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Edgar Lawrence Doctorow’s Ragtime: Ragtime Music and the Musicalization of Fiction
Nino Birkaia
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DOI:10.17265/2159-5836/2023.10.008
Akaki Tsereteli State University, Kutaisi, Georgia
The purpose of the present paper is to explore Edgar Lawrence Doctorow’s novel Ragtime (1975) as a masterful adaptation of musical form in fiction. It demonstrates the ways in which the use of musical devices of Ragtime shapes the rhythmic/narrative structure of the novel. The article offers the reading of the novel as a musicalized fiction, or, in other words, as a form of musico-literary intermediality. It focuses on the chief characteristics of Doctorow’s novel such as a plurality of independent consciousnesses and a diversity of simultaneous points of view/voices. The novel by its very design is polyphonic. Manipulating polyrhythmic effects, mixed rhythms, repetitive phrases and leitmotifs, Doctorow is experimenting with the rhythm both on micro and macro textual levels.
Ragtime, ragged rhythms, syncopation, musicalization of fiction, polyphony
Journal of Literature and Art Studies, October 2023, Vol. 13, No. 10, 775-779
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