About the Book
A profoundly original philosophical detective story tracing the surprising history of an anecdote ranging across centuries of traditions, disciplines, and ideas Red Sea-Red Square-Red Thread is a work of passages taken, written, painted, and sung. It offers a genealogy of liberty through a micrology of wit. It follows the long history of a short anecdote. Commissioned to depict the biblical passage through the Red
Sea, a painter covered over a surface with red paint, explaining thereafter that the Israelites had already crossed over and that the Egyptians were drowned. Clearly, not all you see is all you get. Who was the painter and who the
first teller of the tale? Designed as a philosophical detective story, Red Sea-Red Square-Red Thread follows the extraordinary number of thinkers and artists who have used the Red Sea anecdote to make so much more than a merely anecdotal point. Leading the large cast are the philosophers, Arthur Danto and Søren Kierkegaard, the poet and playwright, Henri Murger, the opera composer, Giacomo Puccini, and the painter and print-maker, William Hogarth.
Strange companions perhaps, until their use of the anecdote is shown as working its extraordinary passage through so many cosmopolitan cities of art and capital. What about the anecdote brings Danto's philosophy of art into
conversation with Kierkegaard's stages on life's way, with Murger and Puccini's la vie de bohème, and with Hogarth's modern moral pictures? The book explores narratives of emancipation in philosophy, theology, politics, and the arts. What has the passage of the Israelites to do with the Egyptians who, by many gypsy names, came to be branded as bohemians when arriving in France from the German lands of Bohemia? What have Moses and
monotheism to do with the history of monism and the monochrome? And what sort of thread connects a sea to a square when each is so purposefully named red?
Table of Contents:
Preface
1. Thought Experiment
2. Emancipation Narrative
3. From Sea to Square to Sea
4. Passages of Bohème
5. Testament and Table
6. Contesting Opera
7. Sea Scenes
8. Between Fact and Fiction
9. Refiguring Exodus
10. Bohemia-Bohemian-Bohème
11. Egyptian-Jewish Bohème
12. Mastering The Cant In The Cafe of Complaint
13. Reds of Art and War
14. Grey Days for a Gay Science
15. Proverbs on the Path to the Absolute
16. Thought Experiments in Color
17. Red Thread
18. Painter of Moods and Professions
19. Street Signs of Libation and Liberation
20. Spreading The Anecdote
21. Tying The Knot
About the Author :
Lydia Goehr is Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University. She is the author of The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music; The Quest for Voice: Music, Politics, and the Limits of Philosophy, and of Elective Affinities: Musical Essays on the History of Aesthetic Theory.
Review :
An intellectual tour de force in five acts. Goehr traverses broad swathes of European cultural history, including a stunning philosophical and theological reading of Puccini's La Boheme, with brilliance and an underlying smile, offering lovers of the arts a trove of delights as she builds her argument about the nature of art itself
Lydia Goehr's account of narratives and philosophies of emancipation is a stunning achievement of narrative and philosophical emancipation in its own right. Red Sea-Red-Square-Red Thread is tailor-made for addressing the pressing question of where our best images of freedom in history are hiding, especially when the surprisingly difficult answer is: in plain sight.
Many books in one: an homage to the great Arthur Danto, an intellectual memoir, a philosophical detective story, an anatomy of anecdotes, and a dazzling display of erudition. Goehr has composed a magical, indeed scintillating synthesis of intellectual history, art history, music history and comparative literature—not to speak of philosophical inquiry.
Beginning with the simplest of questions, Red Sea—Red Square—Red Thread offers a compelling, insightful, and engaging treatise on the nature of art. It's the Goldberg Variations of philosophical treatises.
A stunning performance of the birth of philosophy from the emancipatory spirit of modernism.
A wonderful book. Goehr takes the reader on a journey—considering how the red square-red sea allegory transforms and appears in unexpected ways in service to a modern idea of freedom and inclusion. A model of how to combine wit and analysis to great effect.
Bringing together the histories of art, philosophy, and popular culture into a narrative of human possibility, the book is nothing less than a gift to its culture.
A tour de force of theoretical analysis and cultural criticism, Goehr's book charts an unprecedented path through philosophical, musical, literary, and art history. Dazzling in the wit of its style and depth of its content, it reframes our view of every subject it touches upon.
Sprawling and lively, confounding and engaging, and in a word, brilliant...it surely stands as a testament to [Goehr's] lifetime of teaching, writing, reading, viewing, listening, and conversing. It is a book, that teems with curiosity and erudition. More than once, it made me laugh out loud. It rewards sustained reading, and I am glad I read it cover to cover. But it would also reward the occasional perusal of any given passage, if only to give the reader the chance to marvel at the threads, red and otherwise, that it weaves together.
