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Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu figures same-sex desire as a minimal form of social connectedness, in which contingency affords a sufficient basis for sociality. In the social worlds that Proust called "Sodome" and "Gomorrhe," relationships and encounters tend to be imagined as products of pure contingency, unaccompanied by the kinds of shared norms or tokens of mutual understanding that might conventionally underwrite a stable community. In accordance with a view of contingency articulated by Niklas Luhmann, however, the very absence of these sustaining structures allows contingency itself to operate in the novel as a precarious form of cohesion. In La Recherche, social contingency is often figured using the trope of contiguity (contingency's etymological cousin), so that mere accidental next-to-ness is enough to create a connection between otherwise unrelated characters. In a novel fascinated by transversal links between seemingly distant social milieux, Proust's representation of same-sex desire functions as a network of shortcuts, conjuring contiguity out of apparent distance. These unapologetically improbable networks register the historical unavailability of more stable social structures, but also illustrate what Leo Bersani calls an "anticommunitarian" model of collective life, which is not organized around the community as a social ideal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The influence of Beethoven on Eliot's Four Quartetsis mediated by Wagner and Schopenhauer and relates fundamentally to the philosopher's understanding of instrumental music as expressing a universalised and abstract emotion. Schopenhauer's aesthetics are intimately connected with Wagner's treatment of the idea of absolute music-a discussion which begins in his early prose writings and culminates in his essay 'Beethoven' (1870). At the origin of Wagner's thinking about absolute music is a striking metaphor: that of Beethoven as Columbus, exploring the sea of absolute music. This metaphor can be found at the heart of Four Quartets, powerfully connecting Eliot's poem with Beethovenian music and with a Schopenhauerian aesthetics that understands this music as inhabiting a realm beyond human affect and desire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Muriel Draper, a once preeminent American modernist literary figure, turned conversation into a mode of authorship through her varied career as a salon hostess, writer, and radio broadcaster. The archival papers surrounding her memoir of her music salon, "Music at Midnight" (1929), and her NBC radio program, "It's a Woman's World" (1937-1938), reveal that Draper's contribution to modernism was not literature as we typically conceive it. By providing an alternative articulation of literary form, which blended oral and written modes, her memoir and radio show activated a network of female fan mail writers. Correlating conversation with the music of her salon, Draper challenged modernist claims about music's impersonality while also encouraging her audience to take seriously the literary merits of their talk. From her audience of listeners and readers emerged a public of women writers, for whom the smallest acts of literary participation gained importance through Draper's example. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

He influence of Beethoven on Eliot's Four Quartets is mediated by Wagner and Schopenhauer and relates fundamentally to the philosopher's understanding of instrumental music as expressing a universalised and abstract [...]