The Writer's Fugue

Expanded and updated edition of The Writer’s Fugue, with an additional 80 page section updating Skilbeck’s research into writers in exile, and those held in Australian-run detention centres, including Behrouz Boochani; and also the Australian poet and dramaturg émigré Christopher Barnett, in France.

Dr Ruth Skilbeck chronicles the morphology of the word fugue in music, psychology and literature in Part 1 of The Writer's Fugue, the book based on her PhD, then in Part 2, offers fine-grained analyses of literary fugues by Thomas de Quincey, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Paul Celan and Sylvia Plath in biographical, historical, social and cultural contexts. Skilbeck finds that each of them turned to musical form in writing of traumatic experiences of loss of loved ones, war, exile, and concentration camps. In the chapter on dissocative fugue and statelessness, she reviews the emergence of the term fugue in medical history, the1890s fugue 'epidemic' in France and later epidemics and cases in cultural and medical research literature, and media and government reports, including on the case of the young female Australian resident Cornelia Rau incarcerated in an Australian immigration detention centre in the desert as she forgot her name. This edition updates the research in the chapter in The Writer’s Fugue ‘Exiled Writers, Human Rights and Social Advocacy Movements in Australia: A Critical Fugal Analysis’, first published in a special issue of Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies (Vol. 7, No. 3, Sept. 2010), Cultural Studies of Right: Critical Articulations also published by Routledge as a book, in which she extends her approach of fugal analysis to review the works of two writers in exile held in immigration detention camps in Australia. This edition includes new case studies of writers in exile including Behrouz Boochani on Manus Island, and the protest movements focusing on protest in the arts, and the Sydney Biennale 2014 boycott protest by the biennale artists against the detention policies and practices, and specifically the sponsorship of the biennale by the company awarded the contract to manage Manus island detention centres, which held artists and writers, amongst many others. Skilbeck's reading offers a counterpoint to critical readings of modernism as socially and politically unengaged. Her insights reflecting on 'fugal writing’ in the context of the global era of wars, conflict, enforced migrations, and exiled writers in detention reveal a political and cultural relevance to the earlier romantic and modernist poetic writings for the ‘musicalized’ formal inventive qualities for which they may have been criticised, as being self based and subjective, reading these differently in cultural contexts as signs of individual resilience and transformations of trauma. 

The Writer's Fugue is a philosophical musical-literary study of constructions of the subject as author by the state, and authors' constructions of subjectivity and the self in literature of modernity. Ruth Skilbeck surveys writers in exile and statelessness, and how authors adapt musical forms to transform psychological trauma in writing.

In her innovative investigation into fugue adaptations by authors in modernity, she chronicles the relationship of the rise and decline of fugue in music, and its emergence in literature, and the diagnosis of dissociative fugue in fin-de-siècle France; global surveillance, censorship and self-censorship, statelessness, and new literary fugues.