The incidence of perfect moments: acoustic eloquence and narrative terroir in modern fiction

An exact definition of music is difficult to lay a finger on. Over the many years, the meaning of the term has shifted many times over to be construed and considered through many different conjectures of it. Yet it must be said that few of these definitions have ever accounted for the element-extern...

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Main Author: Tan, Ignatius Lu Wei
Other Authors: Neil Murphy
Format: Thesis-Master by Research
Language:English
Published: Nanyang Technological University 2022
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Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/10356/162993
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Institution: Nanyang Technological University
Language: English
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spelling sg-ntu-dr.10356-1629932023-03-11T20:17:25Z The incidence of perfect moments: acoustic eloquence and narrative terroir in modern fiction Tan, Ignatius Lu Wei Neil Murphy School of Humanities CAMurphy@ntu.edu.sg Humanities::Literature Visual arts and music An exact definition of music is difficult to lay a finger on. Over the many years, the meaning of the term has shifted many times over to be construed and considered through many different conjectures of it. Yet it must be said that few of these definitions have ever accounted for the element-external that surrounds and intrudes upon the process of musical generation. This thesis concerns itself with the influences of such environs, since through these interjections, they become an indelible part of the quality of the musical. By incorporating them into a functional definition of the musical—as the acoustic eloquence that arises out of the incidence between these terroirs and said conjectures of musicality, we allow for the term to be translated across artistic media and into fiction. Where such fictions frequently exhibit moments of extraordinary musicality within the medium of language, I posit that the terroir of music production finds equivalence in the semantics of the modern novel. Turning this lens towards three novels: Graham Swift’s Waterland (1983), Steven Galloway’s The Cellist of Sarajevo (2008), and Samuel Beckett’s How It Is (1964), this thesis will demonstrate that the curation of this terroir of semantic meaning imposes itself as a structural and circumstantial binding condition on the acoustics of language in the modern novel, and thus forms an essential component in the cadences of its sounds and musicality of its words. Master of Arts 2022-11-14T12:06:42Z 2022-11-14T12:06:42Z 2022 Thesis-Master by Research Tan, I. L. W. (2022). The incidence of perfect moments: acoustic eloquence and narrative terroir in modern fiction. Master's thesis, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. https://hdl.handle.net/10356/162993 https://hdl.handle.net/10356/162993 10.32657/10356/162993 en This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0). application/pdf Nanyang Technological University
institution Nanyang Technological University
building NTU Library
continent Asia
country Singapore
Singapore
content_provider NTU Library
collection DR-NTU
language English
topic Humanities::Literature
Visual arts and music
spellingShingle Humanities::Literature
Visual arts and music
Tan, Ignatius Lu Wei
The incidence of perfect moments: acoustic eloquence and narrative terroir in modern fiction
description An exact definition of music is difficult to lay a finger on. Over the many years, the meaning of the term has shifted many times over to be construed and considered through many different conjectures of it. Yet it must be said that few of these definitions have ever accounted for the element-external that surrounds and intrudes upon the process of musical generation. This thesis concerns itself with the influences of such environs, since through these interjections, they become an indelible part of the quality of the musical. By incorporating them into a functional definition of the musical—as the acoustic eloquence that arises out of the incidence between these terroirs and said conjectures of musicality, we allow for the term to be translated across artistic media and into fiction. Where such fictions frequently exhibit moments of extraordinary musicality within the medium of language, I posit that the terroir of music production finds equivalence in the semantics of the modern novel. Turning this lens towards three novels: Graham Swift’s Waterland (1983), Steven Galloway’s The Cellist of Sarajevo (2008), and Samuel Beckett’s How It Is (1964), this thesis will demonstrate that the curation of this terroir of semantic meaning imposes itself as a structural and circumstantial binding condition on the acoustics of language in the modern novel, and thus forms an essential component in the cadences of its sounds and musicality of its words.
author2 Neil Murphy
author_facet Neil Murphy
Tan, Ignatius Lu Wei
format Thesis-Master by Research
author Tan, Ignatius Lu Wei
author_sort Tan, Ignatius Lu Wei
title The incidence of perfect moments: acoustic eloquence and narrative terroir in modern fiction
title_short The incidence of perfect moments: acoustic eloquence and narrative terroir in modern fiction
title_full The incidence of perfect moments: acoustic eloquence and narrative terroir in modern fiction
title_fullStr The incidence of perfect moments: acoustic eloquence and narrative terroir in modern fiction
title_full_unstemmed The incidence of perfect moments: acoustic eloquence and narrative terroir in modern fiction
title_sort incidence of perfect moments: acoustic eloquence and narrative terroir in modern fiction
publisher Nanyang Technological University
publishDate 2022
url https://hdl.handle.net/10356/162993
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