Tanvi Solanki of Yonsei University and CRASSH presents Aural Philology: A Theory and Practice of Reading within Contact Zones.

In recent years, scholars of Sound Studies and literature have acknowledged how writers “constantly return” to the “puzzle of hearing things in literature” (as Angela Leighton has put it) and stage primordial echoes of a resonant (and /or dissonant) ancient past. But how do readers – both literary scholars and characters or subjects in the literary works – listen to these sounds of alterity inscribed into the written word based on their varying positionalities vis-à-vis the text at hand, and what are the political and ethical stakes of their reading-as-listening? By aural philology I refer to a method of reading, sensing, translating, and interpreting that emphasizes the aural dimension when engaging with the alterity of canonical literary works. It is a reading practice and theory that is situated within contact zones, that are (building on Mary Louise Pratt’s definition) those sites in our engagement with literature where interpretive cultural practices, each with differing positionalities vis-à-vis power, clash and grapple with each other.

In this talk, I will focus on contact zones wherein readers attempt to resist, appropriate, or even attempt to become co-present with the Ancient Greek language and its canon – often considered the paradigmatic ‘origin’ Western literary history and theory. I will establish how I came up with the theory and practice of aural philology: the German philosopher and literary theorist Johann Gottfried Herder’s reading-as-listening of Homer’s Iliad. He heard in Homer’s epic the sounds of cultural and historical difference while positioning himself as a German reader-as-listener who seeks to join the bard’s audience while retaining his own cultural difference. I will then put aural philology to practice through readings of passages from a set of texts outside the German literary tradition including Han Kang’s Greek Lessons. The talk intervenes in recent polemics in literary theory on returning to ‘presence’ and intense affective attachments when engaging with the alterity of literature (Rita Felski, Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht). It also critiques foundational aural-philological attachments to Ancient Greece by thinkers including Nietzsche, Heidegger and Friedrich Kittler.