The Music of Voice examines the influence of music on twentieth-century literary theory and fiction. Bringing contemporary novels into dialogue with Said's notion of counterpoint, Bakhtin’s metaphorical polyphony, and other critical theories, this dissertation reevaluates authorial voice and its entanglements in aesthetic and political questions. I consider how select works by three major novelists—Assia Djebar, Maryse Condé, and J. M. Coetzee—deploy musical elements as part of a complex, transnational engagement with multiple traditions and a virtuosic experimentation with narrative form.

In an extended introduction, I reassess the relevance of the terms “postcolonial,” “francophone,” “littérature monde,” and “transnational” to this unique grouping of authors in the context of current debates. I then define my approach to the question of “voice.” Each subsequent chapter frames an encounter between theory, literature and a particular musical form: polyphony, counterpoint and opera. In Chapter One, I examine the implications of Bakhtin’s theory of polyphony for postcolonial literatures, and demonstrate how Condé challenges the very possibility of literary polyphony in her novel, Traversée de la Mangrove (1989). I argue that the misapplication of Bakhtin’s notion of polyphony has obscured our understanding of ethics and representation, and muted the social critique present in many postcolonial texts. In Chapter Two, I use Edward Said’s contrapuntal method to draw out the diverging voices in Djebar’s Les Nuits de Strasbourg (1997). I call attention to the politics that underpin Said’s theory, and reground it in a musical and historical specificity. Finally, in Chapter Three, I examine Coetzee’s treatment of music in relation to his interrogation of voice and narrative authority. I focus in particular on how the opera in Disgrace (1999) disrupts the narrative and models an approach to alterity. Throughout these readings, I seek to resituate music and language in relation to the demands of history, ethics and politics.