Literature as Sound Studies

(Hardback)

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Literature as Sound Studies identifies literature as a site of sonic invention and reconfiguration, contributing a range of terms, models, and methods for attending to sound. Considering literary works drawn from a range of traditionsfrom twentieth-century Moroccan poems to early-modern English playsLiterature as Sound Studies brings out the sophisticated ways that literary writers and commentators have used and studied sound. Moving beyond the use of literature as mere ear witness to history, this collection brings out the complexity of sonic figuration in literature and literary studies, suggesting how this attentiveness to sound might anticipate, illuminate, and enrich the contemporary field of sound studies. The very category of the literary, considered as a subset of language writ large, has often hinged on the particular attention that literary works draw to their own sound, whether that sound be psychologically rehearsed, as in silent reading, or acoustically realized, as in a theatrical performance. Weaving together methods and concepts drawn from both literary and sound studies, these essays make legible literatures complex role in shaping and writing a history of sound.

Author Bio

yasser elhariry is Associate Professor of French at Dartmouth College, USA, and the author of Pacifist Invasions: Arabic, Translation, and the Postfrancophone Lyric (2017), and editor of Cultures du mysticisme (2017), Critically Mediterranean: Temporalities, Aesthetics, and Deployments of a Sea in Crisis (2018), The Postlingual Turn (2021), Sounds Senses (2021), and Abdelkbir Khatibi: Literature and Theory (2022). His essays also appear in Yale French Studies, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, New Literary History, LEsprit Crateur, Contemporary French Civilization, Contemporary French and Francophone Studies: SITES, Francosphres, French Forum, Parade sauvage: revue dtudes rimbaldiennes, and several edited volumes. Liesl Yamaguchi is Assistant Professor of French at the University of California, Berkeley, USA, and specializes in poetics, linguistics, translation, and literary theory. Her recent publications have appeared in New Literary History, Common Knowledge, Nineteenth-Century French Studies, French Studies, and Comparative Literature, garnering the Ralph Cohen Prize (NLH) and the Vivien Law Prize (Henry Sweet Society for the History of Linguistic Ideas). Her translation of Vin Linna's Unknown Soldiers was the first work of Finnish literature to appear with Penguin Classics (2015); her first monograph The Proper Tone: On the Color of Vowels is forthcoming.