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Frequently, the study of music is relegated to the fields of musicology or media studies, even though it has been inextricably intertwined with the United States of America since its founding, and with literature ever since human beings first learned to speak. Many of humanity’s oldest epics, from the Iliad to Beowulf to The Epic of Gilgamesh were originally performed in song, and all of them in turn describe scenes of singing and playing music. In the US, Ralph Waldo Emerson frequently depicted his ideal ”Poet” with a lute or harp, Henry David Thoreau wrote at length about the music of nature as well as of the people surrounding him, and Walt Whitman’s most canonical work is not by accident titled ”Song of Myself.”
In the 20th century, many of the most seminal innovations in North American culture happened in music, from the descendants of enslaved people blending European harmonies and African rhythms into the genre of jazz, ”the original American art form,” to the rock music that fueled the counterculture and Anti-Vietnam War Movement of the 1960s, to the cultural critique and vast commercial success of rap from the 1980s to the present. Unsurprisingly, this music in turn permeates the literature of the respective time periods and, in the form of song lyrics, even engendered its own kind of poetry. It is unsurprising, then, that the musician Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016.
In this seminar, we explore three different ways in which music and American literature intersect. First, music as the subject of literature, second, music as literature, and third, music as an alternative to verbal, literary expression. We will discuss the seminar role of music in American culture and its literary representation, as well as its entanglement with questions of race, gender, and economic inequality. This will frequently lead us to music in the context of personal and societal crises: How do words and music, respectively or jointly, respond to systemic racism, climate change, and US-American imperialism?
The core of this seminar will thus be constituted by three short novels in which music plays a pivotal role: On the Road by Jack Kerouac (1957), The Armageddon Rag by George R. R. Martin (1983), and Jazz by Toni Morrison (1992). In addition to these, we will discuss works by Lin-Manuel Miranda, Kendrick Lamar, and The Weather Station, as well as acquire a basic toolset about how to assess and analyze the meaning-making qualities of music in a literary studies context. |
