The Musicalization Of Fiction

This volume is a pioneering study in the theory and history of the imitation of music in fiction and constitutes an important contribution to current intermediality research. Starting with a comparison of basic similarities and differences between literature and music, the study goes on to provide outlines of a general theory of intermediality and its fundamental forms, in which a more specialized theory of the musicalization of (narrative) literature based on contemporary narratology and a typology of the forms of musico-literary intermediality are embedded. It also addresses the question of how to recognize a musicalized fiction when reading one and why Sterne's Tristram Shandy, contrary to what has been previously said, is not to be regarded as a musicalized fiction. In its historical part, the study explores forms and functions of experiments with the musicalization of fiction in English literature. After a survey of the major preconditions for musicalization - the increasing appreciation of music in 18th and 19th-century aesthetics and its main causes - exemplary fictional texts from romanticism to postmodernism are analyzed. Authors interpreted are De Quincey, Joyce, Woolf, A. Huxley, Beckett, Burgess and Josipovici. Whilst the limitations of a transposition of music into fiction remain apparent, experiments in this field yield valuable insights into mainly a-mimetic and formalist aesthetic tendencies in the development of more recent fiction as a whole and also show to what extent traditional conceptions of music continue to influence the use of this medium in literature. The volume is of relevance for students and scholars of English, comparative and general literature as well as for readers who take an interest in intermediality or interart research.

This volume is a pioneering study in the theory and history of the imitation of music in fiction and constitutes an important contribution to current intermediality research. Starting with a comparison of basic similarities and differences between literature and music, the study goes on to provide outlines of a general theory of intermediality and its fundamental forms, in which a more specialized theory of the musicalization of (narrative) literature based on contemporary narratology and a typology of the forms of musico-literary intermediality are embedded. It also addresses the question of how to recognize a musicalized fiction when reading one and why Sterne's Tristram Shandy, contrary to what has been previously said, is not to be regarded as a musicalized fiction. In its historical part, the study explores forms and functions of experiments with the musicalization of fiction in English literature. After a survey of the major preconditions for musicalization - the increasing appreciation of music in 18th and 19th-century aesthetics and its main causes - exemplary fictional texts from romanticism to postmodernism are analyzed. Authors interpreted are De Quincey, Joyce, Woolf, A. Huxley, Beckett, Burgess and Josipovici. Whilst the limitations of a transposition of music into fiction remain apparent, experiments in this field yield valuable insights into mainly a-mimetic and formalist aesthetic tendencies in the development of more recent fiction as a whole and also show to what extent traditional conceptions of music continue to influence the use of this medium in literature. The volume is of relevance for students and scholars of English, comparative and general literature as well as for readers who take an interest in intermediality or interart research.

What can music teach a novelist, autobiographer, or playwright about the art of telling stories? The musical play of forms and sounds seems initially to have little to do with the representational function of the traditional narrative genres. Yet throughout the modernist era, music has been invoked as a model for narrative in its specifically mimetic dimension. Although modernist writers may conceive of musical communication in widely divergent ways, they have tended to agree on one crucial point: that music can help transform narrative into a medium better adapted to the representation of consciousness. Eric Prieto studies the twentieth-century evolution of this use of music, with particular emphasis on the postwar Parisian avant-garde. For such writers as Samuel Beckett, Michel Leiris, and Robert Pinget, music provides a number of guiding metaphors for the inwardly directed mode of mimesis that Prieto calls "listening in," where the object of representation is not the outside world but the subtly modulating relations between consciousness and world. This kind of semiotic boundary crossing between music and literature is inherently metaphorical, but, as Prieto's analyses of Beckett, Leiris, and Pinget show, these interart analogies provide valuable clues for bringing to light the unspoken assumptions, obscurely understood principles, and extra-literary aspirations that gave such urgency to the modernist quest to better represent the mind in action.

This handbook offers students and researchers compact orientation in their study of intermedial phenomena in Anglophone literary texts and cultures by introducing them to current academic debates, theoretical concepts and methodologies. By combining theory with text analysis and contextual anchoring, it introduces students and scholars alike to a vast field of research which encompasses concepts such as intermediality, multi- and plurimediality, intermedial reference, transmediality, ekphrasis, as well as related concepts such as visual culture, remediation, adaptation, and multimodality, which are all discussed in connection with literary examples. Hence each of the 30 contributions spans both a theoretical approach and concrete analysis of literary texts from different centuries and different Anglophone cultures.

As the twentieth century draws to a close, Ireland in Writing: Interviews with Writers and Academics focuses on the textual mapping of the country over the century through the creative energies and intellectual reflections of a selection of writers and educators at the tertiary level. The volume is a collection of eleven interviews held by three university teachers and a research assistant, all resident in Spain. The interviews with both male and female writers and academics, who hail from Northern Ireland and the Republic, have been conducted over the 1990s. The writers were quizzed about their own writing: how it came into being, who or what they have looked to as inspirational and how their novels, short stories, poetry and plays relate to Ireland past and present. The academics express views on their critical theories and practices, on particular areas of interest, on English and Irish in Ireland, on contemporary writing and cultural dynamics: from Friel to Telefís Éireann, passing through Field Day, the Abbey and the question of a hybrid Irish identity.

This collection of 19 essays is the first one devoted to function-oriented analyses of intermedial interrelationships in literature, art, music, and film. The contributors — among others, Werner Wolf, James Heffernan, Walter Bernhart, Siglind Bruhn, Claus Clüver, Valerie Robillard, and Tamar Yacobi — are leading international scholars in the field of intermediality. The common basis of the essays in this volume — ranging from intermedial studies of medieval liturgical practices, early cinema, modernist art, ekphrasis, music and literature, art and literature, film and literature, hymns, and pop music, to the musical and technological aspects of Concrete poetry — is the ambition to pay attention to the cultural contexts that enhance the significance of these intermedial works and trends under examination. Since the contributions cover different types of intermedial endeavours from various periods and times, a kind of historicizing perspective is outlined. So, in pursuit of a still lacking coherent historical survey of cultural functions of intermediality, this volume might be recognized as a step towards such a Funktionsgeschichte for intermedial exploration.

The volume explores the various intersections and interconnections of the self and popular music in fiction; it examines questions of musical taste and identity construction across decades, spaces, social groups, and cultural contexts, covering a wide range of literary and musical genres.

The study develops a new theoretical approach to the relationship between two media (jazz music and writing) and demonstrates its explanatory power with the help of a rich sampling of jazz poems. Currently, the mimetic approach to intermediality (e.g., the notion that jazz poetry imitates jazz music) still dominates the field of criticism. This book challenges that interpretive approach. It demonstrates that a mimetic view of jazz poetry hinders readers from perceiving the metaphoric ways poets rendered music in writing. Drawing on and extending recent cognitive metaphor theories (Lakoff, Johnson, Turner, Fauconnier), it promotes a conceptual metaphor model that allows readers to discover the innovative ways poets translate “melody,” “dynamics,” “tempo,” “mood,” and other musical elements into literal and figurative expressions that invite readers to imagine the music in their mind’s eye (i.e., their mind’s ear).