Abstract
This chapter contextualizes the historical and aesthetic era of high modernist fiction (1918–1939) by focusing specifically on its multimodal and sonorous qualities. It briefly discusses some major conceptualizations and taxonomies created in the intermedial field of musico-literary theory. This is followed by a summary and discussion of a selection of general musico-literary criticism that focuses on literary texts from the modernist era. This section transitions into a summary of the musico-literary analytical landscape surrounding three modernist authors: Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Thomas Mann. The overall aim of the chapter is to identify the different perspectives, methodologies, and concerns that can be found in the vast body of musico-modernist-literary criticism and locate some of the major tendencies in these intermedial ventures.
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Notes
- 1.
Nathan Waddell’s impressive review of recent monographs on the interconnection between music (sound) and modernist literature, “Modernism and Music: A Review of Recent Scholarship” (2017), provides an excellent survey of the current critical musico-literary landscape in modernist studies.
- 2.
I have consciously omitted Proust from this list. Although much has been written, especially in French, on Proust’s use of music in À la recherche du temps perdu, I find that much of the focus has been on the explicit intermedial reference to specific musical (but some less specific, of course) pieces.
- 3.
- 4.
There are of course multiple studies that provide overviews of the development of sound and music in the modernist era. A few notable examples are those of Kittler (1990, 1999), Stevens (1990), Schafer (1977), Halliday (2013), Sterne (2012), Thompson (2002), Trotter (2013), and the early chapters in Fekadu (2013). For an excellent review of recent books on sound history and modernism, see Latham (2017).
- 5.
Isabelle Brasme approaches Parade’s End from a more traditional musico-literary perspective, singling out three musicalizations in terms of “symphony, of the structural use of leitmotifs, and of a shift from a contrapuntal mode to one of atonality” (Brasme 2018, 62).
- 6.
For further discussions on the sounds of war and modernist literature, see Connor (1997).
- 7.
In addition to Epstein’s extensive work on modernist poetry, Claus Clüver addresses concrete sound poetry specifically as an intermediate aesthetic form that sits between music and poetry (Clüver 2002).
- 8.
Stewart defines a “sound defect” as something vaguely askew, indeed unhinged, in the discrete vocabulary of a given syntactic format: a sound effect as sound defect.
- 9.
It is worth noting that Wolf not only considers modernism to be a literary movement that is transgressive but also includes postmodernism in this genre.
- 10.
Although the handbook focuses on German and French romanticism, a complement to the musico-literary taxonomies in this handbook is Albert Grier’s “Musik in der Literatur: Einflüsse und Analogien” (1995) in which Grier conducts parallel readings of romantic music and romantic literature within a semiotic framework.
- 11.
For a more extensive analysis of Lowell’s musical writing, see Chap. 1 in Fekadu’s (2013) book. Fekadu argues that Lowell charts music as a figure of thought in her approach to a “new poetry” whose (originally) oral, performative character she intends to preserve. In addition to this, Debora Van Durme explores further the musical connection between imagism and Lowell’s poetry with a special focus on the music of Debussy (Van Durme 2018).
- 12.
For a more extensive discussion on the concept of literary soundtracks, see Graham (2013), who broadens the corpus from Fitzgerald to also include T. S. Eliot and poets of the Harlem Renaissance.
- 13.
It is worth mentioning The Reading of Silence: Virginia Woolf in the English Tradition, in which Patricia Ondek Laurence looks at silence in a selection of Woolf’s novels from a predominantly feminist perspective, and Annika J. Lindskog’s two chapters on silence in Woolf’s works, which are part of her doctoral thesis Silent Modernism. Soundscapes and the Unsayable in Richardson, Joyce and Woolf (2014).
- 14.
For a thorough examination of how classical music functions as inspiration as well as reference in the works of Woolf (the Bloomsbury group), T. S. Eliot, Huxley, and D. H. Lawrence, see David Deutsch’s monograph British Literature and Classical Music: Cultural Contexts 1870–1945 (2015).
- 15.
- 16.
For an additional reading of how Joyce attempts to fuse music with language, see Bucknell (2001, 132–138).
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This chapter is dedicated to my late PhD supervisor, colleague, and friend Laura Marcus, who opened my eyes to the interdisciplinary and intermedial potentials of modernism and English studies. I would also like to thank Thomas Leitch and Kyle Meikle for sharing their extensive bibliography on film and adaptation.
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Salmose, N. (2024). The Sonification of Modernist Fiction: A Critical Review. In: Bruhn, J., Azcárate, A.LV., de Paiva Vieira, M. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Intermediality. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28322-2_36
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