Department of English

This thesis examines the trope of the tortured artist to explore how pain restructures language, memory, and identity. I argue that fugue provides a dual framework for understanding this trope’s relevance in literature. Drawing on disability studies and trauma theory, it positions pain not simply as an experience represented in texts but as a force that disrupts linguistic coherence and reorganizes narrative form. Engaging in debates on pain’s ineffability (Elaine Scarry), its epistemological productivity (Margaret Price; Alyson Patsavas), and its recursive nature (Cathy Caruth), the project develops fugue as both a psychological condition and compositional structure that models the fragmentation of a protagonist under pressure.

Fugue operates in two key ways across the thesis’ primary texts, Sylvia Plath’s semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar (1963), and Damien Chazelle’s film, Whiplash (2014). First, it describes the protagonists’ ambition and suffering, where intense psychological and physical strain produces disruptions in memory, identity, and self-perception. Second, fugue functions as a formal principle that organizes narrative itself, as the texts’ linear progressions give way to recursive, contrapuntal, and non-chronological sequencing. Moments of pain become generative breaks from which multiple versions of the self – and of the story – emerge, diverge, and reinterweave. 

Ultimately, the thesis argues that language does not simply fail under the weight of pain but can be reconstituted into fugue-like structures that expand the possibilities of narrative form, revealing new ways of articulating trauma, ambition, and the instability of the self.