Writing the Acoustic Self in English Modernism

Title: Writing the Acoustic Self in English Modernism
Identifier: d_2009_2013:f232717ad536:11704
identifier: 12306
Creator: Varga, Zoltan,
Contributor: John Brenkman
Date: 2013
Language: English
Publisher: City University of New York.
Subject: Comparative literature | English literature | E. M. Forster | English novel | modernism | music | semiotics
Abstract: The dissertation maps the different modes employed for the musicalization of fiction in English modernism, mainly focusing on novels by E. M. Forster, Aldous Huxley, and Virginia Woolf. While music is usually present on the level of structure and characterization in these texts, I claim that even its structural applications are related to characterization and address modernist dilemmas regarding the notions of self and identity. I delineate three modes of musicalization in English modernist fiction---the fugue, absolute music, and Gesamtkunstwerk---and argue that they are interrelated with an emerging modernist critique of the subject. Employing methods of narrative theory, semiotics, and musical semiotics, I aim to show how music, in its paradoxical relationship with representation and language, generates an interference within fictional texts, creating an aporia that allows for an analogy with the constitution of human subjectivity.
Type: dissertation
Source: 2009_2013.csv
degree: Ph.D.
Program: Comparative Literature