Chapter 12
Reflections on Friedrich Christian Delius’s Die Zukunft der Schönheit
In: Popular Music and the Poetics of Self in FictionSearch for other papers by Nicola Gess in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
Purchase instant access (PDF download and unlimited online access):
Abstract
The connection between music and memory is currently receiving a great deal of attention in popular science and psychological literature. This article takes a closer look at the literary dimension of this trend in contemporary literature, particularly in Friedrich Christian Delius’s novel Die Zukunft der Schönheit (The Future of Beauty) (2018). Based on this book, the connection of music, memory, and literature is examined not so much genealogically as systematically, by reading it, on the one hand, as a multi-layered structure of evocations and in the tradition of literary inspiration myths, and, on the other, by examining how the literary text speaks about music and itself becomes ‘musicalized’.