Overview

Modern academic criticism bursts with what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick once termed paranoid readings—interpretative feats that aim to prove a point, persuade an audience, and subtly denigrate anyone who disagrees. Driven by strategies of negation and suspicion, such rhetoric tends to drown out softer-spoken reparative efforts, which forego forceful argument in favor of ruminations on pleasure, love, sentiment, reform, care, and accessibility. Just Vibrations: The Purpose of Sounding Good calls for a time-out in our serious games of critical exchange. Charting the divergent paths of paranoid and reparative affects through illness narratives, academic work, queer life, noise pollution, sonic torture, and other touchy subjects, William Cheng exposes a host of stubborn norms in our daily orientations toward scholarship, self, and sound. How we choose to think about the perpetration and tolerance of critical and acoustic offenses may ultimately lead us down avenues of ethical ruin—or, if we choose, repair. With recourse to experimental rhetoric, interdisciplinary discretion, and the playful wisdoms of childhood, Cheng contends that reparative attitudes toward music and musicology can serve as barometers of better worlds.

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9780472053254

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Reviews

Just Vibrations is without question a groundbreaking book, bothaccessible to a wide readership (including undergraduate students) andtheoretically nuanced. Cheng elegantly balances clarity of explanationwith a depth and breadth of scholarship that encourage the reader todive more deeply into the theoretical underpinnings of his readings andinterpretative approaches. All this is accomplished through a writing stylethat is eminently readable, borderline poetic at times. - Andrew Dell'Antonio, the University of Texas at Austin

Timely and well-researched, Alignment, Alliance, and American Grand Strategy makes convincing and well-supported cases about the dynamics of US power in the contemporary IR environment. As such, it adds explanatory power to our understanding of some quite important political relationships. David Caudill, Villanova University

Just Vibrations is an extremely interesting book written by an exceptionally talented musician. The reflections are far-reaching and a source of much illumination about the function and value of work, hope, determination, realism, and interpersonal care. It is hard to write such a book, but it is very rewarding to read.” — AMARTYA SEN, Harvard University Nobel Laureate in Economics and author of The Idea of Justice

Author Information

William Cheng teaches music, media, and ethics at Dartmouth College and is the author of Sound Play: Video Games and the Musical Imagination.

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