Introduction: New Sonic Approaches in Literary Studies

Introduction:New Sonic Approaches in Literary Studies Jason Camlot (bio) and Katherine McLeod (bio) The sound of literature is now discernible as never before. This emerging discernibility inciting new sonic approaches to literature is due, in the first instance, to digitized audio assets and online environments that make previously analog collections of literary recordings more readily available and useful for research and study. Beyond this important infrastructural condition, the heightened discernibility of sonic approaches to literary culture has arisen from a quite recent interaction and convergence of methods between literary studies and sound studies as a broad, interdisciplinary field. This continuum that now grants context for literary scholarship that focuses on sound did not exist to the same degree even fifteen years ago when Louis Cabri and Peter Quartermain produced their special issue of ESC, "On Discreteness: Event and Sound in Poetry," a collection of scholarly work that focused primarily on the "one-hundred-plus sounds, derived from forty-plus phonemes—spoken English" as "part of poetry's sonic dimension" (Cabri 1). Most notable in that issue was its generic focus, which made it most exciting and meaningful (and innovative from the perspective of methods) to scholars of twentieth- and twenty-first century poetry. This parabolic focus on sound in poetry, arguably going back to the importance of literary prosody in New Critical close-reading methods [End Page 1] of the mid-twentieth century, also characterized some of the influential edited collections that approached the relationship between sound and literature published in the 1990s, such as Adelaide Morris's Sound States: Innovative Poetics and Acoustical Technologies and Charles Bernstein's Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word. Bernstein's work, in particular, is singled out by Cabri (in 2007) as having been "largely responsible for the re-emergence of sound as a value for critical attention" in literary studies (3). The fact of Bernstein's pioneering significance remains true to this day, even as an entire interdisciplinary field of research known as sound studies has blossomed without much direct awareness of these works on literary sound that were focused, for the most part, on expanding our understanding of prosody beyond page-based metrics to include the prosodic features of poetry when spoken. That these "early" works in the recent wave of sound-oriented literary criticism were organized mostly around avant-garde poetic examples, and were generated by scholars who were, in some cases, also poets and performers themselves, suggests that our discipline's recent entry into sonic approaches to literature came from an already developed set of ideas about literary prosody as it might be reimagined and applied in new ways to poetry, now understood as an intermedial artform produced and circulating in differential formats through complex networks and in diverse contexts. The critical points of reference for Morris in Sounds States were Walter J. Ong, Marshall McLuhan, and Friedrich Kittler, as well as Richard Lanham and George P. Lanham, together suggesting the extant context for literary study as "a web of power, technologies, and signifying marks" (Morris 1). Morris defined the sound state of literary studies in 1997 as tin-eared, underdeveloped, nascent: "With the exception of New Critics trained in prosody, even our best close readers have not also been close listeners" (2). Her own conceptual preoccupations at the time were with relationships between orality and literacy and, with reference to Garrett Stewart's then recent Reading Voices: Literature and the Phonotext, between the "graphotext" and the "phonotext." The sonic dimensions of poetry as considered in this work did not stray far from the printed page. Bernstein's influential "Introduction" to Close Listening presented a fugue of ideas about the implications for literary studies of listening to poetry in performance. Along the way, Bernstein stressed (but did not really outline as a practical method) the importance of possible ways of doing close listening as a critical practice. He made a number of key points about what attending to sound in the interpretation of performed poetry might do, observing that such a critical disposition implies a resistance to [End Page 2] the synthetic unity of any literary work (9–10). It frames the poetry reading as "its own...

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