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Fugal composition has traditionally been taken as 'a sign of order and tradition' (Chapin, 2014). In the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, it was normally associated with cosmic order, in keeping with the concept of the harmony of the spheres, and it later came to represent social order (Chua, 1999). In this article I argue that in a variety of early twentieth-century manifestations, fugue came to represent chaos rather than order, maintaining both cosmic and social interpretations. Drawing from music by Milhaud, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, and Toch, and paintings and writings by Kandinsky, Ball, and Huxley, I demonstrate how the early twentiethcentury fugue frequently served as a metaphor for chaos as a redemptive or generating force. In later commentaries, many of these manifestations were later misinterpreted or misrepresented in terms of the metaphor fugue-as-order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While Teju Cole's 2011 novel "Open City" has been received as an exemplary cosmopolitan performance, a careful reading of the novel's engagement with memories of suffering and of its evocations of aesthetic experiences shows that it interrogates rather than affirms an aesthetic cosmopolitan program. Through its use of a flat, nearly affectless tone, it renders visible the inability of contemporary calls for aesthetic and memorial cosmopolitan practices to engage a global landscape riven by injustice and inequality. As the novel progresses, its apparent celebration of the exemplary cosmopolitan figure of the "flâneur" makes way for the decidedly less glamorous figure of the "fugueur." By mobilizing this marginal figure from the history of psychiatry, a condition marked by unwanted restlessness and ambulatory automatism, "Open City" exposes the limited critical purchase of the imaginative mobility and intercultural curiosity celebrated by cosmopolitan defenses of literature and art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines evidence of calculated narrative forms and admiration for certain types of artists in Thomas Bernhard's novel "Der Untergeher." It demonstrates that Bernhard borrowed from Johann Sebastian Bach's fugues and Glenn Gould's theories of fugue. Bernhard is described as an artist who attempted, via baroque forms and the mythologization of topical figures such as Gould, to surmount certain of his own anxieties.

Argues that Aldous Huxley's novel 'Point Counter Point' follows in its largest design the construction of a classical fugue. Move through three interlocked stages which parallel and imitate the major parts of a fugue; Extent to which Huxley drew upon musical forms to give an encompassing unity to his complex materials.