Modern Fiction, Disability, and the Hearing Sciences by Allen, Edward;

Short description:

At a time when visual media otherwise seem to have captured the imagination, Modern Fiction, Disability, and the Hearing Sciences makes the case for a wide range of literature. In doing so, the book reveals the diverse ways in which writers have plotted and voiced experiences of hearing, from the nineteenth century to the present day.

Long description:

The relationship between critical disability studies and the hearing sciences is a dynamic one, and it’s changing still, both as clinicians come to terms with the evolving health of deaf and hearing communities and as the ‘social’ and ‘medical’ understandings of disability continue to gain traction among different groups. What might a ‘cultural’ approach to these overlapping areas of study involve? And what could narrative prose in particular have to tell us that other sources haven’t sensed?

At a time when visual media otherwise seem to have captured the imagination, Modern Fiction, Disability, and the Hearing Sciences makes the case for a wide range of literature. In doing so – through serials, short stories, circadian fiction, narrative history, morality tales, whodunits, Bildungsromane, life-writing, the Great American Novel – the book reveals the diverse ways in which writers have plotted and voiced experiences of hearing, from the nineteenth century to the present day.

Table of Contents:

List of Contributors

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Placing Quietness

Edward Allen

1. Stethoscape: Auscultation in British Fiction

Justin Tackett

2. ‘Redemption From Probable Destruction’: Deafness, Isolation, and Identity in the

Autobiography of Harriet Martineau

Clare Walker Gore

3. Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and the Biopolitics of Interwar Noise Abatement

Anna Snaith

            Earpiece 1: ‘Feel dumb. Don’t cry’: Inside a Soundproof Gray Room

Jaipreet Virdi

4. Automatic Voices: Modernism, Telephony, and Delusion

Andrew Gaedtke

5. ‘The Zoom of a Hornet’: Virginia Woolf, Aural Biopolitics, and the Phenomenology of

an Air Raid

Beryl Pong

6. Sleuthing Deafness in Detective Fiction

Edward Allen

            Earpiece 2: Learning to be Hearing

Ben Holmes

7. The Jabber of Money: Tinnitus as Metaphor and Martin Amis’s Critique of Neoliberalism

A. Elisabeth Reichel

8. Sound Minds: Schizophonia and Schizophrenia in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest

William Allen

9. Teju Cole’s ‘Art of Listening’

Rachel Farebrother

Earpiece 3: ‘Really a part of me’: Dementia Conversations

Catherine Charlwood

Index