The Crossroads of Music and Literature

The Crossroads of Music and Literature: New Essays on the Muse of Song brings together fourteen original essays from an international, intergenerational cohort of scholars, each taking a fresh approach to the manner in which music plays a crucial role in literary texts and to the ways in which music is itself a work of literature.
The relationship of song lyrics to lyric poetry is taken up in work on artists as diverse as Bob Dylan, Motörhead, Nas, and Townes Van Zandt, while the centrality of music and sound in the midst of prose is probed in novels by Ralph Ellison, Valeria Luiselli, and Ann Petry. The creation of artistic communities is considered through the cathartic lens of Sad Girl Music, the anti-Fascist dissonance of punk, and Chicanx translations of British pop, alongside explorations of turntablist poetics, Black voice versus blank verse, the narratology of popular song, and more.

Kelly Baron is Managing Director of Siren Recordings, a sonic poetry label and archive. Andrew DuBois is Associate Professor of English at the University of Toronto.

List of Figures About the Editors and Contributors Acknowledgements Introduction Kelly Baron and Andrew DuBois (University of Toronto) 1. Imagined Audio: Listening to Fictional Sounds Karl Manis (University of Toronto) 2. Townes Van Zandt and the Semantic Entanglement of Song and Lyric Christopher Birkett (Independent Scholar) and Eric Tyler Powell (University of Ljubljana) 3. "I Can't Even Remember El Paso": Bob Dylan's "She's Your Lover Now" as Literary Text Court Carney (Stephen F. Austin State University) and Eralda L. Lameborshi (Texas A&M University) 4. Blank Verse versus Black Voice: Or, the Problem of the Racialized Reception of Poetry and Song George Elliott Clarke (University of Toronto) 5. Paracritical Nas: An (Ill)matic Reading Trivius Caldwell (United States Military Academy at West Point) 6. "Throw Your Hands In The Air": Wayde Compton's Turntable Aesthetics as Sonic Wave/Wake Work Max Karpinski (York University) 7. "A Story That Wasn't in the Words": Music, Mothering, and Minor Figures Cameron MacDonald (University of Toronto) 8. "Stop Me If You Think That You've Heard This One Before": Chicanx Musical Translation and Repetition Desirée A. Martín (UC Davis) 9. Wanton Exhibitions of Spleen: Punk and Post-Punk Dissonance in Word and Melody Sue Sorensen (Canadian Mennonite University) 10. Beyond "Nazi Punks Fuck Off": Anti-Fascist Poetics and the Mythologizing of Reagan in 1980s American Hardcore Punk Cath Marceau (McGill University) 11. Love and Queerness at the End of the World: The Collective Catharsis of Sad Girl Music Ryanne Kap and Amy LeBlanc (University of Calgary) 12. The Sound of Speech: The Transition from Singing to Speaking in Musical Performance Kristine Dizon (Concordia University) 13. Pop Goes the Storyworld: Popular Songs for Teaching Narrative Theory Daniel Aureliano Newman (University of Toronto) 14. Estranged: Alien Grammar and the Ace of Spades Ryan Stafford (University of Toronto) Index