Thomas Gurke

A la lumiere des nombreuses parutions de lectures « ecologiques » de ces dernieres annees, il est surprenant que le recueil de nouvelles de Rick Bass, The Lives of Rocks (La Vie des rochers, 2006), ait recu si peu d’attention de la part de l’(eco-)critique. La nouvelle « Fiber » (Fibre) revet un interet particulier car elle cree un environnement narratif qui se rapproche de ce que l’anthropologue culturel Tim Ingold (Being Alive, 2011) qualifierait de maillage. Contrairement a de nombreuses theories purement relationnelles, le maillage permet des approches a la fois processuelles et relationnelles de l’environnement – « non pas en tant qu’entite delimitee . . . mais en tant qu’enchevetrement illimite de lignes dans un espace fluide » (Ingold 64). A travers une analyse textuelle detaillee, le present article vise a montrer non seulement que « tout est lie a tout le reste » (Rueckert 108), mais que des nouvelles telles que « Fiber » peuvent finalement creer quelque chose de similaire ...

... | Ayuda. After all the erroriboose. Autores: Thomas Gurke; Localización: James Joyce literary supplement, ISSN 0899-3114, Vol. 23, Nº. 1, 2009 , pag. 20. © 2001-2010 Universidad de La Rioja · Todos los derechos reservados. XHTML 1.0; UTF‑8.

... | Ayuda. After all the erroriboose. Autores: Thomas Gurke; Localización: James Joyce literary supplement, ISSN 0899-3114, Vol. 23, Nº. 1, 2009 , pag. 20. © 2001-2010 Universidad de La Rioja · Todos los derechos reservados. XHTML 1.0; UTF‑8.

... | Ayuda. After all the erroriboose. Autores: Thomas Gurke; Localización: James Joyce literary supplement, ISSN 0899-3114, Vol. 23, Nº. 1, 2009 , pag. 20. © 2001-2010 Universidad de La Rioja · Todos los derechos reservados. XHTML 1.0; UTF‑8.

À la lumière des nombreuses parutions de lectures « écologiques » de ces dernières années, il est surprenant que le recueil de nouvelles de Rick Bass, The Lives of Rocks (La Vie des rochers, 2006), ait reçu si peu d’attention de la part de l’(éco-)critique. La nouvelle « Fiber » (Fibre) revêt un intérêt particulier car elle crée un environnement narratif qui se rapproche de ce que l’anthropologue culturel Tim Ingold (Being Alive, 2011) qualifierait de maillage. Contrairement à de nombreuses théories purement relationnelles, le maillage permet des approches à la fois processuelles et relationnelles de l’environnement – « non pas en tant qu’entité délimitée . . . mais en tant qu’enchevêtrement illimité de lignes dans un espace fluide » (Ingold 64). À travers une analyse textuelle détaillée, le présent article vise à montrer non seulement que « tout est lié à tout le reste » (Rueckert 108), mais que des nouvelles telles que « Fiber » peuvent finalement créer quelque chose de similaire ...

“Words, Music, and the Popular is an impressive collection of fresh scholarship
on the relationship between the verbal and the musical. The contributors’
international perspective and focus on seeing this relationship as a form of
intermediality allows them to open new directions for inquiry by simultaneously
employing and interrogating a range of traditional oppositions, such as those
between popular and classical music, rock and pop, the accessible and the
‘difficult,’ the canonical and the ‘minor,’ the present and the historical past, live
and recorded music.”

— Philip Auslander is Professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at the Georgia Institute of Technology, USA


“As a scholar of popular culture, what excites me about this eclectic collection is
the way that it explodes any fixed conception of the relationship between elite
and popular music in favor of an exploration of the flexible borders between
music and lyrics, high and low, text and performance, art and commerce,
traditional and emergent, live and mediated, original and remix, spectatorship
and participation, and so much more. Each essay offers nuanced, intermedial
readings of specific sites of music production, each of which ask fundamental
questions about the nature of popular music, past, present, and future.”

— Henry Jenkins is Provost Professor of Communication, Journalism,
Cinematic Arts and Education at the University of Southern California, USA


This collection of essays explores the relation of words and music to issues of the
popular. It asks: What is popularity or ‘the’ popular and what role(s) does music
play in it? What is the function of the popular, and is ‘pop’ a system? How can
popularity be explained in certain historical and political contexts? How do class,
gender, race, and ethnicity contribute to and complicate an understanding of the
popular? What of the popularity of verbal art forms? How do they interact with
music at particular times and throughout different media?

Thomas Gurke is Lecturer for English and Cultural Studies at the University of
Koblenz-Landau, Germany.

Susan Winnett is Professor of American Studies and Transcultural Studies at the
Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, Germany.

“Brick Lane”. Kevin A. Morrison (ed.). London’s East End: A Short Encyclopedia. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co. 2023, 37-38

“Brick Lane (2007)”. Kevin A. Morrison (ed.). London’s East End: A Short Encyclopedia. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co. 2023, 39

“German Catholic Church”. Kevin A. Morrison (ed.). London’s East End: A Short Encyclopedia. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co. 2023, 90

“Gilbert and George”. Kevin A. Morrison (ed.). London’s East End: A Short Encyclopedia. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co. 2023, 91-92

“Millennium Dome”. Kevin A. Morrison (ed.). London’s East End: A Short Encyclopedia. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co. 2023, 155-156

“Million-Peopled City, The”. Kevin A. Morrison (ed.). London’s East End: A Short Encyclopedia. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co. 2023, 156

“New Realism”. Kevin A. Morrison (ed.). London’s East End: A Short Encyclopedia. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co. 2023, 164-165


The East End is an iconic area of London, from the transient street art of Banksy and Pablo Delgado to the exhibitions of Doreen Fletcher and Gilbert and George. Located east of the Tower of London and north of the River Thames, it has experienced a number of developmental stages in its four-hundred-year history. Originating as a series of scattered villages, the area has been home to Europe’s worst slums and served as an affluent nodal point of the British Empire.
Through its evolution, the East End has been the birthplace of radical political and social movements and the social center for a variety of diasporic communities. This reference work, with its alphabetically organized cross-referenced entries and its original and historical photography, serves as a comprehensive guide to the social and cultural history of this global hub.

The Music: A Novel Through Sound (2018) by the artist and composer Matthew Herbert, contributes to an ongoing musico-literary tradition and within it presents a new and rare example: Herbert’s text uses the acoustic connection between noise, sound and music in order to challenge our preconceived notions of the latter. At the same time, The Music offers a renegotiation of Modern and Postmodern music aesthetics. Thus, this novel not only presents a challenge to the reader but also to the field of intermediality itself: How can Herbert’s work be categorized using the typology of intermediality? What affordances of form – musical and literary – are experimented with and explored in and through this novel?

Tom Cho's Look Who's Morphing (2009/2014) is an excellent example for a Postmodern exhaustion of (meta-) references to the popular. The collection of short stories resembles fragmentation and a unified whole at the same time. Since Cho constantly reaffirms authenticity and his authorial Self – by claiming that he inserted himself into the text – the question remains of how this re-contextualisation of popular material impacts the claim of the popular as a supplier of particulate roles or identities in the first place.
What processes and negotiations of identity-construction are taking place? What is at stake for popular culture and – indeed – literature? Which function does music fulfil in Cho’s ‘morphings’?

This chapter wishes to chart the negotiations of ‘sound concepts’ as a ‘work in progress’ itself which James Joyce theorizes – I claim – from his early writings through Finnegans Wake. His texts often emphasize and even try to recapture ‘original’ sound-events in the face of a changing media-landscape and pre-recorded music: from the chilling rendition of the Lass of Aughrim in “The Dead”, along the “throbbing” and “buzzing” sound waves of the “Sirens” in Ulysses (U 11.315) and, finally, to the ‘ensounding’ frequencies of Finnegans Wake. A theory of sound thus emerges which oscillates between 19th-century ideas of ‘emotion’ and 20th century concepts of ‘affect’.

In the light of the many ecological readings over the recent years, it is surprising that Rick Bass’s short story collection The Lives of Rocks (2006) has received so little (eco)critical attention. The short story “Fiber” is of particular interest, as it produces a narrative environment that comes close to what the cultural anthropologist Tim Ingold (Being Alive, 2011) would refer to as a meshwork. In opposition to many purely relational theories, the meshwork allows both processual and relational approaches to the environment – “not as a bounded entity […] but as an unbounded entanglement of lines in fluid space” (Ingold 64). Through a detailed textual analysis, the paper aims to show not just that “everything is connected to everything else” (Rueckert 108), but that short stories such as “Fiber” can ultimately create something similar to the natural environment by weaving and entangling narrative threads that oppose fixed teleological relations to the intransitive lines of a meshwork.

Mash-ups very much describe and inform the participatory culture of today, feeding off countless memes and intermedial relations in social media networks, user-targeted interfaces, and websites. But the mash-up also plays an important role in the classroom: not as an attempt to catch the studying 'prosumers' at their own 'hip' game, nor in order to diminish literary studies to a nerdy joke. On the contrary, mash-ups are an ideal classroom object that can be used to re-emphasise the value of literature as a useful explanatory model for everyday phenomena, even phenomena of our so-called "convergence culture" in which "consumers are encouraged to seek out new information and make connections among dispersed media content" (Jenkins 2006, 3). Conversely, the mash-up assembles and reconfigures questions of authorship, originality, modes of canonisation, copyright, etc. that are significant in literary studies.
The following two projects illustrate our attempts to explore and utilise the relationships between participatory culture and the literary classroom as sketched above. Our first venture, "POP: Perspectives on Poetry", was tailored for the Sciencity Düsseldorf 2013 – an academic open-house event where we tried to bridge the gap between the classroom and 'the world out there'. The idea was to re-read classical poetics as a theory of the popular and vice-versa: that is, to 'mash up' perspectives on the contemporary media landscape and the literary canon in ways that demonstrate how our work need not rely on separating them in the first place. The second project, "Mapping the Mash-Up", was a graduate course at Heinrich-Heine University in 2016. Here too, we connected traditional and non-traditional approaches to literary studies. By emphasising the mash-up's characteristic trait of also being a "literary remix" (Voigts 2015, 150) we wished to provide a tool to introduce theories of adaptation and appropriation. Focussing on three contemporary examples of literary mash-ups allowed us to propose a simple typology of adaptation for the classroom: 'empowerment', 'resistance', and 'recontexualisation'

This essay traces two different instances of Pythagorean influence in Joyce’s writing. First, the experiences of listening to the song The Lass of Aughrim in “The Dead” will be discussed as an ‘audible parallax’ by utilizing the inherently Pythagorean term acousmatic. Then, the ‘musemathematical’ calculations in the “Sirens” chapter of Ulysses will be read anew based on the ancient mathematician’s acousmas. Both analyses are ‘parallactically’ linked to “Pythagorean lore” (Senn, “Met” 111) by using the term acousmatic as a vantage point.

The deadline for the summer school "Political Masculinities" has been extended to April 30th! The summer school will take place at the University of Koblenz-Landau (Campus Landau) from August 20-24! All application details at www.uni-koblenz-landau.de/de/landau/fb6/philologien/anglistik/Page/Research/internationalsummerschool

CFP for the next upcoming Word Music Association Forum (WMAF) conference in Dusseldorf, Germany, 22-24 November 2018.

Please send abstracts of no longer than 250 words, with the subject “WMAF 2018” to: thomas.gurke@hhu.de. Individual paper presentations will be 20 minutes long to be followed by 10 minutes of discussion. The conference language will be English. More information about the Word and Music Association Forum and about this conference will be posted on the organization website: www.wmaforum.org.

Deadline for receiving abstracts: 31 May 2018 (Acceptance letters: 31 July 2018)

Any questions should be directed to the local Academic Committee:
Thomas Gurke & Susan Winnett at thomas.gurke@hhu.de.