ABSTRACT Title of Document: IMAGINING OTHER WORLDS: LITERARY CONSTRUCTIONS OF ALTERITY THROUGH MUSIC Cameron Fae Bushnell, PhD, 2007 Directed By: Dr. Sangeeta Ray, English The late twentieth century has seen a significant increase in the number of literary texts turning to music for thematic content and structural form. I read musical forms as structuring or articulating new forms of nationalism, identity formation, community, memory, and exile. Using vocabulary from postcolonial theory, I argue that sites of alterity identifiable in music challenge existing, dominant cultural formations, promote ethical orientation towards others, and suggest openness to human interrelations. The texts that anchor my study articulate an aesthetic humanism that proposes the musical arts as non-confrontational conceptions of self and other, of the individual and society. In the introduction to their provocatively entitled anthology, Dangerous Liaisons, Aamir Mufti and Ella Shohat insist on the value of a “contrapuntal juxtaposition” of multiculturalism in the U.S. context and postcolonialism in the international sphere. This phrase – contrapuntal juxtaposition – encapsulates the motivation for my dissertation. On the one hand, my work is contrapuntal in its interdisciplinarity. Revising the critical successes of musicologists, such as Susan McClary and Jeffrey Kallberg, who use feminist and genre theories to interrogate the