Writer's Fugue

In The Writer's Fugue, author Ruth Skilbeck suggests a 'fugal modality' of aesthetic formalism was used by some of the most highly regarded authors of western modernity to transform trauma of loss of loved ones, accidents, war and political exile. This book is a ground-breaking study of fugue in literature of European and new global modernity. What do Celan, Plath, Joyce, Proust, and De Quincy, have in common with writers now in immigration detention prison, specifically, exiled writer Behrouz Boochani marooned in Australian-run Manus "processing centre"? All use what Skilbeck calls the 'fugal modality of writing' to transform trauma of loss into life-saving prose or poetry: bearing witness. In this meticulously researched and explosive book Skilbeck delves into political, social and cultural contexts of oppression of writers by the state in Australia. She uncovers shocking connections between the immigration of war criminals and fascists from post-WW2 Europe, and the undermining of writers wrongly spied on in Australia, in a secretive and repressive regime that imprisons writers in 'processing centres'. Part 1 deploys a sustained critical fugal analysis of the exiled authors with dialogic exchanges with Boochani, Cheikh Kone, and Mohsen Soltany Zand. Chapter 1 comprises Skilbeck's updated and expanded essay on exiled writers, social movements in Australia, and human rights law published in Cultural Studies of Rights: Critical Articulations (Routledge, 2011; 2014), this includes case studies of writers, and the international artists' boycott of the Sydney Biennale 2014, in protest at the sponsorship by profits of the refugee immigration prisons. Part 1 also includes chapters on fugue in literature, in music, and how it turned into a diagnosis of dissociative amnesia in nIneteenth-century European modernity. Drawing on government reports, medical articles, and media reports she presents a new study on the wrongful imprisonment of the woman who forgot her name (in a fugue state) in Australia. Part 2 comprises five studies of authors of modernity writings and postwar poetry, on how and why they use dialogic fugue modalities in their significant, inventive, and politically engaged writing. It includes what may be the first long analysis of the fugue in Ulysses 'Sirens' using Joyce's own notes, discovered by researchers in Paris at the turn of this century. This gives a very different interpretation of his fugue and reveals the hidden political undertones of the episode. The linking themes running throughout the whole book, are in the detailed discussions of the development of the concept of the modern subject and literary subjectivity, the stuggle of authors to express themselves authentically as individuals in language that is also that of the state. Situating each one in intellectual and theoretical context, Skilbeck shows how each of the authors she studies does this through using musicalized fugue modalities, as a metaphor but also in sound-based musicalized mimetic adaptations. The Writer's Fugue will be of interest to students and scholars, authors, readers and professionals interested in fugue in literature and modernity, new approaches in musico-literary studies, fugue adaptations, literary trauma studies, cultural studies, philosophy, psychology, history of ideas and self-based creative writing.