Beskrivelse
“Imagining Music in Late Modern Novels” is the preliminary title of my PhD-dissertation. I study the presence of music in 20 novels published between 1990 and 2010. In this presentation, I will introduce the theoretical scope of the dissertation, and particularly introduce the concept of literary “imaginaries” of music based on Charles Taylor (2003), Jonathan Sterne (2012), and Pierre Dubois (2015) among others. Instead of studying ”the musicalization of fiction” (Wolf, 1999), asking what literature gains from musical themes and structures, I will attempt a more contextual and cultural approach to Word and Music Studies inspired by e.g. Stephen Benson (2006). I frame the phenomenon of music in literature as a ”fictionalisation of music”, and I ask how the literary medium can articulate and stage conceptions of music in a particular way. With Rita Felski, I propose that literary fiction ”creates distinctive configurations of social knowledge” (2011 p. 14).I will briefly discuss how such literary configurations of social knowledge about music take place in two novels: The Time of Our Singing (Richard Powers, 2002) and The Ground Beneath Her Feet (Salman Rushdie, 1999). Though set in very different Western musical cultures, the characters’ relations to music are strikingly similar, and both novels regard music (and the musical genius) as something “otherworldly”.
| Periode | 21 dec. 2022 |
|---|---|
| Sted for afholdelse | Linnaeus University, Sverige |