Guests: Birgitte Stougaard and Therese Vilmar, Rythms of Reading and Music in Literary Fiction
Välkommen till det veckovisa IMS-seminariet!
This seminar is in English.
This week we are visited by Birgitte Stougaard and Therese Vilmar from Aarhus University who will give two presentations on Rhythms of Reading and Imagining Music in Literary Fiction.
Birgitte Stougaard Pedersen: Rhythms of Reading
The presentation will reflect how practices of reading are changing due to digitization. With new media follow new habits and possibilities for reading. The paper will, with a point of departure in ‘the digital reading condition’ in general as well as the increasing use of audiobooks during the pandemic in Denmark, propose this change of reading rhythms as part of a cultural transformation. Reading has, historically, primarily during the last 200 years, been related to isolated, aesthetic contemplation. However reading is also, as Siri Hustvedt frames it “a bodily feeling of rhythms, sounds, and meaning within a human that lives in, and is part of a culture”(2022).
The paper investigates digital reading practices in dialogue with this bodily taking part in a culture with a focus on how rhythms of reading are performed and experienced in the digital reading condition.
Birgitte Stougaard Pedersen is Associate Professor of Aesthetics and Culture at the School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University. Her research interests fall within the fields of sound, literature, digital culture, reading, music, medialization, and phenomenological aspects of aesthetic experience. Furthermore, she focuses on the unique epistemological potential of sound with respect to how we sense and experience the world, and she has researched how sound is constituted and changed by the cultural discourses in which it is active. Together with Iben Have, she founded and edits the international, online journal SoundEffects. 2019-2022 she has been working on the project “Reading Between Media – Developing and Encouraging Children’s Multisensorial Reading in a Digital Age”, funded by the Novo Nordisk Foundation. The manuscript of the project's forthcoming book, The Digital Reading Condition, is published with Routledge 2022.
Therese Wiwe Vilmar: Imagining Music in Literary Fiction
“Imagining Music in Late Modern Novels” is the preliminary title of my PhD-dissertation. I study the presence of music in 20 novels published between 1990 and 2010. In this presentation, I will introduce the theoretical scope of the dissertation, and particularly introduce the concept of literary “imaginaries” of music based on Charles Taylor (2003), Jonathan Sterne (2012), and Pierre Dubois (2015) among others. Instead of studying ”the musicalization of fiction” (Wolf, 1999), asking what literature gains from musical themes and structures, I will attempt a more contextual and cultural approach to Word and Music Studies inspired by e.g. Stephen Benson (2006). I frame the phenomenon of music in literature as a ”fictionalisation of music”, and I ask how the literary medium can articulate and stage conceptions of music in a particular way. With Rita Felski, I propose that literary fiction ”creates distinctive configurations of social knowledge” (2011 p. 14).
I will briefly discuss how such literary configurations of social knowledge about music take place in two novels: The Time of Our Singing (Richard Powers, 2002) and The Ground Beneath Her Feet (Salman Rushdie, 1999). Though set in very different Western musical cultures, the characters’ relations to music are strikingly similar, and both novels regard music (and the musical genius) as something “otherworldly”.
Therese Wiwe Vilmar is a PhD Fellow at the Department of Aesthetics & Culture at Aarhus University. She holds a bachelor’s degree from Comparative Literature and Musicology, and a master’s degree from Comparative Literature, all from Aarhus University. Her research is placed within the interdisciplinary field of Word and Music Studies, and she is especially interested in the occurrences of music in prose literature. Her scholarly interests include intermediality, digital humanities, and music sociology. The dissertation is due June 2023.
https://pure.au.dk/portal/en/persons/therese-wiwe-vilmar(f98487bf-99b1-43bc-ba4a-a4a5c4b34ae4).html
How to attend
It is possible to attend the seminar both from Dacke in Växjö and via zoom. Contact us at ims@lnu.se if you want to participate via zoom, or sign up for our external email list to receive automatic updates on our events (zoom link and additional information are sent out one week in advance).
Photo: 'Aurora - Connecting Senses’, Cristina Pop-Tiron & Signe Kjær Jensen