THE ART OF NOISE: LITERATURE AND DISTURBANCE 1900-1940

[摘要] The Art of Noise: Literature and Disturbance 1900-1940 is a study of noise’s rolein prose literature in the U.S., Britain, and Ireland in the first half of the twentieth century.The Art of Noise focuses on what I call modernist noise, a way of leveraging noise—understood both as an auditory phenomenon (unwanted sound) and cyberneticinterference (additional or garbled information that distorts information transmission)—todraw attention to, and in some cases to patch, a communicative or epistemological gap. Iexamine how authors leverage noise’s ability to confuse, to dismay, to pull a reader outof the flow of a text, and even to alienate her in order to create sticking points in theirwork that demand attention. In tracing noise’s disruptive qualities through modernist andmodernist-era novels, I am particularly interested in how the defamiliarizing action ofmodernist noise coalesces around limit cases of social and political belongingness—narratives of extremity ranging from total war to economic and racial otherness.Scholarship on literary sound has tended to focus on musicality, or on the impactof sound technology on modernist culture. This focus has led to a general neglect of noisein se. The authors I consider—chief among them Mary Borden, James Joyce, UptonSinclair, and Richard Wright—suggest that writing noise carries with it the possibility ofintercourse between otherwise unbridgeable domains of experience. Instead of resolvingmodernist noise into a symptom of the twentieth century’s mechanized war and industryor of modernism’s own inclination toward an aesthetic of difficulty, I read its irruptioninto the novel as a productive disturbance.

[发布机构] Johns Hopkins University

[效力级别] sound studies

[关键词] noise;sound studies;modernist literature;war literature;protest literature;nursing memoir;James Joyce;Upton Sinclair;Richard Wright;Mary Borden;English