Angela Frattarola
Af207@nyu.edu
Sensual Shifts:
From Looking to Listening in Modernist Literature
From Greek philosophy to the Enlightenment, vision has been the privileged sense. Traditionally
associated with knowledge and rationality, vision encourages a subject to keep a distanced,
analytical perspective of an object. But can the other senses allow new ways of conceiving of
and experiencing the relationship between the self and the world? This seminar begins by
examining the dominance of vision in modernity and turns to audition as a way of thinking about
alternative perceptions of the self and the world. We accomplish this by closely reading
modernist fiction that suggests a growing skepticism toward vision and heightened attention to
sound and listening. In order to think about why modernists brought sound to the forefront of
their art, we will attempt to gain a sense of the modernist soundscape and new auditory
technologies of the time. What did the music of the period sound like? What did people think
about the phonograph, radio, and telephone? Readings for the course consist of essays from
sound studies as well as fiction by Virginia Woolf, Dorothy Richardson, Jean Rhys, Samuel
Beckett, and James Joyce.
Required Texts:
1. Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man by James Joyce (Dover, 1994) ISBN10: 0486280500; ISBN-13: 978-0486280509
2. Voyage in the Dark by Jean Rhys (Norton, 1994) ISBN-10: 0393311465; ISBN-13: 9780393311464
3. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (Mariner, 1990) ISBN-10: 0156628708; ISBN13: 978-0156628709
4. Pointed Roofs by Dorothy Richardson (CreateSpace, 2013) ISBN-10: 1467945323;
ISBN-13: 978-1467945325
5. Under the Jaguar Sun by Italo Calvino (Mariner, 1990) ISBN-10: 0156927942, ISBN13: 978-0156927949
6. Electronically available through Bobst: The Sound Studies Reader, edited by Jonathan
Sterne (Routledge, 2012)
7. NYU Classes or the web: short stories and essays
Requirements and Assessment:
Class Presentation: 10%
First Response Paper (3 pages): 10%
Second Response Paper (3 pages): 10%
Midterm Essay (7 pages): 35%
Final Essay (7 pages): 35%
Tentative Schedule:
Week 1: Ocularcentrism
January 27: Introduction, The Rite of Spring
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January 29: Martin Jay chapter (NYU Classes)
Week 2: The Soundscape
February 3: Sound Studies Reader, Sterne’s “Sonic Imaginations,” Connor’s “The Modern
Auditory I” (NYU Classes)
February 5: First half of Joyce’s Portrait
Week 3: Listening
February 10: Sound Studies Reader, Rath’s “No Corner for the Devil to Hide” and Chion’s “The
Three Listening Modes”
February 12: Finish Joyce’s Portrait
Week 4: The Voice
February 17: President’s Day – OFF!
February 19: Sound Studies Reader, Cavarero’s “Multiple Voices” and Calvino’s Under the
Jaguar Sun
**First Response Paper due
Week 5: Noise
February 24: Sound Studies Reader, Picker’s “The Soundproof Study” and Schafer’s “The
Soundscape”
February 26: First half of Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway
Week 6: Music
March 3: Sound Studies Reader, Attali’s “Noise” and Leppert’s “Reading the Sonoric
Landscape”
March 5: Finish Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway
Week 7: The Sound Poem
March 10: Draft of Essay 1 due, in-class work-shopping with a hard copy of draft
March12: Sound Studies Reader, Kahn’s “Noises of the Avant-Garde”; Selection of poetry
(NYU Classes)
**Midterm Essay due on Friday, March 14
Spring Break
Week 8: Voice
March 24: Sound Studies Reader, Barthes’s “The Grain of Voice” and Dolar’s “The Linguistics
of the Voice”
March 26: First half of Richardson’s Pointed Roofs and Richardson’s “About Punctuation”
(NYU Classes)
Week 9: The Auditory I
March 31: Sound Studies Reader, Thompson’s “Sound, Modernity and History” and Oliver
Sacks “The Power of Music” http://brain.oxfordjournals.org/content/129/10/2528.full
April 2: Finish Richardson’s Pointed Roofs
Week 10: The Phonograph and Popular Recordings
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April 7: Sound Studies Reader, Kittler’s “Gramophone,” Gittleman’s “The Phonograph’s New
Media Publics”
April 9: Rhys short story selection (NYU Classes)
**Second Response Paper Due
Week 11: Interior Monologue, Marketing the Bohemian Voice
April 14: Begin Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark
April 16: Finish Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark
Week 12: Wireless and Telephone
April 21: Sound Studies Reader, Hilmes’s “Radio and the Imagined Community,” Berland’s
“Contradicting Media” and Kipling’s “The Wireless”
http://www.readbookonline.net/readOnLine/8675/
April 23: Dorothy Parker’s “A Telephone Call”
http://www.classicshorts.com/stories/teleycal.html, Kafka’s “The Neighbor,”
http://www.kafka.org/index.php?aid=162 and Peter’s “The Telephonic Uncanny”
Week 13: Repetition and Loops
Viewing: Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape
April 28: Pierre Schaeffer, excerpts on musique concrete (NYU Classes)
April 30: Beckett’s prose (NYU Classes)
Week 14: Modernist Radio Drama
May 5: Draft of Essay 2 due, in-class work-shopping with a hard copy of draft
May 7: Beckett’s radio plays
Last day of class!
May 12: Final Essay due
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