Modernist Soundscapes

Auditory Technology and the Novel

Angela Frattarola

• Publisher: University Press of Florida
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780813052434
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

At the turn of the twentieth century, new technologies such as the phonograph, telephone, and radio changed how sound was transmitted and perceived. In Modernist Soundscapes, Angela Frattarola analyzes the influence of "the age of noise" on writers of the time, showing how modernist novelists used sound to bridge the distance between characters and to connect with the reader on a more intimate level. Frattarola tunes in to representations of voices, noise, and music in works by Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Jean Rhys, and Samuel Beckett. She argues that the common use of headphones, which piped sounds from afar into a listener's headspace, inspired modernists to record the interior monologues of their characters in a stream-of-consciousness style. Woolf's onomatopoeia stemmed from a desire to render the sounds of the world without mediation, similar to how some contemporaries hoped that recording technology would eliminate the need for musicians. Frattarola also explains how Beckett's linguistic repetition mirrors the mechanical reproduction of the tape recorder. These writers challenged ocularcentrism, the traditional emphasis on vision in art and philosophy, and instead characterized the eye as distancing and analytical and the act of listening as immediate and unifying. Contending that the experimentation typically associated with modernist writing is partly due to this new attentiveness to sound, this book introduces a fresh perspective on texts that set the course of contemporary literature.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Modernist Soundscapes
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. The Modernist Soundscape: Ocularcentrism and Auditory Technologies
• 2. Music and the Prosody of Voice: Dorothy Richardson and the Transformation from Silent Film to the Talkie
• 3. Recording the Soundscape: Virginia Woolf’s Onomatopoeia and the Phonograph
• 4. Turning Up the Volume of Inner Speech: Headphones and James Joyce’s Interior Monologue
• 5. Inner Speech as a Gramophone Record: Jean Rhys’s Bohemian Voice and Popular Music
• 6. Turning Words into Sounds: Samuel Beckett’s Repetition and the Tape Recorder
• Afterword
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index