Sounding Modernism: Rhythm and Sonic Mediation in Modern Literature and Film

Explores the transformations of sound in modern literary and cinematic forms from the 1890s to the mid-20th century This volume brings together a range of essays by eminent and emergent scholars working at the intersection of modern literary, cinema and sound studies. The individual studies ask what specific sonorous qualities are capable of being registered by different modern media, and how sonic transpositions and transferences across media affect the ways in which human subjects attend to modern soundscapes. Script, groove, electrical current, magnetic imprint, phonographic vibration: as the contributors show, sound traverses these and other material platforms to become an insistent ground-note of modern aesthetics, one not yet adequately integrated into critical accounts of the period. This collection also provides a commanding and wide-ranging investigation of the conditions under which modernists tapped technically into the rhythms, echoes and sonic architectures of their worlds. Key Features Addresses a growing demand for critical studies on the interface between literary history and the 'soundscape' of modernityDiscusses the rich nexus of new sound recording technologies, new vocabularies of and for sonic phenomena, new standardisations of rhythm and speed, and the weird displacements of 'voice' peculiar to modernityAnswers the need for an explicit engagement with the symbolic registrations of sonic modernity on textual forms in sound studiesSystematically analyses modernist forms in terms of their capacities to mediate rhythms, sonic textures and vocal derangements

Table of Contents:
Introduction: Sounding Modernism 1890–1950 Writing Modern Sounds On Not Listening To Modernism, Julian Murphet Advocating Auricularisation: Virginia Woolf’s ‘In The Orchard’, Tom Vandevelde Mediated Voices Bottled Bands: Automatic Music and American Media Publics, Lisa Gitelman How to Listen to Joyce: Gramophones, Voice and the Limits of Mediation, Helen Groth Sounding Region, Writing Accent: A. G. Street and the BBC, Debra Rae Cohen Partial to Opera: Sounding Willa Cather’s Empty Rooms, John Plotz Elliptical Sound: Audibility and the Space of Reading, Julie Beth Napolin Difficult Voices Harsh Sounds: George Gissing’s Penetrating Literary Voice, Penelope Hone Body and Soul: Modernism, Metaphysics, Rhyme, Sean Pryor Listening to the Late Cantos, Kristin Grogan Modern Rhythm: Writing, Sound, Cinema The Rhythms of Character in Katherine Mansfield’s ‘Miss Brill’, Helen Rydstrand The Rhythm of the Rails: Sound and Locomotion, Laura Marcus Two-step, Nerve-tap, Tanglefoot: Tapdance Typologies in Cinema, Steven Connor Bibliography

About the Author :
Julian Murphet is Jury Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Adelaide. He is the author, previously, of Literature and Race in Los Angeles (Cambridge University Press, 2001), Multimedia Modernism (Cambridge University Press, 2009), Faulkner’s Media Romance (Oxford University Press, 2017) and Todd Solondz (Northern Illinois University Press, 2019), and of the forthcoming Modern Character: 1888–1905 (Oxford University Press, 2023) and Twentieth-Century Prison Writing: A Literary Guide (Edinburgh University Press, 2023). Helen Groth is Professor of English in the School of Arts and Media, University of New South Wales. She is the author of Victorian Photography and Literary Nostalgia (Oxford University Press, 2004), Moving Images. Nineteenth-Century Reading and Screen Practices (Edinburgh University Press, 2013), and co-author of Dreams and Modernity. A Cultural History (Routledge, 2013). She is the co-editor of a number of books and special journal issues, most recently Sounding Modernism: Rhythm and Sonic Mediation in Modern Literature and Film (Edinburgh University Press, 2017) and Writing the Global Riot (Oxford University Press, 2023). Penelope Hone recently completed her PhD in English at UNSW Australia. Her research concentrates on the novel in the nineteenth century, with a particular interest in changing conceptions of the literary voice, noise and new media. She has previously published on George Eliot.

Review :
[A] groundbreaking collection of essays [...] Sounding Modernism will definitely intrigue Joyce scholars: first, because of the volume's innovative readings of Joyce's work, and second, because of the contributors' methods to analyze a wide range of literary texts and films can serve as models for further investigation into questions relating to rhythm and sound in Joyce's writings. At last, the collection sound studies has been listening for. Its full-throated intersection of the technical registers in media theory (storage versus communication) with the palpable phonic rhythms of literature and "the talkies" makes for a multi-channel and ear-opening anthology tuned to the very pulse of time-based encounters across media.