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Popular Music and the Poetics of Self in Fiction explores the various links between the self and popular music in contemporary fiction. In the novels discussed in this volume, musical references go far beyond creating a tapestry of sound, they make literary characters come alive by giving an account of the physiological and psychological effects of their musical experiences and of their ways of life in different (sub)cultural and social groups. With plots revolving around songs and albums, musicians and bands, and fans and scenes, the thematic focus on the self encompasses the relation of musical taste and identity construction, popular music’s function as a medium of individual and collective memory, and its uses in everyday life across decades, spaces, and genres.
Popular Music and the Poetics of Self in Fiction explores the various links between the self and popular music in contemporary fiction. In the novels discussed in this volume, musical references go far beyond creating a tapestry of sound, they make literary characters come alive by giving an account of the physiological and psychological effects of their musical experiences and of their ways of life in different (sub)cultural and social groups. With plots revolving around songs and albums, musicians and bands, and fans and scenes, the thematic focus on the self encompasses the relation of musical taste and identity construction, popular music’s function as a medium of individual and collective memory, and its uses in everyday life across decades, spaces, and genres.
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Kind aus Blau (Child of Blue) is a hybrid of a jazz biography and a work of experimental prose that deviates both from the patterns of a commercial jazz biography and from conventional narrative prose. Pohl defamiliarizes the ‘jazz code’, i.e. the experience of slavery and racist persecution, and impregnates his text with music. By way of intermedial transfer from music, experimental techniques that are typical of poetry rather than prose are imported into the text. Playing with the graphics and sounds of words, the author creates a complex web of relations and associations. Pohl draws attention to the distortions that take place when jazz is transferred from its original environment into other cultural and linguistic contexts. Names, song titles, and all sorts of props translated into German sound exotic, satirical, or simply trivial. Thus, imitating Miles Davis’s way of making music, Kind aus Blau provides an extravagant concept of melophrasis that integrates the jazz star into the tradition of European avant-garde art.
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This article examines the act of cultural appropriation presented in Jonathan Lethem’s novel The Fortress of Solitude (2003). Lethem’s text relates musical taste to questions of authenticity, entitlement, and identity in a society structured by racist discourses. After contextualising the debates introduced in the novel, I compare them to two other contemporary North American novels which centre on the entanglement of pop music and racialised power structures: Michael Chabon’s Telegraph Avenue (2012) and Paul Beatty’s Slumberland (2008). In these two novels, two other forms of appropriation can be localised: gentrification, being understood as spatial appropriation, and retromania – a mode of temporal appropriation. I analyse how these phenomena form the material basis of the act of cultural appropriation in The Fortress of Solitude by looking for intersections between the three novels’ narratives.
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This article introduces an infrastructural perspective on musical taste. Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of distinction (in the social space) and consecration (in social fields) will be complemented by some insights of the more recent sociology of mediation, valuation, and evaluation. The article shows how various infrastructures ‘enact’ different concepts of music, music creators, or listeners and, therefore, ‘mediate’ the musical experience in different ways. However, Bourdieu’s field analytical approach helps to analyse the relations and struggles between different principles of valuation and evaluation. This becomes most important, as digitalisation brings a new dynamic to the field of popular music. Finally, the article shows some of the implications of the aforementioned infrastructural approach for the analysis of the relationship between popular music and fiction.
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The realm of word and music studies in ‘Dylanology’ mostly focuses on the multifaceted presence of literature in Dylan’s life and music, with fictional representations of Bob Dylan belonging to the few topics yet to be explored. While a variety of authors have created literary characters that share Dylan’s name or some of his character traits, the plots discussed in this article revolve around characters directly modeled on Dylan: The Rich Man’s Table (1998) by American novelist Scott Spencer introduces an unacknowledged son desperate to get to know his famous father, Catfish. Ein Bob Dylan Roman (2014) by German journalist Maik Brüggemeyer accompanies a fan traveling to New York City to capture Dylan’s spirit, and Die Köchin von Bob Dylan (2016) by German singer-songwriter Markus Berges follows a young woman who, as a chef, joins Dylan’s tour crew. Since all plots are concerned with the way in which the heroes’ identity is transformed by meeting the fictitious Dylan, the article examines why and how the three novelists address questions of the self through the ever-changing phenomenon that is Bob Dylan.
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Fictional narratives about careers in pop music face the difficulty of representing musical elements via text, but overcome this in a number of ways. A common strategy is to fit the fictitious details into pop history as it is known to readers, especially by way of magazine features and references to actual people and music. Comparisons to well-known sounds or tunes are also supplemented by technical or associative descriptions of music. Several of the novels and stories analyzed in this paper (Gillian Cross: Chartbreak; David Keenan: This is Memorial Device; Lauren Laverne: Candypop; Taylor Jenkins Reid: Daisy Jones & The Six; Dana Spiotta: Stone Arabia; Wendy Erskine: ‘77 Pop Facts You Didn’t Know About Gil Courtney’) also integrate the lyrics of the songs into the narrative, drawing a straightforward connection between events and their artistic expression. This, moreover, often serves to make the narrative more relatable to a general audience.
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There are added elements to any work of art. Paratexts of the novel Die Erfindung der Roten Armee Fraktion durch einen manisch-depressiven Teenager im Sommer 1969 by Frank Witzel are the starting point for the following discussion about the German author’s poetics. The frequent mentioning of and the dealing with records, especially Rubber Soul by The Beatles, reveal common features of artefacts from different art genres. I try to show how appendages to the text such as indices or footnotes affect the substance of the narrative. Apart from paratexts, this article explores other methods of approach to Rubber Soul in the novel: the importance of sequence in literature and recorded music on vinyl, and of associations prompted by references to all sorts of cultural artefacts, and how they add to the mood (‘Stimmungskontext’) of Witzel’s text.
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This essay investigates intermedial resonances and narrative dissonances in American country music singer-songwriter Steve Earle’s oeuvre with a particular focus on the racial politics that emerge from a comparative analysis of the song and eponymous short story ‘Taneytown’ (from the El Corazon album from 1997 and the Doghouse Roses short story collection from 2001, respectively). Discerning crucial commonalities between country music as a narrative-driven music and Earle’s literary works, the essay foregrounds the specific affordances of each form of expression while recognizing that music and literature comingle in the larger public sphere, where songs and stories unfold their strongest political effects, as a final consideration of ‘Mississippi, It’s Time’ (2015) indicates. The complexity of Earle’s racial politics and the singer-songwriter and author’s embrace of an ambiguous type of American exceptionalism, the essay suggests, can only be properly understood when his music and literature are heard and read in conjunction and contextualized with his political activism beyond sound and text.