Bullock - Böcker

Within classical music, much writing on the Western song tradition since 1800 has assumed a direct link between musical cultures and national literatures, and song has typically been interpreted as one of the means by which constructions of nationalism and nationhood have been pursued in the cultural sphere. Yet song can also be a mobile and cosmopolitan genre and form of cultural practice, able - through performance, publication, and translation - to cross boundaries between cultures and languages. This volume brings together musicologists, literary scholars, linguists, and cultural historians to examine the ways in which song creation, practice, and interpretation has been defined by, and in turn defines, conceptions of nationalism and the transnational. It focuses on four key poets - the Persian Hafiz, German Heine, American Whitman, and French Verlaine - and examines how their poems have been 'translated' into song, and how music can challenge the seemingly organic relationship between language and nation.

"I'll bet it will tum out that brains use both mechanisms, in different centers. " Much of my waking life and that of many of my friends is spent racking our brains over how brains work. This book claims that good science is often a form of betting on the outcome of research-the stakes being time and reputation and someone's money. Some scientists, to be sure, claim they avoid leaning this way or that, in the name of keeping an open mind. I recommend making expectations explicit in order to design controls against unconscious influence, formulate alternative outcomes more clearly-and to add zest. Both the immediately upcoming experiment and the expected result of many long years of work by many people after one is gone are proper subjects for betting or the most informed and serious guessing. The working title for this collection of new and old papers was for some time "Betting on how brains work" and then "Betting on brains. " It goes without saying that the book will not answer the title question but will speak to it, in particular making a series of propositions that I think are more likely to be confirmed by future research than the alternatives we can presently recognize. It follows that a significant message, implied in many chapters of the book is this.

It is easy to imagine the excitement that pervaded the neurological world in the late 1920's and early 1930's when Berger's first descriptions of the electro­ encephalogram appeared. Berger was not the first to discover that changes in electric potential can be recorded from the surface of the head, but it was he who first systematized the method, and it was he who first proposed that explanatory correlations might be found between the electroencephalogram, brain processes, and behavioral states. An explosion of activity quickly fol­ lowed: studies were made of the brain waves in virtually every conceivable behavioral state, ranging from normal human subjects to those with major psychoses or with epilepsy, to state changes such as the sleep-wakefulness transition. There evolved from this the discipline of Clinical Electroencepha­ lography which rapidly took a valued place in clinical neurology and neuro­ surgery. Moreover, use of the method in experimental animals led to a further understanding of such state changes as attention-inattention, arousal, and sleep and wakefulness. The evoked potential method, derived from electro­ encephalography, was used in neurophysiological research to construct pre­ cise maps of the projection of sensory systems upon the neocortex. These maps still form the initial guides to studies of the cortical mechanisms in sensation and perception. The use of the event-related potential paradigm has proved useful in studies of the brain mechanisms of some cognitive functions of the brain.