Георги Илиев

In 2025, the journal Literaturna missal (Literary thought) is going to publish an issue dedicated to the interdisciplinary topic "Sound and Text". The issue will include articles in English and Bulgarian. The complex interrelations between sound and text have a history as long as literature itself, dating back from the primary unstable form of oral poetry, through the secondary writing forms of oral poetry, up till today’s digital audio-visual forms (Paul Zumthor. Oral Poetry: An Introduction). Sound should be considered in the broadest possible sense, and in many literary and cultural forms it is practically inseparable from the text. The interconnected forms of sound and text are positioned in a broad intercultural context, as these forms develop from the verse of Antiquity to the present day. The research could focus on acoustic and textological issues of the Medieval Corpus and Early Modernity to the 20th century. It can adopt historical or theoretical approach. From the perspective of intermediality, the research could analyze the sound-text interaction in the historical avant-gardes and neo-avant-gardes. The complex relations between the two are crucial also for many other realms of contemporary cultural studies (electronic audio literature, film, theatre, performance, popular music, video games, digital media, etc.). Their theoretical and historical configurations call for examination from various perspectives.

The article traces the attitude to music in the Hellenistic Greek novels, namely the pastoral novels and tries to outline the significance of music and musical improvisation in the ancient world. It is shown against the backdrop of the representations of visual images. The text follows an excursus from there on and it is aimed at explaining the fate of music within the tradition of the aesthetics of the Enlightenment. With this purpose in mind, it considers the distinguishing between the varying signs and the divergent content of different arts as it is done in Winkelmann, Lessing and Herder. Visual art is privileged in the whole tradition of aesthetics. This is true mostly for aesthetics, which considers itself to be a philosophy of art and not a science of perceptive faculties and intuition. This tendency reaches its peak in Hegel’s “Aesthetics”.

The article aims to historically reconstruct the political context in which Heinrich von Kleist wrote his novella “Michael Kohlhaas.” The juridical layer of the text is interpreted as a reaction to the introduction of the Napoleonic Code in the Prussian Lands during the Napoleonic Wars. The study reads the analyzed novella as a form of resistance to the unification of all legal systems required by the Code, following the intricacies of the injustices to which Michael Kohlhaas falls victim. In the article, other examples of similar cases of “unification from above” are provided. One of them is “In the Penal Colony” by Franz Kafka. The other regards the suggestions to use AI in legal action. For the analysis, the concept of “interpretant” of the American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce is applied. Ludwig Wittgenstein’s notion of “use” is also employed to explain the constantly changing and actualizing text of the law