Virtuosity of the nineteenth century

Franz Liszt is the organizing figure in this detailed study of music in Heine and Baudelaire. The acclaimed virtuoso functions both as a metaphor for a musical mode of enunciation and as a historical referent. This dual status dramatizes the struggle at the heart of nineteenth-century aesthetics between poetic self-reference and realism's efforts to report the world accurately.

The book's analyses of nineteenth-century theories of correspondence, along with the thematization of the "other arts," point to the limitations of analogy, the impossibility of a general theory of art, and a crisis of identity - that is, a shared non-identity - that can be the only common property among different discourses, genres, and media.