RBC Research Seminar – Music, modernism and the limits of the rational
1600-1730 Tuesday 3rd November
Online event
Free registration on this link

Dr Gemma Moss (Birmingham City University) Music, modernism and the limits of the rational

It is well known that modernist writers such as James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound used music to inform their literary experiments. In this talk, I’ll outline arguments on this topic from my forthcoming book. Appeals to music in literary modernism signal anxieties, not simply about language or forms of art, but about the limitations of post-Enlightenment rationality and the ways of living it makes possible. A methodology informed by continental philosophy can help us to unpack the significance of modernism’s musicality.

About the speaker

Gemma Moss is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Birmingham City University. Her first monograph Modernism, Music and the Politics of Aesthetics is forthcoming from Edinburgh University Press in May 2021, and she has also published on music in E. M. Forster, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, and Ford Madox Ford. She is editing Where Angels Fear to Tread for the Cambridge Editions of the Fiction of E. M. Forster, forthcoming in 2024.