Sonic Modernity: Representing Sound in Literature, Culture and the Arts

ISBN-13: 9780748627622 / Angielski / Miękka / 2020 / 224 str.

Sam Halliday

Opis

Reveals the many roles and forms of sound in modernism. Drawing on a wealth of texts and thinkers, the book shows the distinctive nature of sonic cultures in modernity. Arguing that these cultures are not reducible to sound alone, the book further shows that these encompass representations of sound in 'other' media: especially literature; but also, cinema and painting. Figures discussed include canonical writers such as Joyce, Richardson, and Woolf; relatively neglected writers such as Henry Roth and Bryher; and a whole host of musicians, artists, and other commentators, including Wagner, Schoenberg, Kandinsky, Adorno, and Benjamin. Conceptually as well as topically diverse, the book engages issues such as city noise and 'foreign' accents, representations of sound in 'silent' cinema, the relationship of music to language, and the effects of technology on sonic production and reception.

Spis treści

List of Illustrations; Acknowledgements; Introduction: the Sonic Cultures of Modernity; Overture: L’Inhumaine; The Ear in History: Some Theory; Representing Sound in Literature; Defining “Modern” Sound; Or, Marvin Gaye as Theorist of Modernity; Chapter One. Theorising Sound and Hearing; Sound in Philosophy from Aristotle to Marx; Darwin, Kant (again), and Physiology; Technology, and the Dialectic of Sensory Excitement and Exhaustion; Sound in Literary Modernism; Music Amongst the Other Arts; Music, Language, and Meaning; Chapter Two. Sound and Social Life; Dorothy Richardson and Sound-space; Music as Paradigm of Sociality; Parties, City Streets, and Foreign Accents; Telephones, Radio and Gramophones; Love and the Piano; Wagner at Bayreuth; Chapter Three. Seeing Sound; Substitution and the Word; Substitution and the Image; Inter-art Translation or Equivalence; Light and Colour; Psychiatry, and ‘Neuro-grammatology’; On Musical Notation; Chapter Four. Modernising Music; Historicity and Dissonance; Pitch division, Rhythmic Chords, and Synthesizers; Precision and Preservation; The ‘phonograph effect’, and Jazz; Jazz and the Extra-Musical, and Blues; Coda: musical (un)timeliness; Chapter Five. The Art of Listening; Listening and/as Attention; Memory and Silence; Against the ‘Talkie’; Blindness and Cathected Space; Coda: Listening as Life; Bibliography; Index.