The Fact of Resonance

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With meticulous attention to the aesthetics and politics of voice, sound, reading, listening, and the representation of others, Julie Beth Napolin offers an ear-opening set of resonances, restoring to the texts in question an audiovisual multiplicity entangled with race and ethnicity. This book is destined to reboot our reception of classics by Conrad, Du Bois, Fanon, Faulkner, and others. An admirably ambitious and nuanced study."-Rey Chow, co-editor of Sound Objects"This is a remarkable book, a truly interdisciplinary effort that brings the study of sound to bear on the very nature of narrative and the phenomenology of reading. Using a twinned approach to sound-both as acoustics and as sound-figures-allows Napolin to produce a wholly original set of engagements with the politics of colonialism, race, affect, and subjectivity in the modernist novel."-Brian Kane, Yale UniversityThe Fact of Resonance returns to the colonial and technological contexts in which theories of the novel developed, seeking in sound an alternative premise for theorizing modernist narrative form. Arguing that narrative theory has been founded on an exclusion of sound, the book poses a missing counterpart to modernism's question "who speaks?" in the hidden acoustical questions "who hears?" and "who listens?"For Napolin, the experience of reading is undergirded by the sonic. "Resonance" names the traversal of acoustical figures across the spaces of colonial and technological modernity, figures that register and transmit transformations of "voice" and "sound" across languages, culture, and modalities of hearing. Moving between Joseph Conrad, W. E. B. Du Bois, William Faulkner, Frantz Fanon, Chantal Akerman, and others, Napolin captures and enhances literature's ambient sounds, sounds that are clues to heterogeneous experiences secreted within the acoustical unconscious of texts.Julie Beth Napolin is Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities in the Literature Program at the New School.