Ebook: Sounding Modernism: Rhythm and Sonic Mediation in Modern Literature and Film

This volume brings together a range of essays by eminent and emergent scholars working at the intersection of modern literary, cinema and sound studies. By attending carefully to the dynamics and aesthetics of mediation, the essays in this collection explore the transformations of the rhythmic or metrical patterning of sound in a range of modern literary and cinematic forms produced from the 1890s through to the mid-twentieth century. The essays ask what specific sonorous qualities are capable of being registered by different modern media, and how sonic transpositions and transferences across media affect the ways in which human subjects attend to modern soundscapes. Script, groove, electrical current, magnetic imprint, phonographic vibration: sound traverses these and other material platforms to become an insistent ground-note of modern aesthetics, one not yet adequately integrated into critical accounts of the period. This collection addresses that lack through a wide-ranging investigation of the conditions under which modernists tapped technically into the rhythms, echoes and sonic architectures of their worlds.