(Not so) Distant Music

Tomorrow will find us visiting Joyce's supremely elegant and moving short story, "The Dead." Joyce, as you may know, was a musician before he was a writer, which may explain why there are so many musical episodes distributed across his writing, from the stories in Dubliners to the far more complexly realized permutations in Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake. For our purposes, the questions are probably fairly obvious: in what sense is music relevant to our understanding of "The Dead"? When and how does music appear in this story? Is music used as ... a metaphor? ... a structuring device for the narrative? ... thematic content for the story and its characters? Can what we learned about the (narrative) structure of sonata form be deemed relevant to the progression of this story in any way? How do you read and experience the sublime conclusion to this story in light of what we've been reading and discussing over the past couple weeks? Feel free, of course, to get things started in this space in advance of class ... or to drop by, later in the week, to continue what will necessarily have been an abbreviated conversation on Wednesday.

First, though, at the beginning of Wednesday's class, having discussed "To Autumn" and listened to R.E.M.'s song at the end of Monday's class, I still want us to talk a little bit about the Stipe lyric for "Find the River." I find it to be one of their most supremely graceful and touching tracks, and I wonder if any of you might be inclined to share some thoughts here as to how we might put this song lyric in conversation with the Keats poem and aesthetic? What do they share, if anything? If you were to make a case for this lyric rising to the level of poetry, how would you go about doing it?