Sound Effects: The Oral/Aural Dimensions of Literature in English: Introduction

Sound Effects:The Oral/Aural Dimensions of Literature in English: Introduction Neil Rhodes (bio) and Chris Jones (bio) Sound Effects traces the history of the relationship between oral conditions and aural effect in English literature from its beginnings in the Anglo-Saxon period through to the twenty-first century. Few collections nowadays, other than textbook histories, would attempt a survey of their field from the early middle ages to the present day, and it is not our intention here to offer a continuous narrative. But despite the many centuries covered by this collection, the reader will find that certain themes recur in different contexts and that the individual essays speak to each other, often over long distances of time. It ends where it might have begun, with Homer, though in modern English form. The effect of this pattern is to create an "envelope" structure in which the ancient oral forms of Greek and Anglo-Saxon verse reappear as contexts for understanding how these forms survive and how sound works in the poetry of the modern world. The scope of the volume is also determined by its subject, since we are concerned with tradition as well as with the oral and aural. In particular, we are concerned with how literary production and reception respond to the different waves of media evolution from oral to written, manuscript to print (and the theater), and the later development of machine technology. We are not specifically concerned with the computer and the Internet, though they are an unstated presence behind the project as a whole. A subsidiary theme is the way in which sound, understood in both oral and aural terms, provides the agency through which high and low, elite and popular cultures are brought into conjunction throughout English literature. This collection derives from a conference held at the University of St. Andrews in 2006, one of an occasional series on the media in history as a context for literary interpretation.1 The aim of the conference was to extend our discussion of the literary media from printed text and script back to the most basic medium of all: speech. But we also wanted to explore points of contact between the established field of oral tradition and the emerging field of sound studies. The origins of the latter might be traced as far back as Luigi Russolo's The Art of Noises (1913), but in academic terms the landmark publication is probably Murray Schafer's The New Soundscape (1968), which gave us a term that has become increasingly common in modern cultural history. More recently, there have been groundbreaking books by Bruce Smith (1999) on early modern England and John Picker (2003) on the Victorian period, as well as valuable multidisciplinary collections such as Les Back and Michael Bull's Auditory Culture Reader (2003). Our hope is that the present collection will make its own contribution to this developing field by offering a broad historical contextualization of the oral/aural dimensions of English literature in an easily accessible online form that also allows us to provide sound and image files in an eCompanion. Although our use of this last facility has been relatively modest, the electronic medium of the publication points in the direction that sound studies should obviously go. This has been the direction taken by John Miles Foley in his editorship of Oral Tradition and in his own work on the parallels between the conditions of primary orality and those produced by modern Internet technology.2 It will seem increasingly odd to produce printed books about sound that are themselves soundless. The point we have reached was imagined half a century ago by Marshall McLuhan, who effectively invented modern media studies and gave us the concepts of "acoustic space" and, through his influence on Walter Ong, the "secondary orality" of the electronic media. It was McLuhan (1962) who announced that "the new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village" (31), and it is fitting that his work should now be enjoying a revaluation: this is his century. McLuhan was a Canadian, as is Murray Schafer; when we add in the work of Harold Innis on the railways and...

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