30 November 2012: The Ensemble for the Romantic Century’s first seminar held in conjunction with its 2012-13 season, MONSTERS!

“The right kind of thing should fall out in the right kind of place; the right thing should follow and…all the circumstances in a tale answer one another like notes in music.” So wrote Robert Louis Stevenson of his conception of an ideal narrative structure. The Scottish writer’s 1886 tale would seem to be a superb example of such a musically balanced literary work. (The novelist Vladimir Nabokov compared the book’s elegant style to that of Flaubert and Gogol and praised its “delightful winey taste”). The novella concerns lawyers and doctors—modern-day professionals—who find themselves confronted with the nightmarish criminality of an upstanding Dr. Jekyll and his diabolical double. Is it a detective story, a species of late-Victorian melodrama, gothic science fiction, an allegory of male “reproduction” in a world where women are peripheral, an anticipation of Freudian models of psychic double-ness, or a cautionary tale of the perils of the repressed life? Examining film clips from recent adaptations–from Spencer Tracy and Ingrid Bergman in the 1941 GM adaptation to the 1963 Paramount comedy “The Nutty Professor” starring Jerry Lewis and Stella Stevens (in which Lewis’s awkward professor’s Hyde-like self is suave Dean Martin-like playboy), we will consider the meaning and legacy of Stevenson’s mythic work. Devices in Romantic music which were enlisted to represent ideas of double-ness and duality—such as sudden modulations, juxtaposed harmonies, and dissonance, among others—will be discussed in relation to the literary topoi of Stevenson’s novella.

Friday, 30 November 2012, 5:30-7:30, at CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, Skylight Room, 9th floor. FREE ADMISSION