Eulogy for Apollo: Synesthesia and Musicality in Andrei Bely's PETERSBURG and James Joyce's ULYSSES

Date of Award

2009

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Humanities

First Advisor

Schatz, David

Keywords

Bely, Andrei, Joyce, James, Music and Literature, Synesthesia, Modernism

Area of Concentration

Literature

Abstract

Petersburg and Ulysses are often compared within the Modernist movement as texts which capture the urban landscapes of the early twentieth-century by means of radical experimentation with language. Petersburg examines a specific tumultuous moment in Russian history, October of 1905, and tethers it to a unique brand of synesthetic and musical poetics. The narrative portrays the cosmic and ineffable qualities of the political and social climate, suggesting an apocalyptic transformation taking place within the city. Nietzsche's Apollonian-Dionysian duality of the arts developed in Birth of Tragedy can be usefully applied to understanding the novel's complex imagery and style, which assert a total collapse of order and reason. Music also plays an important role in the Dionysian aspect of the novel and Bely deploys various devices which charge his language with the qualities of music. The examination of Ulysses focuses on the "Sirens" episode of the novel and the multifaceted musical-linguistic experiments with form and narrative within it. The distinction between Apollonian and Marsyan styles of artistic collaboration frames the discussion of Joyce's musical mode of expression. Both texts have great interest in the prowess and potential of language to move beyond itself, to create challenging and provocative fictive worlds, while having distinct approaches to their unique synthetic literary processes.

This document is currently not available here.

Share

COinS