UC Berkeley

The theory and history of the modernist novel traditionally emphasizes a shift away from "telling" towards "showing." This project argues that the overly visual account of modernism misses a crucial opportunity to "hear" modernist narrative and composition. It is an acoustics of modernist narrative backed by two case studies, the work of Joseph Conrad and William Faulkner. These writers propose a way of listening to the modernist novel and to the neglected importance of sounds and voices within it. Attending to Conrad's peculiar transnational voice, Faulkner's regional, southern voice, and their shared sensitivity to the physical, rhetorical, and musical properties of speech and writing, I argue that listening in and to their novels takes on a critical valence. In Conrad's negotiation of colonialism and Faulkner's attendance to the legacy of slavery, both writers attend to the dejected registers of narrative voice, hearing the sonic remainders of identity, including race and nationality.