Fact of Resonance

Beth Napolin Julie

Description

Shortlisted, 2021 Memory Studies Association First Book AwardThe Fact of Resonance returns to the colonial and technological contexts in which theories of the novel developed, seeking in sound an alternative premise for theorizing modernist narrative form. Arguing that narrative theory has been founded on an exclusion of sound, the book poses a missing counterpart to modernism's question "who speaks?" in the hidden acoustical questions "who hears?" and "who listens?"For Napolin, the experience of reading is undergirded by the sonic. The book captures and enhances literature's ambient sounds, sounds that are clues to heterogeneous experiences secreted within the acoustical unconscious of texts. The book invents an oblique ear, a subtle and lyrical prose style attuned to picking up sounds no longer hearable. "Resonance" opens upon a new genealogy of modernism, tracking from Joseph Conrad to his interlocutors-Sigmund Freud, Frantz Fanon, W. E. B. Du Bois, William Faulkner, and Chantal Akerman-the racialized, gendered, and colonial implications of acoustical figures that "drift" through and are transformed by narrative worlds in writing, film, and music.A major synthesis of resources gleaned from across the theoretical humanities, the book argues for "resonance" as the traversal of acoustical figures across the spaces of colonial and technological modernity, figures registering and transmitting transformations of "voice" and "sound" across languages, culture, and modalities of hearing. We have not yet sufficiently attended to relays between sound, narrative, and the unconscious that are crucial to the ideological entailments and figural strategies of transnational, transatlantic, and transpacific modernism. The breadth of the book's engagements will make it of interest not only to students and scholars of modernist fiction and sound studies, but to anyone interested in contemporary critical theory.

Informations

• Publié par: Fordham University Press
• Date de parution: 02 juin 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780823288199
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 6 Mo

Extrait

THE FACT OF RESONANCE

THE FACT OF RESONANCE

MODERNIST ACOUSTICS AND NARRATIVE FORM

JULIE BETH NAPOLIN

Fordham University PressNew York2020

Fordham University Press gratefully acknowledgesfinancial assistance and support provided for the publication of this book by Eugene Lang College, The New School for Liberal Arts.

Copyright © 2020 Fordham University Press

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2020903278

Printed in the United States of America

22 21 20

First edition

5 4 3 2 1

for Marsha & in loving memory of Leah Napolin

CONTENTS

Note on Abbreviations

Overture: The Sound of a Novel

1

Voice at the Threshold of the Audible: Free Indirect Discourse and the Colonial Space of Reading

Coda: Chantal Akerman and Lip Sync as Postcolonial Strategy

2

The Echo of the Object: On the Pain of Self-Hearing inThe Nigger of the “Narcissus”and “The Fact of Blackness”

Coda: Literary History as Miscegenating Sound:The Sound and the Fury

Intersonority: Unclaimed Voices Circum-1900, or Sound and Sourcelessness inThe Souls of Black Folk

3

A Sinister Resonance: On the Extraction of Sound and Language inHeart of Darkness

Reprise: Reverberation, Circumambience, and Form-Seeking Sound (Absalom, Absalom!)

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

i

1

x

1

3

5

9

6

7

103

115

149

211

231

235

309

331

vii

NOTE ON ABBREVIATIONS

For major primary sources, I have used an abbreviation system.

SBF

W. E. B. Du Bois,The Souls of Black Folk: Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Terri Hume Oliver (New York: Norton, 1999)

Unless otherwise noted, all references to Conrad’s works are to Joseph Conrad, The Collected Works, 26 vols. (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page, and Co., 1926), and are abbreviated as follows:

AF LJ NN PR TU Y

Almayer’s Folly Lord Jim The Nigger of the “Narcissus” A Personal Record Tales of Unrest Youth and Two Other Stories

The most frequently cited works by William Faulkner are abbreviated as follows, less frequently cited works being noted in the text:

AA SF

Absalom, Absalom!, corrected text ed. (New York: Vintage, 1990) The Sound and the Fury, corrected text ed. (New York: Vintage, 1984)

ix