Stephen Rumph

Academics. If it is their area they go on about it till the end of time and if it is not they blithely mischaracterize (Rumph read one book on linguistics, Aarsleff's, stripmined what he wanted and abandoned it) and nobody calls them on it because it's not their area either. And it's no wonder. I tried to be accurate and balanced and now I have 100,000 words of notes to turn into 15,000 words of thesis and most of it is sentences like "Forster disagrees with Aarsleff's argument regarding show more Condillac's influence on Humboldt." And I'm looking at the other theses from my cohort--some of them now people who graduated as long as FOUR YEARS AGO--and I'm seeing focused topics, treated in a balanced fashion, within length, and above all interesting--my one friend wrote about "Two Drunk Ladies" (the female alcoholic in Jean Rhys and Jane Bowles) and doesn't that sound like more fun that the chapter of gibberish I just finished on Leibniz? Ugh.

UGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.

Anyway, this is an okay article on how Beethoven was following an eighteenth-century call-it-"empiricist" (so far as you care here, call it mimetic) vision of what music should do (create a picture) rather than the nineteenth-century Hegelian idealist vision (call it gibberish) that B is identified with by Adorno. I like music, even used to engage in it on occasion before I became a grad student, and I like Beethoven and have read (and mostly despise) Hegel and also Adorno (he seems clever), yet I have no basis on which to evaluate this article and do not wish to acquire one. So I'll just accept it uncritically, except for Rumph's linguistics, which is wrong, but you have to blame Aarsleff too, but not too much because Aarsleff just made (and supported) an argument, which Rumph presented like it was fact and consensus, but why shouldn't he it's not his field, but, but but.

UGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.

Article appeared in Beethoven Forum. show less