Daniel Albright’s Interdisciplinary Studies Of Literature,Music, Visual Arts And Quantum Mechanics

This thesis analyzes Daniel Albright’s interdisciplinary studies of literature,music, visual arts and quantum mechanics, focusing on five of his works. Albright takes an interest in Shakespeare’s plays and poems of Ezra Pound and W. B. Yeats. In his study of the interaction of literature and music, Albright discusses the scenes, plots,characters and the change of psychological activities in Shaksepeare’s plays by analyzing Berlioz’s dramatic symphony Roméo et Juliette and Verdi’s oprea Macbeth,which opens a new way to the studies of Shakespeare’s plays and brings new life to literary works. Painting attracts Albright’s attention. In the study of the interaction of visual arts, literature and music, Albright illustrates the inspiration of hieroglyph to Mozart’s opera the Magic Flute and the affinity of ideogram and Noh plays with Pound’s poetics. He holds that musical epigrams and bells of the glockenspiel and the flute in the Magic Flute are the variants of hieroglyph. These hieroglyphs are visual signs that can speak, express meanings explicitly and show the relation between visual arts and music. In his study of visual arts and Pound’s poems, Albright believes that Pound’s poetics is formed on the basis of ideogram and Noh plays. In his study of quantum mechanics and literature, Albright analyzes the influence of quantum mechanics on modernist poetry and he believes that modernist poets such as Yeats take the wave concept in quantum mechanics that concerns the movement of the substance as a tool to compose poetry. Albright points out that Yeats’ s poetics belongs to wave-aesthetics. The thesis illustrates Yeats’ s wave-aesthetics from two aspects: the empty background and a fluid universe. Albright’s interdisciplinary study unfolds the possibility of the fusion of arts and demonstrates the interaction of different kinds of art, which strengthens the force of an individual art.