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Tuning Out: Intersections of Music and Literature in the Contemporary French-Language Novel
Abstract
The past thirty years have seen a shift in French-language novels as authors move from the self-reflexive formal experimentation of the nouveau roman and its successors toward a literature that is again concerned with plot, character, and above all, the problems of the contemporary world. This “retour au récit” is accompanied by a resurgence of interest in writing the self (through experiments in autofiction), the past (through explorations of collective memory and collective guilt), and the present (through novels that challenge existing social structures and seek to define and develop new collective or national identities).This dissertation examines the (re)turn to worldly issues in contemporary French-language literature through the lens of “musical” novels. The novels of Pauline Delabroy-Allard, Akira Mizubayashi, Antoine Volodine, Déwé Gorodé, and Chantal Spitz use music in different ways: sometimes the protagonist is a musician, sometimes a music lover; the music is sometimes performed live, sometimes listened to as a recording, sometimes overheard on the radio, and sometimes present only to the reader, as when the prose itself becomes metaphorically or imitatively musical. But though the authors studied here fill their novels with music, that is rarely their central concern. Instead, music is instrumentalized to explore questions of the self, of narrative construction, of intermediality, of historical memory, of racism, of colonialism, and of national identity. Their novels engage at once in linguistic play and social critique, using music as a means to intervene in contemporary debates about what society—and, for that matter, the self, and literature—should look like. The dual process of “listening in” (by identifying musical references and understanding them on their own) and “tuning out” (by querying the role of these references within the authors’ novels) is proposed as a method to read literature in a new light and to uncover the hidden personal, social, political, and historical resonances of novels’ musical soundtracks.
Subject Area
French literature|Creative writing|Musical performances|Music
Recommended Citation
Claussen, Alexander James, "Tuning Out: Intersections of Music and Literature in the Contemporary French-Language Novel" (2024). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI31293512.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI31293512