Prose fiction’s infinite playlist : encountering music in fiction narrative

This paper will argue that reference to music in young-adult prose fiction stimulates movement across narrative and artistic boundaries in ways that facilitate a unique reading encounter. The inclusion of musical reference opens up a space for a multisensory experience that is beyond that of the reading experience devoid of musical association, even when the audio is not immediately available at the time of reading. This experience is bound to the role of the reader, however, be it through the remembered or imagined experience of the music that is signaled in-text, or even the reader’s pursuit of the audio in response to the reading. As ‘a threshold literature’ (Eaton 2010, np) that targets a young audience for whom ‘popular music is globally acknowledged as affectively and culturally central’ (Bloustien & Peters 2011, 4), young-adult fiction is an apt space for explorations into the potential that exists when a text includes musical reference. In particular, Gerard Genette’s paratexts (1997), J Hillis Miller’s ‘membranes’ (2005) and T Austin Graham’s ‘literary soundtrack’ (2009) will be used to examine how Rachel Cohn and David Levithan’s young-adult fiction novel Nick and Norah’s infinite playlist (2006) functions as an ‘infinite playlist’ in itself via a series of paratextual and epitextual elements. Discussion of the latticework of music-narrative interaction that exists as a part of this text will facilitate an understanding of how musical reference can encourage movement within and beyond the narrative towards a potentially unique reading experience.

Spinoza/space/speed/sublime: Problems of philosophy and politics in the post-colonial fiction of Gerald Murnane

This article takes account of the ‘spontaneity’ of the post-colonial fiction of Gerald Murnane within the ‘dominating space’ of the philosophy of Spinoza. My use of Paul Carter’s terms here is strategic. The compact of fiction and philosophy in Murnane corresponds with the relationship of spontaneity to the dominating organization of desire in Carter’s rendering of an Aboriginal hunter. Carter’s phrase “‘a figure at once spontaneous and wholly dominated by the space of his desire’” worries Ken Gelder and Jane M. Jacobs, who suggest that it subjugates the formation of Aboriginal desire (incorporating spontaneity) to impulses of imperialism. The captivating immanence of Spinoza’s philosophy in Murnane’s fiction, which I will demonstrate with various examples, puts pressure on the fiction to occupy the same space as the space of the philosophy. Here is a clue to why Murnane’s post-colonial thematics have been little explored by critics with an interest in post-colonial politics. The desire of Spinoza’s philosophy creates a spatial textuality within which the spontaneity of Murnane’s fiction, to the degree that it maximizes or fills the philosophy, is minimized in its political effects. That is to say, the fiction shifts politics into an external space of what Roland Barthes calls “resistance or condemnation”. However, the different speeds (or timings) of Murnane and Spinoza, within the one space, mitigate this resistance of the outside, at least in respect of certain circumstances of post-coloniality. It is especially productive, I suggest, to engage Carter’s representation of an Aboriginal hunter through the compact of coincidental spaces and differential speeds created by Murnane’s fiction in Spinoza’s philosophy. This produces a ceaseless activation of desire and domination, evidenced in Murnane’s short story ‘Land Deal’, and indexed by a post-Romantic sublime. What limits the value of Murnane’s fiction in most contexts of post-colonial politics, is precisely what makes it useful in the matter of Carter’s Aboriginal hunter.

Who was Sarah Bernhardt? Negotiating fact and fiction

Review essay of : Robert Gottlieb's Sarah: The Life of Sarah Bernhardt. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010. pp. 233.