Abstract
In “Home and Exile: Listening for Contrapuntal Irony in Don Juan,” I connect several threads of contemporary critical theory to read Lord Byron's Don Juan via temporal-audial contrapuntal analysis. The work traces the development of Edward Said's contrapuntal analysis in its relationship to his worldly experience of exile. It follows David Bartine and Eileen Maguire's argument that Said's technique needs more fidelity to the musical basis of counterpoint. This investigation of contrapuntal analysis concludes by gesturing to Jean-Luc Nancy's Listening as the catalyst by which Said's contrapuntal analysis might more fully address the temporal-audial aspects of exilic subjectivity. Such a depiction of exile is well-aligned with the foundational criticism of Don Juan as an ironic form of art. I argue for a “listening analysis,” which focuses on complex variations in “eventual times” in Don Juan's small-scale language and its large-scale compositional structures to provide new insight into the text. This reading suggests a mobile ironic experience of exile which differs meaningfully from more traditional, static representations of exile. Finally, I argue temporal-audial contrapuntal analysis has further implications for critical theory than just Don Juan. Rather, deconstructing the (visual) stasis built around exile informs exilic art in other, contemporary, literary periods.
