Katherine Hirt: When Machines Play Chopin: Musical Spirit and Automation in Nineteenth-Century German Literature (2010)

“When Machines Play Chopin brings together music aesthetics, performance practices, and the history of automated musical instruments in nineteenth-century German literature. Philosophers defined music as a direct expression of human emotion while soloists competed with one another to display machine-like technical perfection at their instruments. This book looks at this paradox between thinking about and practicing music to show what three literary works say about automation and the sublime in art.”

Publisher De Gruyter, 2010
Interdisciplinary German Cultural Studies series, 8
ISBN 3110232405, 9783110232400
170 pages
via alcibiades_socrates

Abstract of the thesis (2008)

Publisher

PDF

Barbara Cassin (ed.): Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon (2004–) [FR, EN]

“This is an encyclopedic dictionary of close to 400 important philosophical, literary, and political terms and concepts that defy easy–or any–translation from one language and culture to another. Drawn from more than a dozen languages, terms such as Dasein (German), pravda (Russian), saudade (Portuguese), and stato (Italian) are thoroughly examined in all their cross-linguistic and cross-cultural complexities. Spanning the classical, medieval, early modern, modern, and contemporary periods, these are terms that influence thinking across the humanities. The entries, written by more than 150 distinguished scholars, describe the origins and meanings of each term, the history and context of its usage, its translations into other languages, and its use in notable texts. The dictionary also includes essays on the special characteristics of particular languages–English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.

Originally published in French, this one-of-a-kind reference work is now available in English for the first time, with new contributions from Judith Butler, Daniel Heller-Roazen, Ben Kafka, Kevin McLaughlin, Kenneth Reinhard, Stella Sandford, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Jane Tylus, Anthony Vidler, Susan Wolfson, Robert J. C. Young, and many more.The result is an invaluable reference for students, scholars, and general readers interested in the multilingual lives of some of our most influential words and ideas.”

The book has been or is in the process of being translated into Arabic, Chinese, Farsi, Portuguese (5 Vols, scheduled 2009-11), Romanian (scheduled 2013), Russian, Spanish, and Ukrainian (3 Vols, 2009-13, (2), (3)).

First published in French as Vocabulaire européen des philosophies: Dictionnaire des intraduisibles, Seuil/Le Robert, Paris, 2004.

English edition
Translated by Steven Rendall, Christian Hubert, Jeffrey Mehlman, Nathanael Stein, and Michael Syrotinski
Translation edited by Emily Apter, Jacques Lezra and Michael Wood
Publisher Princeton University Press, 2014
Translation/Transnation series
ISBN 0691138702, 9780691138701
1344 pages

Untranslatables and their Translations (Barbara Cassin, Transeuropéennes, 2009, in French, English, Arabic and Turkish)
Commentary (Jacques Lezra, video, 12 min, 2014, in English)
Wikipedia (FR)

Project website (archived)
Publisher (FR)
Publisher (EN)

Vocabulaire européen des philosophies – Échantillon IMAGE (French, HTML version of 30 entries related to the notion of image)
Dictionary of Untranslatables (English, EPUB, PDF)

Geoffrey Winthrop-Young: Kittler and the Media (2011)

“With books such as Discourse Networks and Gramophone, Film, Typewriter and the collection Literature, Media, Information Systems, Friedrich Kittler has established himself as one of the world’s most influential media theorists. He is also one of the most controversial and misunderstood.

Kittler and the Media offers students of media theory an introduction to Kittler’s basic ideas. Following an introduction that situates Kittler’s work against the tumultuous background of German 20th-century history (from the Second World War and the cultural upheaval of the late 1960s to reunification), the book provides succinct summaries of Kittler’s early discourse-analytical work inspired by French post-structuralism, his media-related theorising and his most recent writings on cultural techniques and the notation systems of Ancient Greece.

This clear and engaging overview of a fascinating theorist will be welcomed by students and scholars alike of media, communication and cultural studies.”

Publisher Polity, 2011
Theory and Media series
ISBN 0745644066, 9780745644066
165 pages

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2019-12-8)