Module description
'Civilisation is noise. At least modern civilisation is. And the more it progresses the noisier it becomes' (D. MacKenzie, The City of Din: A Tirade Against Noise, 1916, p.25)
The soundscape of the modernist city changed radically with new ways of recording, producing and transmitting sounds. With the popularisation of the gramophone, radio broadcasting and the rising hum of industry and traffic noise, a new auditory environment altered not just the sounds people heard but how they listened to them. Early twentieth-century writers often describe living in an 'Age of Noise' in response to the chaos and multiplicity of modern life (Aldous Huxley, 'Silence'). This module will investigate how writers such as Gertrude Stein, F. T. Marinetti, Claude McKay, George Orwell, Virginia Woolf and Elizabeth Bowen engage with the sonic and consider how we might register and analyse modernism's 'auditory imagination', to use T. S. Eliot's coinage.
In line with recent work in sound studies, we will investigate the sonic in its broadest forms in primary texts that attend to the sounds of urban living, the cacophony of war and the transformation of domestic space by telephone, gramophone and radio. We will consider what it means to 'write sound', whether through onomatopoeia, sound poetry, aural collage, dialect, song lyrics, typographical noise or manifestos on the aesthetics of noise. Our study will be supplemented by audio recordings and readings relating to the cultural history of hearing and listening, the growth of noise abatement societies and the history of the measurement of sound and its effects on the body. Modernist texts do not always emit clear and transparent signals; they require interpretive 'tuning' just as the hiss and crackle of the new 'talking machines' required listeners to train their ears. In this way, literary modernism could be said to turn up the volume on the disruptive capacity of the literary. Our focus will allow us to ask wider questions about the ways in which sonic modernity is central to modernism's interdisciplinarity, its revolutionary motivations and its interest in the interactions between mind, body and the external world.
Assessment details
1 x 4000-word essay