Ryan James McGuckin
Ryan James McGuckin
(Ph.D., Louisiana State University)
Visiting Assistant Professor
Department of English
Appalachian State University
mcguckinrj@appstate.edu
biography
As a New York native, literature and the arts have always been appealing worlds. Intending for a career in classical music, my focus on academics and writing began during my undergraduate conservatory studies at Mannes School of Music in New York City. There I witnessed how literary and musical texts both acted as expressions of artful self-confession regarding modern lives on the periphery.
teaching and research fields
- Modernism and Modernity
- Gender, Race, and the Novel
- Musical Culture
- Rhetoric and Modernism
- Transnational Approaches to Literature
- Urban Modernism
publications
“E. M. Forster’s Female Musicality: Counter-Romance in A Room with a View,” Journal of Modern Literature (forthcoming).
Part of my book project, this article analyzes the way Forster’s narrative confronts the logics of the heterosexual marriage plot, revealing how women use music to embody aesthetic modesty as agency toward social-sexual independence in the early twentieth century.
Abstract
E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View (1908) musically animates a “self-reflexive gender consciousness” to expose the limits of romantic female life. Employing music to confront the logics of the heterosexual marriage plot, the novel embodies a counter-romantic subtext about the desire for female independence. As such, Forster’s music moves attention away from marriage and toward female hesitation about domestic identities in early twentieth-century society. Forster’s own late-in-life considerations of A Room also signal that post-war disruptions provide backgazing clues to the novel’s inconclusiveness over nuptial anxieties, further highlighting how ideals of heterosexual love and social inheritance obscure the aims of unrealized female selfhood.
“Clocked Chaos: Modernist Refrain, Modern Disruption in the Music of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Unconsoled” (for Studies in the Novel )
Abstract
Kazuo Ishiguro’s most enigmatic, musical novel, The Unconsoled, presents civic life and artistic being at odds, resembling one of modernism’s enduring visions: the conflict over authentically seizing the now among life’s intrusive, technological constructions. Augmented by tense social codes, harried globalization, Kafkaesque absurdity, and unrealized mutuality amid the machinery of urban fatigue, The Unconsoled resembles its title through a mosaic of elaborately lived abstractions that expose its landscape as a series of distorted figurations. As such, Ishiguro stresses music’s ephemerally to exaggerate the disrupted novel’s surreal states. This musical turn underscores how modern urbanity’s artistic zones necessitate and represent people’s struggle for and failure in securing communal stability, what Kenneth Burke considers music signaling changes among chaos. Thus, in The Unconsoled, Ishiguro imparts how a disruptive musical life elaborates on the modern crux of isolation in an increasingly urbanized and hyperconnected world of attempted, but unsuccessful, belonging.
“Review of Helen Rydstrand’s Rhythmic Modernism: Mimesis and the Short Story,”Affirmations: of the modern, vol. 6., no. 1, 2019, pp. 125–29.
manuscripts in progress
Ishiguro’s Modernisms: Isolation through Kafka and Nabokov, Henry Miller and Baldwin, Woolf and Mansfield
In its initial stages, This second book project extends current treatments of Kazuo Ishiguro’s narrative negotiations and genre hybridity. Seen through readings of six transnational modernist precursors, Ishiguro’s writing is a signature cadence of surrealist and modernist elements that cross new issues in urban and artistic life with new experiments in narrative form. Describing the relationship between high art and the social tensions of urban life, I conclude with how uncommon musical and literary expressions and the materials of isolated everyday social life paradoxically are isolating and uniting forces.
This book project considers the works of Henry James, Kate Chopin, James Weldon Johnson, E. M. Forster, Willa Cather, Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf, and Truman Capote to compare late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century musical life to women’s independent dispositions, historically known as the “New Woman.” Utilizing areas of literary theory, musical reception, and cultural history, I describe how music underscored modern female life and was a key medium for women to express a new kind of autonomy, a topic which remains pertinent to contemporary issues regarding gender, race, and social life.
“Rethinking Resilience: Musical Isolation and the Natural World of Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out”
As a chapter project, I analyze Woolf’s portrayal music as a means to seek isolation among the novel’s tragic conditions. Considering this voyage of sea and open land, and—as a consequence—psyche, and through close readings of music, gender, isolation, and environment, I conclude this novel's uses of music reveal life abroad is a surprising artistic measure to reclaim personal resilience and female individualism through the individual power of musical distance.
“Ex-colored and Un-great: Exotic Dissipations in Black and White in James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-colored Man and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby”
For this article project I am researching connections between James Weldon Johnson’s and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s uses of music, analyzing with particular care the cross over between the musical spaces in the Ex-colored Man and Gatsby are two sides of the same coin. While both texts seem at cultural odds, a central comparison in both texts are the racial, social, and musical spaces that Johnson is attempting to alter with ragtime are similar to the aesthetic and economic environs of Fiztgerald.
“Willa Cather and Kazuo Ishiguro: Passing Future Selves”
Intended as a single article project and/or chapter focus on music and memory among queer, multi ethnic, and multi national identities, particularly how musical experiences draw out the subjectivity of their characters amid trauma and loss, with music foreseeing (for Cather) and confirming (for Ishiguro) the problems of certainty in modern times. While the assumption for many is that music unites hearts, the irony concerning these authors is the way music acts as a disruptive companion, translating for characters the isolated realities amid the problems of upholding traditions and memory in contemporary and global life.
“Sonic Youth: Engendered Music in the MTV Age”
This article project will analyze the oscillation of 1980’s music videos normative and non-normative ideas about the feminine and masculine, sexual aim, and the conventions of orientation amid the paradox of gender-mix representations in musical culture and marketing. While music videos, like their video game counterparts, appeared as youthful indulgence and vacuity, they acted as a powerful rhetorical medium, creating a multimodal canon of image, music, and text that furthered conversations about gender, race, and sexuality, issues which were essential to an entire generation in conflict about individuality in the industrial and corporate climates of Western life. Utilizing critical theory, cultural history, and literary analysis, I describe how and conclude that despite being within the pressures of entertainment and market trends, music videos challenged and complicated normative conceptions of autonomy and social customs.
teaching
music
research playlists
Selections include contemporary German-British composer Max Richter’s modern reimagining of Antonio Vivaldi’s most iconic musical structures. Other selections on this list include American composers Philip Glass and Michael Torke.
1. Max Richter, Recomposed: Vivaldi — The Four Seasons (Deutsche Grammophon, 2012)
2. Philip Glass, Glassworks (Sony Masterworks, 1982)
3. Philip Glass, Kronos Quartet Performs Philip Glass (Nonesuch, 1995)
4. Philip Glass, Philip Glass: Piano Works (Deutsche Grammophon, 2017)
5. Micheal Torke, Chamber Music (Argo, 1990)
6. Michael Torke, Javelin: The Music of Michael Torke (Argo, 1996)
A playlist assembled for charting the connections between 19th-century classical and romantic music and 20th-century modern music.
This playlist orders songs from simple to advanced rhythms and time signatures, demonstrating with music how poetry similarly uses meter to create differences in one’s reading and listening experience.
227 Sanford Hall
Department of English
Appalachian State University