Literature as Sound Studies

Reviews / Votes

This edited collection makes a significant and welcome intervention in the field of sound studies through its centering of the literary and the textual. Literature as Sound Studies reminds us that the literary is not merely 'ear witness' to the past but a place where the audible is constituted and sound worlds are produced. Editors yasser elhariry and Liesl Yamaguchi have assembled a fantastic roster of scholars writing on a historically and geographically diverse set of writers (from Thomas Dekker to Mohammed Khair-Eddine to Franz Kafka) who attend in complex ways to these provocations. * Anna Snaith, Professor of Twentieth-Century Literature, King's College London, UK * A resource exquisitely attuned to literature's neglected soundplay and rightful place within the booming field of sound studies. * Matthew Rubery, Professor of Modern Literature, Queen Mary University of London, UK * Literature as Sound Studies revives a mode of inquiry into the sonic dimensions of literary texts first explored over 25 years ago in the groundbreaking collections Sound States (Adelaide Morris) and Close Listening (Charles Bernstein). The welcome strength of the essays in this new collection is how they proceed with an expanded descriptive and conceptual vocabulary, developed in the interim, across the thriving, interdisciplinary field of sound studies. The phonographic readings of literary works offered here explore and resonate with new critical timbres. * Jason Camlot, author of Phonopoetics: The Making of Early Literary Recordings (2019), UK * Literature within sound studies has long been treated as a silent historical resource. This volume puts the various sounds of literature squarely within the field of study and does so through a geographically and chronologically ranging series of interventions. Anybody who has wondered how the tools of sound studies might inform literary analysis-and, importantly, vice versa-will find much with which to engage here. * James A. Steintrager, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of California, Irvine, USA *