Listening In
Subtitle: Music, Mind, and the Modernist Narrative (Stages)
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Published: January 1, 2003
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 324
ISBN-13: 9780803237322
Subjects: Literary studies: general; Theory of music & musicology; Semiotics & Theory; Modernism (Literature); 20th Century Literature - History And Criticism; Philosophy And Esthetics Of Music; Literature - Classics / Criticism; French; Music; History & Criticism - General; Literary Criticism & Collections / General; General; 20th century; History; Music and literature; Philosophy and aesthetics
Description: "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."--Jacket.