Literary critics were not the intended beneficiaries of the New Musicology, the revisionism that supplemented technical analyses of the European classical music canon with broader perspectives drawn from feminism, queer theory, and critical race studies, applied democratically to a range of sounds, including jazz and pop. But these critics eagerly embraced the New Musicology, first baptized in the 1990s, as a license to teach their music department colleagues a thing or two about the theory-friendly interdisciplinary methods common in literary studies since the 1970s. As a result, literature PhDs contributed a number of the most admired and influential New Musicological titles, D. A. Miller’s Place for Us (1998), Wayne Koestenbaum’s The Queen’s Throat (1993), and Krin Gabbard’s collections Jazz among the Discourses (1995) and Representing Jazz (1995) among them. By contrast, the three newer titles reviewed here, two by younger literary critics and one by a distinguished historian of print...
Sounding Real: Musicality and American Fiction at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
Jazz in the Time of the Novel: The Temporal Politics of American Race and Culture
Cultural Considerations: Essays on Readers, Writers, and Musicians in Postwar America
William J. Maxwell is professor of English and African and African American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis. He is the author of the books F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature (Princeton Univ. Press, 2015) and New Negro, Old Left: African-American Writing and Communism between the Wars (Columbia Univ. Press, 1999), and the editor of Claude McKay’s Complete Poems (Univ. of Illinois Press, 2004). His annotated edition of the FBI file of James Baldwin will be published in 2017. A former book-review editor of African American Review and member of the editorial board of American Literature, he is now a contributing editor at American Literary History.
William J. Maxwell; Sounding Real: Musicality and American Fiction at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
Jazz in the Time of the Novel: The Temporal Politics of American Race and Culture
Cultural Considerations: Essays on Readers, Writers, and Musicians in Postwar America. American Literature 1 June 2016; 88 (2): 419–422. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-3533446
Download citation file:
Advertisement
