Rezensionen 342 Claus-Ulrich Viol, Jukebooks: Contemporary British Fiction, Popular Music, and Cultural Value (Anglistische Forschungen 349). Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag, 2006. Louis J. Kern In his chapter on pop music in Sexuality and Popular Culture (1998), Carl B. Holmberg observed that music is - or may be interpreted as - a non semantic sign system, a series of open texts that suggest not one and one only “correct” interpretation but numerous trajectories of interpretation and use. With lyrics superadded, the musical complexities may be variously interpreted as a fabric the lyrics reflect, defer, or oppose. The criticism of popular song is in no way as simplistic as some commentators ordain - but should focus on the music (213). Jukebooks can be read as an intertextual response to Holmberg’s call to take pop music seriously and to show the relevance of the increasingly common references to popular songs, musical icons, and musical culture - dance, radio programming, CDvinyl shops, album covers, the rave-drug scene - to postmodern fiction. By way of contextualization and discrimination of the use of popular music in postmodern fiction, Viol provides a critical overview of the use of “verbal music” in modernist literary classics like E.M. Forster’s Howard’s End and Aldous Huxley’s Point Counter Point. He finds its focus on the purest and most abstract musical forms to be a kind of cultural elitism that limits full access to the text to those sufficiently familiar with musicological form and style. In contrast to the rigidly formalized culture of high-culture music - audiences must remain quiet, can express pleasure only at the end of the performance of a piece, and the maintenance of a strict hierarchy of musicians in relation to the conductor - pop music, Viol maintains, “is ‘by nature’ multimedial, consisting of ‘language’ as much as of ‘sounds.’ Pop songs in fiction will in fact make many readers hear and perform music” (84). Viol argues that a variety of intertextual, transmedial, and intermedial techniques create a complex and powerful structure of textual musicalization in these texts that he calls the “new verbal music” (151). While he finds that integral use of music in pop texts may have a socially leveling effect insofar as it draws in a select group of readers that may feel themselves marginalized by more mainstream literary products (like working-class punk fans), his analysis of musical subcultures and the phenomenon of fandom make clear that the verbal representation of pop music may be equally hermetic as that of classical music. Viol argues that the intertextual use of pop music is the most common form of verbal music. It includes simple mention of a song or album title, references to concerts, bands, and singers, styles and attitudes associated with pop music culture, and significant events in its history. It serves to define characters, establish a context, further diegetic developments, and extend symbolic representation. Transmedial musicalization generally involves extensive quotation of song lyrics, a technique Viol calls “soundtracking fiction” (161). Its functions are to set the mood, to create feelings of involvement and empathy in the reader, and to establish an affective tone. Intermediality, Viol argues, is the stylized use of pop music (analogous to modern- AAA Band 32 (2007), Heft 2 Rezensionen 343 ism’s use of classical music) by which writers attempt to directly translate pop music into the structural dimensions of their work, rhythmically and formally. Viol undertakes a close reading of a limited body of postmodern texts that he uses as exemplary of “a new kind of verbal music” (246), and he concludes that this new employment of music in literature is similar to a soundtrack in film: information is provided, emotions evoked, identification is made possible by pop-musical references, frequently in so systematic a way that the practice amounts to a new narrative strategy with new narrative functions (246). If Viol’s analysis bears such a conclusion - in effect the emergence of a new kind of fictional representation - it does so only in the context of an age-specific, generationally-driven context, not as a universal phenomenon. It rests, as Viol observes elsewhere, on the assumption of the casual nature of the reception of pop music - its ambient quality is like elevator music, and it is equally inescapable. Certain tunes become indelibly associated with particular time periods and serve as reservoirs for popular memory and symbolic summations of collective experience. But in a world of highly fragmented musical tastes characterized by powerful technologies facilitating custom designed collections of pop music geared to the idiosyncratic tastes of each individual listener - MP3 players, iPods, and Napster.com - Viol’s assumptions about the reception and use of pop music and therefore the viability of the “new” verbal music seem quaintly dated. Even when confirmed by a text he examines, like Barry Hines’ Elvis Over England (1998), they are classand generation-bound. Eddie, the novel’s protagonist, is a redundant steelworker who undertakes a pilgrimage to Prestwick Airport in Scotland, the only place in the UK “the King” ever visited. Eddie’s emotional and psychological attachment to the songs and his idolization of Elvis are indicative of his arrested development; these are songs of his youth, and he has never moved beyond them. While it is true that there is a broader community of Elvis fans, Eddie can only find solace after the breakdown of his marriage with the Scottish barmaid Sue, whose home is a shrine to Elvis. Pop music has offered flight and the opportunity to cross the boundary between his real broken life and his fantasy life, but the motion of the novel is along the trajectory of escape, and Eddie can find solace only in a small Scottish village. While many of Eddie’s contemporaries may remember the words to “Heartbreak Hotel,” they may well not carry the very powerful emotional connotations they do for Eddie. Indeed, the stunned, embarrassed silence of the other punters attending the pub’s Elvis Memorial Night in response to his intensely emotional karaoke rendition, suggests as much. Then, too, Viol’s depiction of the male subculture of pop music mavens in the pop music shop in Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity (1995), who do not discuss personal problems, relationships, or failed ambitions with one another, seems less directly the effect of their collective obsession with pop music than it does an expression of a traditional male, working-class culture that maintains a taboo on emotional expression and affective male association expressive of homophobia. Viol concludes that both thematically and technically pop music has had a huge impact on recent British literature and that, reciprocally, our understanding of pop music has been significantly shaped by its fictional representation. While this is arguably the case, Viol’s arguments about the reception of pop music and its endur- Rezensionen 344 ing emotional power are less convincing, and seem much less relevant to the technologically transformed world of contemporary pop music that provides little shared experience for its listeners. Given the apparent trends of pop music cultures, it seems unlikely that the “new” narrative strategies of musicalized texts will prove an enduring shift in popular literary representation Louis J. Kern History Department Hofstra University, Hempstead, NY Brenda Hollweg, Ausgestellte Welt: Formationsprozesse kultureller Identität in den Texten zur Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition (1893). Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag, 2001. Louis J. Kern Recently, the World’s Columbian Exposition has enjoyed renewed attention in American popular literary texts. Robert Bloch’s American Gothic appeared in 1974, and more recently Alec Michod published The White City: A Novel (2003), followed by Erik Larson’s bestselling The Devil in White City: A Saga of Magic and Murder at the Fair that Changed America (2004). Interestingly, in all three novels Chicago and the Exposition grounds serve as the backdrop for the fictionalized homicidal career of H.H. Holmes [Herman Webster Mudgett (1861-96)]. The Holmes cult was further evidenced by the release of a documentary film, H.H. Holmes: America’s First Serial Killer (2004), directed by John Borowski. The Exposition has also figured in a recent computer game - “1893: A World’s Fair Mystery,” revolving around a jewel heist, and an ongoing virtual reality project directed by Lisa Sunder of UCLA’s Urban Simulation Team, which is developing an on-line Virtual Columbian Exposition. It is in the context of this renewed and heightened interest in the Fair that Hollweg’s Ausgestellte Welt has been published. Hollweg’s work provides a reading of the textual representations of the Exposition in the context of the crisis of identity - national and personal - that characterized the transition to modernity. Her focus on identity formation affords a new scholarly reading of the Fair. Sources for the study are drawn from a wide range of contemporary popular cultural expressions - official and unofficial guidebooks, newspaper accounts, magazine articles, personal accounts, humorous reflections, poetry, novels, and detective stories. From these diverse texts, voices and perspectives, Hollweg sketches a complex system of discourse that enabled an America in transition to address both the reinterpretation of national foundation principles and their contestation by marginalized groups. AAA Band 32 (2007), Heft 2