| This thesis re-reads certain figures associated with English modernism--Pater, Pound, and Joyce--in terms of their varying attitudes toward, and uses of, the idea of music. The aim is to come to terms with certain aspects of "modernity" itself. Rather than viewing music as the ideal art, or one that holds the most transcendent potential, both in itself, or as a model for the other arts, the thesis, beginning with Mallarme, explores how music becomes the model for a writing which in fact resists romantic transcendent or expressive tendencies. The notion of music as a questionable ideal appears very subtly in Pater's attempt in The Renaissance to offer an aesthetic theory which tries to defeat time and history. The paradox here is that Pater should call upon one of the arts most associated with time as the model by which all the arts might overcome time. In Pound, the issue of music is again connected with time and successivity; but Pound, both in his theories of music and in his poetic practice, tries to overcome the logic of continuity with a logic of contiguity in the hope of dispersing the linear tract of the text, allowing it not just to represent the "real" but to become conflated with it. Joyce's "musical" writing in "Sirens" draws attention to the spaces of overlap, and divergence, between the lexicality of language and its properties as sound. The thesis shows how in Joyce's text music and writing are in certain ways brought into the closest proximity, with the result that transcendent assumptions about meaning in either art are placed in doubt.;Each of the writers I discuss has had a significant impact upon twentieth-century writing, and one of the things that is of most importance in this thesis is the outlining of connections that subsist between ideas of modernity, writing, and music. |
