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Teacher
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FRANCESCHINI STEFANO
(syllabus)
This year’s Working and Reworking the Literary Text addresses the intermedial relationship between music and literary fiction, exploring how contemporary American novels incorporate sound both at the level of form and content. Through close readings of Jazz by Toni Morrison (1992), A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (2010), and Orfeo by Richard Powers (2014), students will analyze the strategies through which authors effectively translate musical structures, devices and meaning into narrative form. With intermediality at large providing the theoretical backbone of the course, the syllabus will focus on the works of Steven Paul Scher, Werner Wolf, and Emily Petermann. In addition to these sources, students will draw on pre-existing criticism as further guidance on the above novels’ engagement with sound and musicality. This selection of novels allows for a preliminary yet sufficiently comprehensive study of how jazz, rock and classical music serve as a heteromedial and resourcefully composite toolbox for American Literature to draw upon. Students will thus be encouraged to consider literature not only as a recording device lending its textual voice to sound, but also as discourse that aspires to evoke a full-fledged musical experience in the minds (and ears) of the reader.
(reference books)
FONTI PRIMARIE • Toni Morrison, Jazz, London: Vintage, 2004 [1992] • Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad (any edition; 2010) • Richard Powers, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2014
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