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The Fact of Resonance: Modernist Acoustics and Narrative Form

Online ISBN:
9780823290468
Print ISBN:
9780823288175
Publisher:
Fordham University Press
Book

The Fact of Resonance: Modernist Acoustics and Narrative Form

Julie Beth Napolin
Julie Beth Napolin
The New School
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Published online:
21 January 2021
Published in print:
2 June 2020
Online ISBN:
9780823290468
Print ISBN:
9780823288175
Publisher:
Fordham University Press

Abstract

The Fact of Resonance returns to the imperial and colonial contexts in which Anglophone and francophone narrative theory developed, seeking an alternative sonic premise for theorizing narrative form. The exclusion of postcolonial sound and acoustics is foundational not only to modernist studies, but to narrative theory, novel theory, and the strains of film theory they orient. The study is primarily focused on Joseph Conrad and concerns the bearing of his multilingual formation and attunement to the gender and race of sound in colonial encounter. To return to Conrad is to return to the repressed of colonial sound. Bringing new methodologies of sound studies and postcolonial studies to bear upon older models of narrative and close reading, the book argues the novel to be a sound technology. This technology captures not “facts,” but a fact of resonance, which is both a physical sound and a strategy of relation across difference. The book develops a methodology of reading for resonance, while also developing a vocabulary for the acoustic unconscious of texts. These readings focus on the way that imaginary sound and voice circulate within and between texts, from page to psyche, from colonial site to metropole, and across race and gender. The book follows the resonances between Conrad and a series of writers and artists, including Chantal Akerman, Walter Benjamin, W. E. B. Du Bois, Sigmund Freud, Frantz Fanon, and William Faulkner. Ultimately, the transatlantic and transpacific are resonance, less a place than an event.

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