The Writer's Fugue

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 states and statelessness, she reviews 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. The Writer’s Fuguefeatures as its final chapter a significant contribution ‘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. 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.

Contents

Part One

Prelude 3

Introduction 5

Taking Flight Into Writing 10

The Musical Fugue 38

Identity Shifts, Fugal Recursion 61

Stateless: The Dissociative Fugue 79

Part Two

Literary Fugue Studies 120

Thomas de Quincey’s Dream-Fugue 123

Marcel Proust’s Fugal Search 165

James Joyce’s Sirens’ Fugue 218

Paul Celan’s Deathfugue 272

Sylvia Plath’s Little Fugue 293

The Writers’...In Review 303 

ESSAY. Exiled Writers: A Critical Fugal Analysis 318

Glossary of critical style terms 338

Works consulted 339

Published by PostMistress Press, imprint of Borderstream Books. www.borderstreambooks.com.au

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Dr Ruth Skilbeck chronicles the morphology of 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's musico-literary and psychological reading offers a counterpoint to critical readings of modernism as being socially and politically unengaged. Her additional analysis of contemporary writers in exile and in immigration detention centres reflects on 'fugal' post-traumatic writing in the context of the global era of war, conflict and enforced migrations, and gives a new relevance to the earlier romantic and modernist self-based narratives and poetic writings.