Senior Seminar

How do nonlinguistic forms of meaning making (semiosis) relate to language, and what kinds of interest do literary writers show in these non-linguistic practices in different times and places? In this seminar we will take up the case of music-making as a semiotic practice and investigate what different kinds of literary interest in music might consist of. We will read some semiotic theory, some work from sound studies, and some cultural studies of music, as well as a wide range of literary writing about music.  We will start off with a short story by James Baldwin, “Sonny’s Blues,” then we’ll move back in time to a mid-18th-century French text by Denis Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew. We’ll look at some Kafka short stories and a novel, The Loser, by the Austrian novelist Thomas Bernhard. The main figures we will be interested in will be Marcel Proust and Baldwin. We will read some extended excerpts from two of the volumes of Proust’s seven-volume novel, In Search of Lost Time along with Baldwin’s Just Above My Head. As a coda at the end of the semester, we will read Andrea Lawlor’s recent novel, Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl. How and why do sounds become so meaningful to some people (and not others), and how and why do they come to mean such different things to different people? How do novels put sounds on the page?