“If there is a space of thinking, either real or virtual, then within it there must also be sound, for all sound seeks its expression as vibration in the medium of space,” writes Bill Viola. We think of narrative as being with “space” and, while we understand literature as being with a poetics and rhetoric, we do not ask after its acoustics. What, then, is narrative acoustics? In a triple gesture, it is the making of narrative space by sound, the virtual hearing of sounds in narrative and intertextual space, and the narrative of sonic change. This talk takes us through some of the acoustical-narrative spaces of Flaubert, James, Faulkner, Ellison, and Hitchcock.
At 5:15pm in Lerner Center 102, University of Pennsylvania, Department of Music, Graduate Student Colloquium Series