Dr Ruth Skilbeck (PhD) 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. 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. 

Contents

PART 1

INTRODUCTION 3

1 EXILED WRITERS’ HUMAN RIGHTS & SOCIAL ADVOCACY MOVEMENTS IN AUSTRALIA: A CRITICAL FUGAL ANALYSIS 2 15

Action Writing—Writing Action: the Post-Kantian Subject— Journey into Exile—Fugal Approach—Cases of Exiled Writers and International Human Rights Law: Pacific Solution v1—Deconstructing Dehumanization and Deviancy—Refugee Writers: Beyond Detention—Changing Policies—Islands of Despair: Pacific Solution v2—Sydney Biennale Boycott Protest Background— Sydney Biennale Boycott Protest—Official Audit Criticizes Department of Immigration and Border Protection—Arts Funding Cuts—Behrouz Boochani—Christopher Barnett—Fugal Analysis

2 TAKING FLIGHT INTO WRITING 88

Methodological Issues: Intentionality and Phenomenology— Psychoanalytical Themes: Mimesis, Trauma, Affect

3 FUGUE VARIATIONS: POLYPHONIC CONVERSATIONS 116

Structural Form and Techniques—Variations in Interpretation: Modality to Tonality—History and Development of Fugue— Canon—Polyphony—Variations, Texture and New Contexts— Rousseau, Rameau, and the Dispute over Harmony: Querelle des Bouffons

4 IDENTITY SHIFTS, FUGAL RECURSION 140

Fugal Journeys—Musico-Literary Terms—Fugue Narratives— New Limits of Representation—Fugal Paradox: The Dichotomy of Writing—Fugal Recursion: A Perceptual Function of Memory

5 STATELESS. THE DISSOCIATIVE FUGUE 159

Early Definitions of Psychogenic Fugue—Fin de Siècle and
the Emergence of Fugue—Cornelia Rau: a Case of Mistaken Identity—Medical Conclusions—Objects of Love and Hate—The Writer’s Fugue: Paradox of Modern Subjectivity

PART 2

6 LITERARY FUGUE STUDIES 201

7 THOMAS DE QUINCEY’S DREAM-FUGUE 204

The English Mail-Coach—‘Into my dreams forever’—
De Quincey’s ‘Literature of Power’—The Young Romantic and Romantic Withdrawal—Re/connecting Life, Work and Art Involutes—Emotional Avoidance, Trauma and Fugue—‘Author’s Postscript’ to the Dream-Fugue—Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder— Musicalization in Dream-Fugue—Writing Accidents—Cracking the Puzzle-Canon of the ‘Dream-Fugue’—Interpretations of ‘Dream- Fugue’—Musicalized Readings—Reverberation and ‘Impassioned Prose’—‘Dreadful resurrections that are in dreams’—Rapture and Ravishment—Postmodern Readings of Dream-Fugue

8 MARCEL PROUST’S FUGUE OF LOST TIME  244

Through the ‘I’s’ of Lost Time—Shifting Perspectives—Proust in Time: La Belle Èpoque—Memory/Modernist Métier—Proust and Bergson—Élan Vital and Memory Binding—Metaphor, Motif and Metonymy in Proust—I-Spy: How Many I’s am ‘I’?—‘Invisible Music’ of ‘Unknown Pleasures’—The Importance of Being Affective—Musicalized Sign Language—Metaphors in Metaphors: the Art of the Infinitely Expanding (self-generative, associative) Metaphor—Metonymy: Coded Associations-Discreet Language of Text—Motif/Motive: Objectifying Others, The Writer’s Bliss— Motion and Motive Energy: Musical Analogies to Temps Durée and Temps Espace—Chora—The Proustian Writing Machine: What Makes À la recherche du temps perdu a Performative Fugal Text—The Antilogos and the Fugal Modality of Writing

9 JAMES JOYCE SIRENS’ FUGUE 295

Homecoming: Ulysses, a Strategy of Invention—Protagonists on a Mock Epic Journey—The Mystery of Joyce’s Fuga per Canonem Revisited—Fugue Devices and the Fuga per Canonem—Double Meanings of Joyce’s Double Counterpoint—Sirens’ Setting and ‘Technic’—Fugal Texture—Fugal Variation on A Theme—Songs of Seduction and Rebellion—Comparative Interpretations—Figures of Speech Sound—Joyce’s Fugal ‘Quintet’ of ‘Master Singers’

10 PAUL CELAN’S DEATHFUGUE 348

Black Milk—‘Death is a Meister from Germany’—Deathfugue’s Structure—‘Poetry after Auschwitz is Barbaric’—Music after Auschwitz: Klezmer Chronotope

11 SYLVIA PLATH LITTLE FUGUE 372

12 THE WRITERS’ FUGUE IN REVIEW 382

Crab Canon—Writing Subjectivity—Invention—Arrangement— Trauma: Style—Delivery—Modern Fugal Modality of Writing

Notes 395 

Works Consulted 416

Updated edition with expanded chapter on exiled writers.

 ISBN: 9780992277949 (paperback)

Published in 2017 by PostMistress Press, in Newcastle (Australia)

Paperback publication date March 2017, vii, 436 pages