Music and letters: Correspondances of notes and narrative from Berlioz to Proust

The dissertation examines certain thematic and structural connections between nineteenth-century literature and music: how literature and narrative influenced musical compositions and, most importantly, how music inspired and shaped works of literature. Baudelaire's poem, "Correspondances," serves as a thematic leitmotif throughout the dissertation for focusing the investigation of thematic and structural crossover between the sister arts of literature and music. First examining a programmatic symphony and a work of music criticism as two important nineteenth-century predecessors of musically-inspired literary production, the dissertation considers several examples in French literature of "verbal music," the literary representation and description of music in words. The thesis ultimately suggests the importance of music as a literary structuring device and a functional analogy and model for literary narrative.;In comparing the narrative role of a literary program for instrumental music and of a musical program in literature, the thesis asks several crucial questions: what music in a literary narrative accomplishes; how verbal music profoundly reshapes the literary text; how analogous structures emerge from literary and musical narratives; and, finally, how verbal music in a literary text suggests a model for narrative structure.;The first chapter presents two nineteenth-century cultural influences on musically-inspired French literature: the narrative program of Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique and Baudelaire's essay "Richard Wagner et Tannhauser a Paris." The second chapter studies the verbal music, of both thematic and structural interest, in Mallarme's poem, L'Apres-midi d'un faune, as well as the interdisciplinary collaboration between the musically-influenced poet and Debussy, who composed a Prelude for the poem. The third chapter presents Proust's narrative description of the Vinteuil sonata and septet in A la recherche du temps perdu as the culminating stage of an authorial search for voice and of the literary realization of the semantic potential of instrumental music. Through these examples of creative connections between music and literature, I suggest the formative role of these complementary sister arts in defining nineteenth-century European literary aesthetics and culture from the wake of Romanticism through the fin-de-siecle period.