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 modernity
• Discusses 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 modernity
• Answers the need for an explicit engagement with the symbolic registrations of sonic modernity on textual forms in sound studies
• Systematically analyses modernist forms in terms of their capacities to mediate rhythms, sonic textures and vocal derangements

Julian Murphet is Scientia Professor in English and Film Studies at UNSW Australia.
Helen Groth is Professor of English in the School of the Arts and Media at UNSW Australia.
Penelope Hone recently completed her PhD in English at UNSW Australia.