"The most direct answer come from Bizet, Debussy, Ravel... and Glinka, all of whom have 'told' us through their widely disseminated works what they take Spanish music to be."
"the many paradoxes in the musical history of this 'peripheral' country confronting modernism."
These are quote from the musicologist Carol Hess that I use in one of my chapters. She is a very good writer, and her work is impressive. I wouldn't use quotations marks around these words. Either Spain is peripheral or it is not. If it is, drop the quotation marks. If it isn't, rephrase.
Obviously, (well, obviously to me), this mannerism arose out of deconstruction. All of sudden the "language" we use to describe "things" came into "question." It seemed "naive" to use words that were "problematic" in this way, so everything had to be put under erasure. Since we still had to use words to "communicate," we could "signal" our distance "from" them typographically.
A word like "aesthetic" could be used, but only in quotes, otherwise the reader might think we actually believe in "aesthetics," god forbid. The word in italics functions in the opposite way: here we are saying that this word solves our problems, as in the word cultural.
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