is as much about music as about painting (see “Kandinsky, Schoenberg, and the Music of the Spheres”). An article on Victorian poetry compares physics to metaphysics (see “The Science of a Sacrament”). Or my discussion of the emergence of the e-book turns into a larger examination of the nature of reading itself, whatever the graphic medium (see “What Is Reading?”).
As future articles are added, I will address other cross-disciplinary and intermedia topics.
The general rubrics under which essays are gathered here, such as the MUSIC or THEATER sections, are therefore mostly a matter of convenience. They outline basic, familiar boundaries that the essays themselves are at liberty to cross at will. In this I take inspiration from the late Daniel Albright, once my dissertation director and mentor, who was a champion of cross-disciplinary studies and a brilliant practitioner of them. The phrase “aesthetic hybrids and chimeras” is his. In that spirit of fruitful resynthesis, I have continued to pursue studies which benefit from the dissolution of arbitrary boundaries, and from the interaction of too-often segregated content areas and modes of analysis.
I encourage readers to go to the SUBSCRIBE page. There you can sign up for email notification of new articles as they appear, from time to time.
And I especially urge readers to engage with the topics pursued here by using the COMMENT feature, where selected visitor responses will be posted after vetting.
James Leggio