UC Santa Barbara

Sonic Alterities: On Literature and the Sounds of Intersubjectivity explores the spatial, affective and intersubjective significance of sound to develop a theory of self-and-other that moves beyond the gaze. It orients around three nodes: sound studies, literature, and intertwining discourses of intersubjectivity and alterity. Attending to sound in eco-acoustic, beyond-the-human contexts as well as sonic cultural practices the ocularnormative would occlude, Sonic Alterities deconstructs sound as philosophical problem and demonstrates how modernist experimentation and Black epistemologies center sound in intersubjectivity and phenomenal consciousness. The first chapter moves from antiquity (Plato’s Phaedrus) to the present and shows how cicada singing envelops and pierces a dialectic of death and desire. The second chapter, on bells in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, draws on consciousness studies to distill the role of bells and sound waves in metaphors of attunement. The third chapter reframes acousmatic sound (i.e., sound whose source is unseen) and reads Ralph Ellison’s “sound subject” as an inversion of Pierre Schaeffer’s “sound object,” and it likewise argues that call-and-response is as influential to intersubjective theory as continental philosophy. Chapter Four unpacks how William Faulkner’s circumscription of Joe Christmas in “a little island of silence” underscores his alienation as a possibly biracial character in the Jim Crow South. The fifth reads James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” to argue that jazz provides the cultural frame that makes conceptualizing epigenetics in scientific discourses possible.