'Something Inaudible': Roland Barthes' Concept of Listening and Literary Music

Authors

  • Eric T. Behr MacEwan University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.31542/j.muse.156

Abstract

This essay considers Roland Barthes' three types of listening and how they relate to avante garde music as well as novels that present formats subversive to the typical narratives expected of the medium. Both Anthony Burgess's Mozart and the Wolf Gang and Kirsty Gunn's The Big Music are novels that present an experience more in harmony with avante garde music than their own medium by bringing attention to the rhythm, cadence and phonetic relationships of the language rather than their narrative arcs. These novels demand an altogether seperate manner of reading, or listening, than the act of deciphering usually associated with texts.

Author Biography

  • Eric T. Behr, MacEwan University
    I am a student with a major in English and a minor in Psychology.

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Published

2014-10-22

Issue

Vol. 1 No. 1 (2014)

Section

Arts

License

By publishing works in MUSe, authors and creators retain copyright under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) license, which allows others to share these works for non-commercial purposes as long as credit is given. The MUSe Editorial Board reserves the right to make copy-editing changes to works prior to publication to ensure they conform to the publication's style and quality standards. The Editorial Board also reserves the right to archive published submissions in MacEwan University's institutional repository, RO@M.

How to Cite

’Something Inaudible’: Roland Barthes’ Concept of Listening and Literary Music. (2014). MacEwan University Student EJournal, 1(1). https://doi.org/10.31542/j.muse.156