More recently, theatre has turned to increasingly abstruse texts.
The insight comes courtesy of the Aspen Institute's Justice and Society Seminar, where I've been spending several days, pondering at times abstruse texts that turn out to have surprising resonance with current events.
Precisely where the great German philosophers Immanuel Kant (1724-1824) and Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) stond on matters of doing and being is the subject of many an abstruse scholarly text.
For Chinese children, language and reading instruction consisted of rote memorization of such abstruse Confucius texts as The Great Learning (大學Daxue) and The Doctrine of the Mean (中庸Zhongyong).
He could have been a T.A. in one of my college courses, or the slightly older guy in Advanced Approaches to Interpretation who sat slightly aloof from the others and had not only mastered the abstruse and trendy texts everyone else was reading, but also skipped backward, sideways and ahead.
"He's playing a very dangerous game, because he's taking on all his predecessors," by, for example, recasting metaphors from The Aeneid, Dante's favorite pagan text, and reworking the abstruse medieval theology of Thomas Aquinas into dazzling poetry.
Anything with women's shoes on the cover is chick lit; anything with a title that takes up the entire cover page is a thriller; anything with a plain blue background and text in thin white letters is some abstruse but probably fascinating scholarly book from M.I.T. Kudos to the designers of this book which gave me pause.
Phillips develops his abstruse theme over five chapters, the bulk of the text taking the form of an on-the-hoof gloss on 19th-century writers interested in ideas of secular morality (Wilde, Nietzsche and Freud are paraphrased and riffed on at special length).
Another departure, heading in a different, more abstruse direction, was John Eaton's foray into microtonality in "Duo" (1977), which treated contrasting biblical texts (God as both the refuge of the faithful and a source of retribution) with solo and choral sections pulling in opposite directions.
