« The Sensual world » de Kate Bush : une réécriture poético-musicale au/du féminin

Abstract

“The Sensual World” by Kate Bush (1989), the opening track of the eponymous album, is a hymn to feminine eroticism, inspired by the end of Molly Bloom’s famous monologue at the end of Joyce’s novel Ulysses (1922). The song is typical of the relationship Bush is used to establishing between elite culture and pop music (“pop-scholarly” art). By comparing her song with its source text and her more faithful and less subversive rewriting of it “The Flower of the Mountain” (2011), we’ll show how innovative “The Sensual World” is as an hybrid artistic adaptation and also, from a feminist point of view, by its way of representing a feminine subject of desire which is different from Joyce’s lyrical subject.

Keywords

• poetic and musical rewriting
• hybridization between arts
• “pop-scholarly” art
• feminism
• eroticism