Key Components of Musical Discourse Analysis

Musical discourse analysis is an interdisciplinary study which is incomplete without consideration of relevant social, linguistic, psychological, visual, gestural, ritual, technical, historical and musicological aspects. In the framework of Critical Discourse Analysis, musical discourse can be interpreted as social practice: it refers to specific means of representing specific aspects of the social (musical) sphere. The article introduces a general view of contemporary musical discourse, and analyses genres from the point of ‘semiosis’, ‘social agents’, ‘social relations’, ‘social context’, and ‘text’. These components of musical discourse analysis, in their various aspects and combinations, should help thoroughly examine the context of contemporary musical art, and determine linguistic features specific to different genres of musical discourse

Odious Debt, Old and New: The Legal Intellectual History of an Idea

In a sense, all debts are odious; that is, to use dictionary definitions, hateful; disgusting; offensive. Yet insofar as international economic law today is concerned, only a certain few debts can be considered odious debts in order to contest and perhaps eventually to repudiate them. Here, Feinerman examines the concepts of odious debt and related international legal phenomena, in both historical and contemporary context, with a view of determining the role that denomination of certain debts as odious may play in the overall process of sovereign debt rescheduling

Historical Political Economy: What Is It?

In this chapter, we define what historical political economy (HPE) is and is not, classify the major themes in the literature, assess the relative strengths and weaknesses of the literature, and point to future directions. We view HPE as social scientific inquiry which highlights political causes or consequences of historical issues. HPE is different from conventional political economy in the emphasis placed on historical processes and context. While we view HPE in the most inclusive manner reasonable, we define it to exclude works that are either solely of contemporary importance or use historical data without any historical context (e.g., long-run macroeconomic time series data). The future of HPE is bright, especially as more historical data from around the world become available via digitization. Consequently, the future frontier of the field likely falls outside of the US, which is the concern of a disproportionate amount of the current literature

Analysis of the classical cyclotomic approach to fermat's last theorem

We give again the proof of several classical results concerning the cyclotomic approach to Fermat's last theorem using exclusively class field theory (essentially the reflection theorems), without any calculations. The fact that this is possible suggests a part of the logical inefficiency of the historical investigations. We analyze the significance of the numerous computations of the literature, to show how they are probably too local to get any proof of the theorem. However we use the derivation method of Eichler as a prerequisite for our purpose, a method which is also local but more effective. Then we propose some modest ways of study in a more diophantine context using radicals; this point of view would require further nonalgebraic investigations.Comment: Publications Math\'ematiques UFR Sciences Techniques Besan\c{c}on 2010 (2010) 85-11