CMUS 210 - Music in Literature

FC ARHU CD WINT

4 credits
This course explores how literature understands, represents, and imitates music. We will read poems about music, novels about musicians and composers, and novels structured like musical compositions (fugues, theme and variations). The course looks at eighteenth-century quarrels between Neoclassicists (les Anciens) and Moderns that led to the reversal of the poetic primacy of mimesis in favor of modern artistic expression. It examines musics rise in favor from the least appreciated of the Sister Arts to the autonomous Romantic art par excellence. This aesthetic turn will inform our study of literatures attempts to integrate music into its forms and themes.