In this course, we will explore the relationship between music and fiction, considering both the ways music appears within literature as well as the manner in which musical structures and techniques might inform the writing of prose (with a particular emphasis on rhythm, repetition, variation, harmony, dissonance, and silence). We will ask whether a sentence can have a melody, whether a novel can be organized like a symphony, whether a character might function as a recurring motif, and what it might mean for a story to improvise. Our readings will range across literary traditions and musical genres, examining writers who have drawn inspiration from jazz, classical music, popular song, and experimental composition. We will consider the relationship between musical and narrative time; the use of repetition and variation; the tension between formal constraint and improvisation; and the possibilities of polyphony, counterpoint, and silence in fiction. We will also think about music as subject matter: how writers describe the experience of listening, how music shapes memory and identity, and how prose might communicate an experience that seems to resist language. Alongside close readings and listening exercises, students will undertake a series of creative experiments, borrowing compositional strategies from music and applying them to their own fiction. The aim is not necessarily to write about music, or even to write musically, but to discover how thinking through another art form might expand our understanding of what fiction can do. No formal musical training is required—only a willingness to listen closely, read attentively, and experiment with the possibilities of narrative form. Reading may include works by: James Baldwin, Thomas Mann, Vladimir Nabokov, Vikram Seth, Marcel Proust, Kurt Vonnegut, EM Forster, Jennifer Egan, Kazuo Ishiguro, Zadie Smith, Jenny Erpenbeck, Mathias Enard, Leonard Cohen, Helen Garner and George Saunders.