Musical Metaphor Research Articles

RAÍZES DO BRASIL, 1936: O ESTATISMO ORGÂNICO COMO CONTRIBUIÇÃO ORIGINAL

Esse artigo analisa o processo político latinoamericano na década que vai desde o ano dois mil até hoje, especialmente no que se refere aos países com governos progressistas ou de esquerda. Em particular, são analisadas as mudanças produzidas nos sistemas políticos da Argentina, da Bolívia, do Chile, do Equador, da Venezuela e do Uruguai. Avalia-se o impacto social da década no crescimento econômico, assim como no impacto que tiveram as políticas trabalhistas e sociais levadas a cabo por esses governos. Finalmente, se estudam as mudanças de governos de direita ou centro direita que estão produzindo em alguns desses países e suas atuais dificuldades.

Metaphorical Sounds of Classical and Jazz Music in Sex Appeal

Taiwanese filmmaker Wang Weiming’s (王維明) Sex Appeal (寒蟬效應；不能說的夏天) derives from a true story of a male professor’s rape of his female student. For the cinematizing of the story, the setting was shifted to the Graduate Institute of Musicology at National Taitung University, Taiwan. Classical and Jazz music elements in this film, therefore, serve as vivid metaphors. This article aims to analyze metaphors of classical music in Sex Appeal, decoding at least four categories of classical music metaphors: first, the classical music of Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) and Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990) when Li Renfang appears; second, Baibai and her musical instrument, the clarinet; third, Baibai’s mother and her musical instrument, the piano; and fourth, Thelonious Monk’s jazz music during Li Renfang’s rape of Baibai.

Gravity’s Reverb: Listening to Space-Time, or Articulating the Sounds of Gravitational-Wave Detection

In February 2016, U.S.-based astronomers announced that they had detected gravitational waves, vibrations in the substance of space-time. When they made the detection public, they translated the signal into sound, a “chirp,” a sound wave swooping up in frequency, indexing, scientists said, the collision of two black holes 1.3 billion years ago. Drawing on interviews with gravitational-wave scientists at MIT and interpreting popular representations of this cosmic audio, I ask after these scientists’ acoustemology—that is, what the anthropologist of sound Steven Feld would call their “sonic way of knowing and being.” Some scientists suggest that interpreting gravitational-wave sounds requires them to develop a “vocabulary,” a trained judgment about how to listen to the impress of interstellar vibration on the medium of the detector. Gravitational-wave detection sounds, I argue, are thus articulations of theories with models and of models with instrumental captures of the cosmically nonhuman. Such articulations, based on mathematical and technological formalisms—Einstein’s equations, interferometric observatories, and sound files—operate alongside less fully disciplined collections of acoustic, auditory, and even musical metaphors, which I call informalisms. Those informalisms then bounce back on the original articulations, leading to rhetorical reverb, in which articulations—amplified through analogies, similes, and metaphors—become difficult to fully isolate from the rhetorical reflections they generate. Filtering analysis through a number of accompanying sound files, this article contributes to the anthropology of listening, positing that scientific audition often operates by listening through technologies that have been tuned to render theories and their accompanying formalisms both materially explicit and interpretively resonant.

Sound Animation, or on the Singing Stone

Abstract The starting point for the author’s reflection on sound animation is the Egyptian statue of Memnon, the stone that sang at dawn; at first sight, this appears to be an oxymoron, for stone is an allegory of the inanimate, and yet immortal, while voice is the exact opposite, the fleeting sign of life. This opposition has triggered thinking about the life of stone and about the question of whether stone – not unlike musical instruments – has its own soul or if another life sounds through it. The author touches upon cosmological theories and world mythologies, which describe the world and its origin with musical metaphors, as well as the superstring theory in contemporary physics, according to which the vibrations of superstrings determine the properties of particles and forces in nature. Oscillation, then, is an innate property of all things; hence, man is not only a constructor and animator, but must also listen to things and become an echo of their own sounds. In this relationship, the author finds the line separating classical, mainly industrial, instruments from original musical instruments that originate from the “animation” of materials: in the first case, it is the musician who expresses him- or herself, while in the latter case, it is the object that does so; the former instruments are played by musicians, the latter are animated by them. The writer is the author of musical puppet plays in which set design elements, props and puppets enable visual and theatrical expressiveness as well as the performance of music; therefore, his performances are an indivisible blend of puppet animation and music concerts.

Musical Metaphors in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens’s “The Man with the Blue Guitar” (1937) is widely recognized as one of the most important and influential poems of the 20th century. Inspired by Picasso’s painting The Old Guitarist, the poem in turn inspired Michael Tippett’s sonata for solo guitar, “The Blue Guitar” (Tippett 1983) and David Hockney’s The Blue Guitar: Etchings by David Hockney who was inspired by Wallace Stevens who was inspired by Pablo Picasso (Hockney and Stevens 1977). Central to “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” the metaphor of the musical instrument as a transformational symbol of the imagination is common in Stevens’s poems. The structure of “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” according to J. Hillis Miller, is the structure of stream-of-consciousness. Stevens’s poem creates what has been called “the deconstructed moment in modern poetry,” “an attempt to project a spatialized time that can be viewed from the privileged position of a timeless, static moment capable of encompassing a life at a glance” (Jackson 1982). This consciousness, which Derrida refers to as the “trace,” Stevens calls “the evasive movement of language.” The trace is the perception of the absence of meaning after the word or perception has passed, the glimpse of a hidden meaning that immediately vanishes. Stevens’s poem influenced not only other poets, artists and composers; references to and echoes of his ideas and techniques can be seen in popular music and culture well into the 21st century.

Pre-Raphaelitism

Pre-Raphaelitism Florence Boos (bio) A section of this article was regrettably omitted. That entry is reprinted in its entirety in Victorian Poetry 54.4. This past year brought many valuable contributions to the study of literary Pre-Raphaelitism, with detailed critical analyses often providing wider philosophic or cultural insights. I will begin this review by examining articles, book chapters, and a monograph that analyze the work of the Rossetti brothers, then turn to several articles and chapters on Christina Rossetti’s poetry. Since Elizabeth Helsinger’s Poetry and the Thought of Song in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Univ. of Virginia Press, 2015) includes chapters on several Pre-Raphaelite poets, among them Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Christina Rossetti, these will be discussed separately under the relevant author headings. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Michael Rossetti, and Pre-Raphaelite Poetry In “Poetry on Pre-Raphaelite Principles: Science, Nature, and Knowledge in William Michael Rossetti’s ‘Fancies at Leisure’ and ‘Mrs. Holmes Grey” (VP 53, no. 1 [2015]), John Holmes explores the relationship between the Pre-Raphaelites’ early respect for empirical science and the critique of its moral limitations embodied in their verse. Holmes is innovative in pointing out, in William Rossetti’s little-noticed “Fancies at Leisure,” the modernity, close observation, and appeal to the reader’s subjective perceptions that encourage “an enhanced appreciation of our common life within the ecologies that we share” (p. 30). He also finds Rossetti’s “Mrs. Holmes Grey” a sustained exposé of the limits of documentary testimony, as medical witnesses, a judge, jury, [End Page 387] newspaper report, and the recollections of husband and friend all fail to explain a deranged woman’s alleged death from frustrated adulterous passion. Although the proximate focus of this article is on William Rossetti, Holmes’s remarks on the ethos of early Pre-Raphaelitism provide a useful model for understanding other Pre-Raphaelite works as “writing poetry as science—that is, poems on scientific principles—rather than merely poetry of science” (p. 37). Another exploration of the impetus behind early Pre-Raphaelite art appears in D. M. R. Bentley’s “Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s ‘For an Annunciation, Early German’: Einfühlung, Inspiration, and Significance” (JPRS 24 [Fall 2015]). Examining the first of Rossetti’s sonnets on a painting, written in 1847 as a contribution to his initial collection “Songs of the Art Catholic,” Bentley notes the similarity of Rossetti’s practice with what would later be theorized by the German philosopher of aesthetics as Einfühlung—glossed by Bentley as “a temporary egress from the narrow confines of self and an opening of space within the self for the alterity that has been felt-into” (p. 37). After examining several plausible originals for the yet-unidentified “Early German” Annunciation painting memorialized in the poem, Bentley demonstrates ways in which the sonnet adduces details only apparent to the figures within the painting, which thus “work to absorb the reader further into it and to achieve an ‘inner standingpoint’” (p. 38). In her chapter on “Listening: Dante Gabriel Rossetti” in Poetry and the Thought of Song, Elizabeth Helsinger traces the significance of listening, sound, and music in evoking altered states of consciousness throughout Rossetti’s paintings and poetry. After identifying ways in which his paintings convey the sense of listening, Helsinger explores the importance placed on older musical and ballad traditions by Rossetti and his friends and the influence of the latter on his watercolors and songs. Observing that his lyrics repeatedly explore “that perplexing transit from page to tones to music heard in the ear of the mind to expand the conception of what lyric poetry and painting might do” (pp. 81–82), she offers subtle readings of the effects of musical allusions within Rossetti’s actual “songs,” his sonnets on paintings, poems replete with musical metaphors such as “Love’s Nocturne,” and finally, the “Willowwood” and “Monochord” sonnets from The House of Life, which, in her words, offer “the feel of life to those who can no longer anticipate” (p. 116). In “Speaking with the Dead: The Séance Diary of William Michael Rossetti, 1865–68,” JPRS 24 (Spring 2015), Andrew Stauffer provides a fascinating glimpse into an unexpected nook of...

Wine and music (I): on the crossmodal matching of wine and music

For years now, wine writers have been tempted to describe certain wines in terms of musical metaphors and analogies. Until recently, however, it has never been altogether clear how widely shared, and hence meaningful, such surprising cross-sensory connections really were. A growing body of scientific evidence, however, now shows that regular consumers (i.e. non-experts) do reliably match certain wines with particular pieces of music (under conditions of forced choice). When questioned, people also feel that certain wines go well with specific pieces of music, while others do not. As such, it can be argued that describing wines in musical terms can potentially provide useful information concerning the likely sensory, descriptive, analytic and/or hedonic properties of the wine. While some commentators have sought for an explanation for such crossmodal matches in terms of synaesthesia, here we argue that crossmodal correspondences—the associations that the majority of us share between tastes, aromas, flavours, and mouthfeel characteristics on the one hand and particular properties of sound and music on the other—offer a more satisfactory explanation for what may be going on. In particular, we highlight how structural, statistical, semantic and affective correspondences could all play a part in explaining the affinity that so many of us feel between wine and music.

The Problem of Linguistic Analysis of Musical Metaphors at Lessons of Russian as a Foreign Language

The main object of practical training in Russian as a foreign language at an advanced stage is to teach students to apply theoretical knowledge in practice, for a more complete understanding of various texts. Along with this, an important problem is the process of interpreting and systematizing of metaphors. In article within an anthropocentric paradigm, the mental bases of human activity are considered. In particular, features of perception and interpretation of musical sounding of professional musicians in the critiques devoted to the description of music in operas. The purpose of research to explore the specificity of the sign marking musical images by music critics, and attempt to classify and describe them. The theory of a conceptual metaphor and metaphorical modeling acts as a methodology. The carried-out analysis allowed revealing three main models: Music – the world of artifacts (subjects), Music is the world of the person, Music is the world of the nature. The main objectives of authors of these articles to convey the meaning of operas, to make “an intersemiotics translation”, i.e., to describe feelings from perception of music, by resources of a natural language.

Identity predicaments and the music metaphor in contemporary Irish fiction

Ever since Jimmy Rabbitte proffered his oft-quoted “niggers of Europe” line in Roddy Doyle’s The Commitments (1987), contemporary Irish culture, especially during the boom years, was characterised by an insistent revisiting of popular music as a metaphor for interracial and/or intercultural connection or understanding. Cross-cultural identification through music may be seen, in Werner Sollors’s memorable terms, as an eschewing of “descent” relations in favour of “consensual” relations. This essay revisits the music metaphor as it has manifested itself in Irish fiction since it was announced officially that Ireland had entered recession in 2008. Specifically, it explores Kevin Curran’s Beatsploitation (2012) and Joseph O’Connor’s The Thrill of It All (2014) arguing that, through their deployment of the music metaphor, the novels stage the murky politics of contemporary Irish iterations of consent and descent. By exposing the extent to which the rhetoric of Irish economic recovery is yoked to paradoxical invocations of volitional and ancestral Irishness, the novels urge their readers to consider the ways in which discourses of economic recovery work to reinforce and perpetuate patterns of exclusion and marginalisation established during the Celtic Tiger years.

The meaning and interpretation of the Serbian discourse marker BRE

Bre is a word whose origin is neither exclusively tied to the Serbian language, nor is it even derived from the elements of the South Slavic languages. Nonetheless, it has come to serve as a most prominent typically Serbian linguistic item to the extent that a number of people in the social networks in Serbia (e.g. Facebook) have been signed in with the discourse marker bre between the first and the last names, in the place of the middle name (e.g. Jovan Bre Marković).This “small” bre (as Kapor (1989:9) would qualify it with the Serbian adjective malo) – inconspicuous, as it were – has a potential of an important accompaniment to the tune of a Serbian expression, to use a music metaphor. This has presented us with a challenge worthy of a deeper investigation: bre, clearly, contributes to the meaning of an utterance in which it occurs, but the question is what kind of contribution.Working within the relevance-theoretic framework (Sperber and Wilson, 1986/95; Blakemore, 2002; Carston, 2002), we explore the issue of how this discourse marker contributes to the relevance of its host utterance. We conduct our analysis around the cognitive semantic distinction between conceptual and procedural types of meaning and the pragmatic distinction between explicitly and implicitly communicated assumptions by the speaker's utterance.Basing our findings on a corpus collected from Serbian newspapers and magazines as well as face-to-face exchanges, we conclude that bre is a procedural constraint on the construction of a higher-level explicature which expresses a speaker's particular attitude to the addressee.

Fin-de-siècle Lyrical Drama and the European Modernist Sensibility on the Eve of World War One

The paper analyses the relationship of lyrical drama, which emerged as the dominant genre of European Modernism, and opera, representing a paradigm shift in European thought on the eve of World War One. The musical metaphor of love-death, originating in Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, was adopted widely and transposed into verbal art by the dramatists and prose-writers of Modernism in Eastern and Western Europe. This metaphor or leit-motif is read in the context of the theory of the Freudian death-drive and the emergence of a modern analytic of finitude, which announces a new European cultural paradigm, grounded in identity and difference. A new ‘modern’ sensibility is formed out of these metaphysical elements, which come to expression in the Modernist genre of lyrical drama, in which a synaesthetic relationship is forged between music and the verbal text. A musical motif (love-death) is generalised into desire in the verbal text which it structures through intonation, gesture and the representation of unconscious drives on stage.

Landscapes of musical metaphor and musical learning: the example of jazz education

Theoretical approaches to learning in practice-based jazz improvisation contexts include situated learning and ecological perspectives. This article focuses on how interest-driven, self-sustaining jazz learning activities can be matched against the results of a recent Swedish investigation based on extensive qualitative interviews with jazz musicians regarding their views on the metaphor ‘storytelling’ and its relevance in the field of jazz improvisation. In order to visualise and discuss the educational implications of the results of this study, the notions of a landscape of musical metaphor and a corresponding landscape of musical learning are presented and discussed.

Willem Marinus Dudok: the lyrical music of architecture

Willem Marinus Dudok stands out from his Dutch and European peers for resisting the temptation to conform to the aesthetic norms of the avant-garde and for the unique aesthetics in his work. A man who shunned movements and dogma in a time when new architectural manifestos abounded, Dudok preferred to say little about his designs. Yet by combining a close reading of his design work with the few essays that survive, it becomes apparent that one important inspiration for Dudok was classical music composition, in particular counterpoint. Dudok was the son of a professional musician; he played the piano all his life, even sketching his design ideas on scores, probably when he was practising. Analogies between music and architecture date back centuries; typically architects worked with the aspects of form, rhythm, harmony and proportion. But Dudok added another element to the musical arsenal: he used classical counterpoint as an organising principle in plan and elevation. Although he never outlined exactly how he translated his extensive knowledge of music to architecture, Dudok used musical metaphors often enough when describing his work for us to know that music was always on his mind. Dudok was a prolific architect, and considered important during his lifetime—he won the UK's Royal Gold Medal and the American Institute of Architects Gold Medal, there were Dudok societies all around the world—and yet he is largely overlooked today because his work never conformed to the aesthetic expectations of modernism. This paper examines Dudok's design method, in particular his use of musical composition techniques, and re-positions his work as an outstanding example of a different kind of modernism.

Metaphor in Music or Metaphor About Music: A Contribution to the Cooperation of Cognitive Linguistics and Cognitive Musicology

This article offers an overview of a research program related to the metaphorization of music. In a short analysis, the omnipresence of metaphors in the written discourse about music is first highlighted. After this, the author defines several dichotomies whose clarification may be useful in the theoretical research of musical metaphoricity (intrinsic and extrinsic metaphors; musical conceptualization and metaphorization; absolute and referential musical metaphor; the problem of metaphor in music or metaphor about music). The third segment presents the main results of two empirical studies conducted with ten-year-old participants with different mother tongues, musical affinities and cognitive status, where claims are raised that metaphor in music is all-present, that there are differences in particular metaphorical statements, however that beneath those differences certain underlying similarities may be postulated. The final chapter uses these results as a basis for proposing an integrative theory of musical metaphor, based on the contributions of four separate semantic schools.

Sound and Sense: Music and Musical Metaphor in the Thought and Writing of Goethe and His Age by Jo Tudor (review)

Jo Tudor, Sound and Sense: Music and Musical Metaphor in Thought and Writing of Goethe and His Age. Oxford: Peter Lang, 2011. xvi + 515 pp.When you open contents page of Tudor's monograph, you come up against windowpane of musical metaphor, as if gazing from behind a barrier at tempting mysteries beyond. In course of these chapters, author's solitary vigil-her unwavering pursuit of these images-is slowly unraveled for her reader. The monograph has many moments of illumination, where eye looks in from dark into brightness.In honor of significance that Goethe attached to music in his writing, Jo Tudor has highlighted four key areas in which musical metaphors that Goethe and his contemporaries employed are most evident. In part 1, traditional concepts of music-music as harmony and conversely music as an embodiment of irrational, demonic-are unveiled; equally potent is her unraveling of conceptions of musical structure and their influence on musical metaphor in part 2. The balance she strikes between her vigilant, detached witnessing of conceptions of music and language (in part 3) and insightful interpretation of synthesis of these conceptions (in part 4, where she explores metaphor of music as harmony and sequence) leaves us with a new understanding of and insight into Goethe's poetic practice.Goethe's understanding of music, so often vaunted as maladroit, is here richly endorsed. Tudor profiles Goethe against his contemporary reality and presents us with a book in which whole question of Goethe's relationship to musical values is worked out in extreme detail. As his comments on European musical life in his notes to his 1806 translation of Diderot's Le neveu de Rameau show, poet was pervious to importance of intellectual engagement with music as a self-standing discipline. As early as 1772, Goethe had read Allgemeine Theorie der schonen Kunste by Johann Georg Sulzer, whom Michael Spitzer identifies as the most important German theorist of eighteenth century (Metaphor and Musical Thought, 243)- As Tudor rightly observes in her rich contextualization of Goethe's engagement with music: Germans wrote extensively about music; not only in cultural periodicals but in their literature and in essays and treatises of all kinds. In short, a significant part of in Germany took place not in public but in private, between writers of various kinds and their readers (11). Goethe's correspondence with composers bears rich testimony to Tudor's words, as does poet's belief that metaphor and mythology were part of multiple discourse needed for transmission of human knowledge (23).In Goethe's musical imagination, sings. In An Lina, he insists that verse should be sung not read-Nicht nur lesen! Immer singen! / Und ein jedes Blatt is Dein! (stanza 2.7-8)-a belief that prevailed in long nineteenth century. As a young man and member of brotherhood of Herder, Goethe regarded himself as a singer with a bardic position in national culture-a custom with which Goethe's practice as a writer and speaker of his own verse was continuous. Tudor argues convincingly how this idea of poetry as vocalized'song,' of music as absorbed into language to voice human feeling and experience,.. .Thus became part of Goethe's consciousness at an early stage (138). The musicality with which he firmly and intimately embosses his literary practice is here identified by Tudor, whose study testifies to continuing efficacy of his literary work as a necessary and fundamental part of our musical inheritance. …

John Cage's Cartridge Music (1960): ‘A Galaxy Reconfigured’

Cartridge Music (1960) initiated crucial developments in John Cage's compositional processes and aesthetics. By allowing performers to use different sound sources and texts, it anticipated Cage's more open indeterminate works. By creating a theatrical situation in which performers produce live electronic music, manipulating dials on amplifiers and inserting and removing objects in and out of phonograph cartridges, it looked forward to subsequent works focusing upon actions as well as sounds. Examining the performance practice Cage and his colleagues developed for this work also draws attention to his changing views regarding improvisation. Finally, with Cartridge Music, Cage adapted his music to his evolving perceptions of broader cultural practices. The amplification of sounds that would otherwise be inaudible, constituted a musical metaphor for Cage's rapidly developing ‘McLuhanesque’ world view in which electronic circuitry creates an extension of the human nervous system to the outside world.

Musical metaphors: Evidence for a spatial grounding of non-literal sentences describing auditory events

This study investigated whether the spatial terms high and low, when used in sentence contexts implying a non-literal interpretation, trigger similar spatial associations as would have been expected from the literal meaning of the words. In three experiments, participants read sentences describing either a high or a low auditory event (e.g., The soprano sings a high aria vs. The pianist plays a low note). In all Experiments, participants were asked to judge (yes/no) whether the sentences were meaningful by means of up/down (Experiments 1 and 2) or left/right (Experiment 3) key press responses. Contrary to previous studies reporting that metaphorical language understanding differs from literal language understanding with regard to simulation effects, the results show compatibility effects between sentence implied pitch height and response location. The results are in line with grounded models of language comprehension proposing that sensory motor experiences are being elicited when processing literal as well as non-literal sentences.

Dissonant Voices: Soviet Youth Mobilization and the Cuban Missile Crisis

Although studies of the Cuban missile crisis abound, the story “from below” of those fateful days of October 1962 remains largely to be written. This is particularly true for the Soviet side. Little is known about the way the Soviet population, and particularly youth, the prime category for propaganda, perceived what is widely regarded as the most dangerous crisis of the Cold War. Youth were indeed the target of a massive mobilization campaign, but one that was ridden with many shortcomings, or, using the musical metaphor, dissonances. The propaganda machine (mainly the press but also radio and film) had been cultivating anti-Americanism and solidarity with the Cuban people for quite some time, but when the crisis suddenly arose, many “choir members” were unable to modulate their voice to the right key, if there ever was one. Secrecy and improvisation in the Communist Party’s highest organs, coupled with the trauma of World War II, bore the fruits of inertia, formalism, pacifism, and above all, embarrassed silence, eventually contributing to an extreme and often ambivalent palette of reactions.

Patterns of empathy as embodied practice in clinical conversation-a musical dimension.

Cognitive linguistics and conversation analysis (a) converge in the analysis of category bound activities and (b) in viewing thinking and talking as embodied activities. The first aim of this paper is to outline these powerful theories as useful tools for the analysis of enacting empathy. The second aim is to outline these theories as useful tools for the analysis of how empathy is co-enacted in clinical conversation documented in transcripts. Cognitive Linguistics and Conversation Analysis converge in detecting patterns of I-You-relationships with roots in early preverbal embodied protoconversation continuing to more symbolic conversational level. The paper proposes to describe this continuity of empathic conversation in musical metaphors like balance, rhythm and resonance. In a first section transcripts from therapeutic sessions are presented. In a second section linguistic and other research data are presented in order to bring empirical data to this new conception of how empathy can be understood, how it is done and how two participants cooperate to enact empathy. Ideas for further research are outlined.

Claude Simon: situations éd. par Paul Dirkx, Pascal Mougin

postnationalism with critics who dispute its representation of the postcolonial subject as “an uprooted, deterritorialized, unfettered, and free-floating migrant” (xiii). Interestingly, gender is the paradigm that underscores the novelty of her analysis, which dwells on Francophone African migrant literatures. The book breaks new ground by deconstructing previous readings of nationalism that ignore the gender paradigm, and by correlating this oversight to their celebration of postnationalism. Engaging three migrant women writers, Coly notes the continuity between“the gender politics of anticolonial nationalism” and those of male/female postcolonial postnationalist narratives (xxv). Her subsequent analysis of postindependent home and belonging as elusive, exclusivist, inviting, and too heteropatriarchal for migrant African women is refreshing. The critic reveals the connected experiences of Calixthe Beyala, Ken Bugul, and Fatou Diome in Africa and Europe. Dealing with Bugul’s novels, the first and second chapters address the female migrant’s experience of the nation and Europe as a non-place and question the reintegration of home and the impact of homesickness on the narrative of homecoming respectively. The relevancy of the nation for women depicted by Beyala is the focus of chapter 3 where Coly correlates the dissident and culturally violent space-clearing gesture of the lesbian desire and their exclusion by the postcolonial/heteropatriarchal nation. If affiliation is positively read as women’s alternative means to attain home, Beyala’s transnationalism is less so, given her obsessive French tropism. In fact, chapter 4 echoes Coly’s critique of Beyala’s Belleville novels as “colonialist narratives of Africa” (71) and addresses the politics of interracial marriage and prostitution as pathways into the French house. Coly also notes how women create contact and appropriate space in France (ch. 5). The final chapters unveil the negative effects of colonial globalization on Senegal and the relevance of the nation, which appear through Diome’s demystification of France and reinstatement of her homeland.Coly ultimately relates identification with the hostland, homeland, and homecoming to gender politics and social status. It features Diome and Beyala’s contrasted depictions of the African woman and the treatment of her body in France. In articulating a bold challenge of the preeminence of the migrant through a concise reading that significantly correlates African women, migration, and nation, Coly refers repeatedly to the ‘nervous condition,’ which informs the trio’s oftentimes ambiguous narrative of home. However, discussing this trope separately would have added valuable substance to this theoretically sound work. Colby College (ME) Mouhamedoul A. Niang Dirkx, Paul, et Pascal Mougin, éd. Claude Simon: situations. Lyon: ENS, 2011. ISBN 978-2-84788-302-2. Pp. 203. 23 a. Awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1985; added to the required reading for the agrégation in 1997–98; since 2000 Simon has attracted more critical interest than 220 FRENCH REVIEW 88.1 Reviews 221 any French novelist except Proust. In this volume, eleven scholars discuss how Simon’s fictions enfold the personal—autobiography, dwellings, family, and history—without being dominated or shaped by it. He is neither dependent on real-world referents, nor scornful of them like his contemporaries the New Novelists. Simon’s configurations of referents are systemic but not systematic; and he may eliminate toponymics. His Nobel acceptance speech explains that for him the work of writing produces meaning. The newness created by this work is the adventure of writing. Musical metaphors explain his art. His novels resemble the compositions by those classical and jazz musicians who combine citation with transformation.As a writer,he feels an affinity with artisans and their ethos of craftsmanship. Alternatively, he supports or denies the ideal that living with literature can improve humans. He consistently resists the tyranny of aesthetic norms (preached by the New Novelists, particularly Jean Ricardou), as well as the moralistic imperatives of the Existentialists’ littérature engagée. In this volume, the most informative starting point for non-specialists would be Pascal Mougin’s “La mésalliance parentale” (41–52). Simon’s father was a navy captain, a son of peasants, who proved himself and earned advancement through the discipline of enduring harsh climates and facing dangers, deferring the gratification of rewards. His mother came from an aristocratic family of wealthy landowners that...