| In this dissertation, I analyze five novelists' representations of music and consider how they each use musical tropes to explore the idea of negotiating cultural and social boundaries, including the boundaries between "high" and "low" culture. The primary texts upon which this study focuses are the following: James Joyce's "Sirens" episode from Ulysses, James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night, Maxine Hong Kingston's Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book, and Toni Morrison's Jazz.;This study analyzes novelistic portrayals of both the disruptive and the conservative effects of music as a social force and a cultural production. From an interdisciplinary perspective that includes extensive research in music history, I examine the ways that music impacts these authors' approaches to style, characterization, language, metaphorical implications, narrative structure, and historical engagement. The 1920s debate over "jazz" as popular music in America significantly informs this project, but the chapters on Kingston and Joyce also extend the scope of my analysis to consider, in other cultural and historical contexts, representations of music as a social and an aesthetic threat to the absolutism of binary oppositions.;The inspiration for this study emerged from my reading of musicologist John Shepherd's ideas about the capacity of music to cross boundaries---both symbolically and in direct, tangible ways. In his Music as Social Text, Shepherd's observations indicate that the material vibrations of timbre and the body's role as a sympathetic resonator can break down the dichotomies of inside/outside and self/other.;All of the writers in this study engage with the idea that "popular" music---literally music that is disseminated to a large and diverse audience and that is not generally considered an expression of "high" culture---has the capacity to negotiate boundaries more fluidly than other modes of expression, including written language. An analysis of these novelists' musical tropes suggests a model for approaching representations of popular music in literature and offers insight into the character of contemporary culture. |
