Literature as Sound Studies - by Yasser Elhariry & Liesl Yamaguchi Hardcover

Book Synopsis

Literature as Sound Studiesidentifies 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 traditions-from twentieth-century Moroccan poems to early-modern English plays-Literature 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 literature's complex role in shaping and writing a history of sound.

Review Quotes

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

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

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 Khaïr-Eddine to Franz Kafka) who attend in complex ways to these provocations.
Anna Snaith, Professor of Twentieth-Century Literature, King's College London, UK

About the Author

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 Abdelkébir Khatibi: Literature and Theory (2022). His essays also appear in Yale French Studies, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, New Literary History, L'Esprit Créateur, Contemporary French Civilization, Contemporary French and Francophone Studies: SITES, Francosphères, French Forum, Parade sauvage: revue d'études 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 Väinö 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.