Essays on Music and Language in Modernist Literature

Musical Modernism

Katherine O'Callaghan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367593476
• eBook ISBN: 9781351865883
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

This volume explores the role of music as a source of inspiration and provocation for modernist writers. In its consideration of modernist literature within a broad political, postcolonial, and internationalist context, this book is an important intervention in the growing field of Words and Music studies. It expands the existing critical debate to include lesser-known writers alongside Joyce, Woolf, and Beckett, a wide-ranging definition of modernism, and the influence of contemporary music on modernist writers. From the rhythm of Tagore's poetry to the influence of jazz improvisation, the tonality of traditional Irish music to the operas of Wagner, these essays reframe our sense of how music inspired Literary Modernism. Exploring the points at which the art forms of music and literature collide, repel, and combine, contributors draw on their deep musical knowledge to produce close readings of prose, poetry, and drama, confronting the concept of what makes writing "musical." In doing so, they uncover commonalities: modernist writers pursue simultaneity and polyphony, evolve the leitmotif for literary purposes, and adapt the formal innovations of twentieth-century music. The essays explore whether it is possible for literature to achieve that unity of form and subject which music enjoys, and whether literary texts can resist paraphrase, can be simply themselves. This book demonstrates how attention to the role of music in text in turn illuminates the manner in which we read literature.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Woolf Rewriting Wagner: The Waves and Der Ring des Nibelungen
• 2 “That’s the Music of the Future”: Joyce, Modernism, and the “Old Irish Tonality”
• 3 The Ring, The Waves, and the Wake: Eternal Recurrence in Wagner, Woolf, and Joyce
• 4 Musicality in Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End: Towards Modernity
• 5 The (R)Evolution of Olive Moore: Fugue as Bridge to a New Feminist Awakening
• 6 A Strict Arrangement: Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus, and the Kretzschmar Lectures
• 7 Sounding Bodies: Eroticized Music-Making in Proust’s À la Recherche
• 8 Rabindranath Tagore and Musical Modernity in Early Twentieth-Century Bengal
• 9 Words for Music Perhaps: W. B. Yeats, Music, and Meaninglessness
• 10 “The Way to Learn the Music of Verse Is to Listen to It”: Ezra Pound’s the Pisan Cantos and the “Sequence of the Musical Phrase”
• 11 Imagism’s Musical Sympathies: Amy Lowell and Claude Debussy
• 12 Expansive Musical Modernism in William Carlos Williams, Steve Reich, and Tom Leonard
• 13 The Sudden Thing of Being No One: Robert Creeley’s Rhythm Changes
• 14 “With all that Tutti and Continuo”: Musicality and Temporality in Djuna Barnes’s The Antiphon
• 15 “The Blues Always Been Here”: African American Music and Black Modernism in August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom
• 16 The Musicalization of Samuel Beckett
• Bibliography
• Index