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.