CHAPTER 4 Opera and the Search for a Universal Language

Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter i
2. Contents vii
3. Note on Language ix
4. Introduction 1
5. PART I Sound and Script
6. CHAPTER 1 The Number of Everything: Music, Cosmology, and the Origins of Language 15
7. CHAPTER 2 Letters from the West: Sanskrit, Latin, and Phonetic Legibility in Ming China 46
8. CHAPTER 3 Script, Antiquity, and Mental Training: Metaphysical Inquiry Into the Nondiscursive Potential of Writing 73
9. PART II Singing and Speaking, Reading and Writing
10. CHAPTER 4 Opera and the Search for a Universal Language 103
11. CHAPTER 5 Reading the Classics for Pleasure: Prose as Verse, Verse as Music 136
12. PART III Philology: The Making and Remaking of a Discipline
13. CHAPTER 6 Afterlives: Ming Methods and Their Competition in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries 167
14. CHAPTER 7 The Reinvention of Philology: Specialization, Disciplinarity, and Intellectual Lineage 199
15. Epilogue 224
16. Acknowledgments 231
17. Notes 235
18. Selected Bibliography 285
19. Index 305