Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Fact of Resonance: Modernist Acoustics and Narrative Form

The Fact of Resonance: Modernist Acoustics and Narrative Form

Napolin, Julie Beth

Hardcover

Series: Idiom: Inventing Writing Theory

PhilosophyLiterary CriticismMusic Reference

ISBN10: 082328817X
ISBN13: 9780823288175
Publisher: Fordham Univ Pr
Published: Jun 2 2020
Pages: 288
Weight: 1.47
Height: 0.94 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English

Shortlisted, 2021 Memory Studies Association First Book Award

The Fact of Resonance returns to the colonial and technological contexts in which theories of the novel developed, seeking in sound an alternative premise for theorizing modernist narrative form. Arguing that narrative theory has been founded on an exclusion of sound, the book poses a missing counterpart to modernism's question who speaks? in the hidden acoustical questions who hears? and who listens?

For Napolin, the experience of reading is undergirded by the sonic. The book captures and enhances literature's ambient sounds, sounds that are clues to heterogeneous experiences secreted within the acoustical unconscious of texts. The book invents an oblique ear, a subtle and lyrical prose style attuned to picking up sounds no longer hearable. Resonance opens upon a new genealogy of modernism, tracking from Joseph Conrad to his interlocutors--Sigmund Freud, Frantz Fanon, W. E. B. Du Bois, William Faulkner, and Chantal Akerman--the racialized, gendered, and colonial implications of acoustical figures that drift through and are transformed by narrative worlds in writing, film, and music.

A major synthesis of resources gleaned from across the theoretical humanities, the book argues for resonance as the traversal of acoustical figures across the spaces of colonial and technological modernity, figures registering and transmitting transformations of voice and sound across languages, culture, and modalities of hearing. We have not yet sufficiently attended to relays between sound, narrative, and the unconscious that are crucial to the ideological entailments and figural strategies of transnational, transatlantic, and transpacific modernism. The breadth of the book's engagements will make it of interest not only to students and scholars of modernist fiction and sound studies, but to anyone interested in contemporary critical theory.

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