LIT 5017 Fall 2023 Faulk

“For twenty-five centuries, western knowledge has tried to look upon the world. It has failed to understand that the world is not for beholding. It is for hearing. It is not legible, but audible.” Jacques Attali’s demand for a new mode of engaging the world that de-privileges sight and attends to the world as an auditory phenomenon is answered by the writers of the modern music novel. Our reading will focus on 20th and 21st century fictions that engage with and respond to music; we will pay special attention to how writers incorporate musical themes and adapt the methods of musical composition for narrative purposes in their writing. We’ll also consider how the shift from analog to digital technology has transformed our relationship to music, and how novelists, and novelistic forms, have adapted to these changes. Our reading will include: Michael Ondaatje’s Coming Through Slaughter (1976), Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia (1990), Toni Morrison’s Jazz (1992), Jackie Kay’s Trumpet (2000), Zadie Smith’s On Beauty (2005), Kazuo Ishiguro’s Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall (2009), Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad (2011), and Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Daisy Jones and the Six (2019).