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A brief guide to Oxford’s ‘Very Short Introductions’.

A Fortnightly Review of

VERY SHORT INTRODUCTIONS

Literary Theory
by Jonathan Culler
[UK/EU]

Madness
by Andrew Scull
[UK/EU]

The Animal Kingdom
by Peter Holland
[UK/EU]

Ancient Greece
by Paul Cartledge
[UK/EU]

Early Music
by Thomas Forrest Kelly
[UK/EU]

Modern France
by Vanessa R. Schwartz
[UK/EU]

Oxford University Press | £7.99/$11.95 each

By Michelene Wandor.

WESTERN THOUGHT TOOK A meta-intellectual leap in the second half of the century. Cross-disciplinary pollination from philosophy, cultural politicisation, the sciences and empirical information meant that what might previously have been confined to the academy began to appeal to a broader reading public. To help ease the paths of students, new introductory guides appeared; and boundaries of intellectual interest between academics and the intelligentsia began to blur.

Two series have successfully bridged the gap between academic and trade publishing. Routledge’s ‘The New Critical Idiom’ surveys developments in cultural and aesthetic theory and thinking. These are substantial introductory texts. However, the titles in the OUP series, which is the subject of this review, are smaller, shorter and more succinct, but no less expert and vital.

The first ‘Very Short Introduction’ appeared in the mid-1990s, and now there are nearly 300 books, which have sold over three million copies, and been translated into over twenty-five languages. The virtue is unadorned: A ‘Very Short Introduction’ contains all you need to know in order to decide if you need to know more. The recipe is a tough call: a ‘Very Short Introduction’ must necessarily historicise, provide an epistemological guide to the subject, analyse its conceptual and ideological issues, and wrap it all up – for now. Inevitably, the opening chapter is critical. It has to define the field and set up its conceptual parameters. A model of its kind is Jonathan Culler’s Very Short Introduction to Literary Theory (2000). For an important part of my work (criticism and teaching creative writing), it is invaluable and I insist on it as essential reading for my Creative Writing students. Normally, they will run a mental mile from anything with the words ‘literary criticism’ or ‘theory’, but this book demonstrates to them that knowledge consists not only in learning how to do something, but how to think about what that ‘something’ is – and how others have thought about it. It helps to improve their critical reading skills (of published work, as well as their own), and stimulates different ways of thinking about how they are studying the creation of imaginative literature.

THE QUALITY OF OUP’s series can’t just depend on how well they represent one’s own field. Andrew Scull’s Madness is a case in point. I’m not an expert in the field of ‘madness’, though know a fair amount about the phenomenon, attitudes towards it and methods of diagnosis and treatment. Scull succinctly historicises the ‘causes’ of madness, from religious visions, through to Rousseau’s ‘Noble Savage’, and those who saw madness as a product of the dangers of civilisation.

Most of us (from Hogarth et al.) are familiar with the brutality and voyeurism with which people were incarcerated in asylums. Scull pinpoints changes of attitude with the development of psychological medicine in the nineteenth century, and the establishment of ‘mental hospitals’, to the medicalisation of ‘mental illness’ from the 1950s onwards. He voices scepticism about mechanistic diagnostic procedures, while also commenting on the way psychoanalysis has gone in and out of fashion. Finally, the rapid growth of psychopharmacology (a bonanza for pharmaceutical firms) has led to  Prozac making ‘depression’ the ‘common cold’ of mental illness. He ends on a cautionary conclusion about the dangers of where we are. While the book is largely a psycho-physiological history of ‘madness’, Scull also dovetails in ways in which writers, artists and directors have dealt with the phenomenon.

The next two books are, for me, ventures into new intellectual territory. Peter Holland’s broadly titled The Animal Kingdom gives a nod to the new academic discipline of animal studies, beginning with the basic ‘what is an animal’? He moves beyond commonsense into the scientific categorisation of living organisms, drawing on naturalists, zoologists and philosophers and theories of evolution. I may not understand the chemistry or the science much better, but I do have a better sense of the range of living phenomena which come under the heading of the ‘animal’ – as well as a salutary reminder of the extent of my ignorance.

Paul Cartledge’s careful, sometimes stern, but duly brief, introduction to Ancient Greece is the product of a lifetime of detailed and distilled knowledge. This whistle-stop tour of  Greek civilisation (1400 BCE to CE 330, from the Black Sea to Spain) is presented as a civilisation of cities, illustrating while also diverging from Shelley’s claim that ‘we are all Greeks’. Illuminating, and daunting.

IN A SERIES SUCH as this, there should be no duds. Unfortunately, the book to which I looked forward most eagerly, is just such a one. Thomas Forrest Kelly certainly has a lot of source material for his Early Music, but coherence, clarity and understanding are not qualities much in evidence. His framing chapter is truly poor, almost patronising in its assumption that ‘early’ music is largely ‘lost’ music.

His succeeding chapters follow an obvious chronology – Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, linked like paper chains, rather than outlining the lines of musical, social and cultural cause-and-effect. There are useful short sections which explain phenomena such as the beginnings of music printing and cantus firmus, but when it comes to anything which suggests historical analysis or understanding, he is either silent or just plain wrong. He claims, for example, Renaissance music was not connected with the ‘rebirth’ of anything. But of course it was – notably, to Humanist attempts (successful or not) to revive the values of ancient cultures. Most seriously, there is no real account of the way the modal development into the diatonic laid the foundation for baroque, and, later, classical music. Subheadings are (like references to individuals) almost scattergun and random – there is nothing for ‘pitch’, for example, which forms an important section.

Forrest’s main burden is the claim that the ‘early music revival’ was a product of the 1960s and ’70s. This is a gross simplification, and a great injustice to the work of so many others earlier in the century. He doesn’t mention Dolmetsch until towards the end, and there is nothing about the educational drives of the movement. Indeed, reading this book feels like a curious back-to-front exercise. He seems to be addressing a readership which is not only ignorant of pre-classical music, but perhaps even hostile to it. While his references to American activities are appropriate, he seriously underplays the place of research and performance in the UK. This is more than a mere jingoistic complaint! It is telling that, unlike all the other books reviewed here, there are no references for individual chapters. ‘Further Reading’ is useful, but not sufficient guidance.

Finally, Vanessa R. Schwartz’s very readable Modern France is more satisfying. Dating the ‘modern’ from the revolution of 1789, she surveys the political and symbolic meanings of ‘Frenchness’ across the world, framing the contradictions between a tradition of democracy, and the presence of racism and sexism. Despite the addition of the concept of fraternity to liberty and equality, France’s colonial past has led to political crises after postcolonial migration in 1950s. France’s special mission of culture and its respect for writers and intellectuals makes suggestive reading for us Anglophones. French is, after all, the ‘other global language after English’.

Incidentally, the series includes Frank Close’s Very Short Introduction to Nothing, which – if I had written it – would consist of blank pages. But then, of course, it would not be ‘nothing’. It would be white paper – and perhaps closer in spirit to Close’s thesis. As he observes, the great interstellar ‘nothing’ is really packed with things and anti-things. So even in ‘nothing’ there is meaning, and as these books remind us meaning is something indeed.


Michelene Wandor’s two most recent poetry books are published by Arc Publications: Musica Transalpina (a Poetry Book Society Recommendation), and The Music of the Prophets. She performs with the Siena Ensemble and reports regularly for The Fortnightly Review.

 

 

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Nick
Nick
11 years ago

Your comments on the Early Music title strike me as an overzealous attempt to dispute scholarship of which you know basically nothing. For example, The idea that “early music” is mostly lost (inaccessible to scholarship) is really the single most important general concept in the study of early music, not a patronizing assumption. It is a prerequisite to understanding the role of this field in music history, even in its most basic presentation. And you are very, very incorrect when you insist that Renaissance musicians were aiming towards a revival of Classical ideas.

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