The article is devoted to the problem of perceiving and analyzing the notion of the musicalisation of fiction (both poetry and prose) in the beginning of the 21st century.
To a significant extent, the problem of studying musicalisation in the 21st century is the problem of definition. In the author’s opinion, the academically significant notion of musicalisation was defined and put in practice in the beginning of the 20th century by T. S. Eliot – an imagist highly influenced by the revolutionary epoch of jazz.
Outside of T. S. Eliot’s manifests on the subject matter, writing on the musicalisation is often limited to the analysis of similar acoustic nature of language and music, as well as to the description of structural analogies between musical and literary pieces.
In the context of Eliot’s works, critical writing on musicalisation tends to focus on the comparison of effects produced on the audience when listening to a musical piece and listening to (reading) a piece of musicalised poetry or prose. This approach assigns the notion of musicalisation a new quality, making it a perceptive phenomenon, based on the unique synthesis of three elements: the acoustic features of language, the specific musical structures as applied to fiction writing, and the semantic meaning of words used in the literary piece.
The article is aimed at showing that the Eliot-oriented approach, being concerned with musical and literary semantics rather than with a mere analogy of form, is more promising for the 21st century interdisciplinary musico-literary studies. As one of the grounds for such a statement, the author mentions the obvious finiteness of structural or acoustic analogy types.
Keywords: T.S. Eliot, intermediality, music, jazz, musicalisation, musical semantics.