ENG 3931 Spring 2020 Faulk

In the past 30 years, music has moved from the margins of fiction to being a central concern. This course surveys the recent and ongoing “musicalization of fiction” (Werner Wolf) from a variety of perspectives, including adaptation theory and narrative theory. Topics of discussion include: how does writing about music impact literary form? How do literary narratives incorporate the various fan discourses of rock and hiphop? How does music, and writing about music, help transact racial and gender identity? We will begin by reading James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” (1957), a landmark meditation on African-American musical culture, but our main focus will be on recent fiction: by Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison, Jennifer Egan, Colson Whitehead, Michael Muhammad Knight, and Nick Hornby. We will also sample some recent work in Sound Studies, a new critical discourse that attempts to integrate musicology and literary studies.