Toward a History of Literary Listening

Toward a History of Literary Listening Jason Camlot (bio) I am outlining a new project, a history of literary listening. It will be a different kind of disciplinary history of literary studies than others I have read and enjoyed, like Gerald Graff's Professing Literature (1987/2007), John Guillory's Cultural Capital (1993) and Professing Criticism (2022), Paul Eggert's The Work and the Reader in Literary Studies (2021), for example. One of my opening questions is: Does literary studies as a discipline have discernible audile techniques? The answer is a resounding yes. It must be, right? And then, on second thought, we are inclined to ask, What do you mean by literary studies "as a discipline"? Because, if we are to consider the application of audile techniques within a discipline, we must first understand the defining qualities of the discipline itself, even if there are, as in the case of literary studies, various sub-fields, many of them explicitly interdisciplinary in their orientations, within it. What qualifies an audile technique, a method of listening, as constitutive of a literary method of analysis or interpretation? Insofar as such methods of listening "work to operationalize distinctions" (Siegert 14)1 and function as "concrete set[s] of [End Page 263] limited and related practices of listening and practical orientations towards listening" (Sterne 90), surely we can identify some distinctively literary critical concepts that point to significant practices and orientations toward listening that help literary critics make distinctions and claims about their objects of study. These would, ideally, be concepts and approaches that have wide implications for the practice of literary study, even if these concepts come from outside the discipline of literary studies itself. They would be substantial, like those introduced by R. Murray Schafer in The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and Tuning of the World (1977, 1994) as the foundational techniques of acoustic ecology and design, or like the overarching modes of critical listening Michel Chion introduced for film studies in works such as The Voice in Cinema (1999)/La voix au cinema (1982) and Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen (1994)/L'audio-vision: Son et image au cinema (1990). Are there audile techniques for literary listening akin to Schafer's range of practical methods of preparation for listening, including what he called "Ear Cleaning" (208, 272), through the structured pursuit of listening walks and sound walks, through methods for using recording media, and through techniques for classifying and scoring heard sounds and producing other written documentation as part of the kind of audile practice that contributes to eco-acoustical listening (123–50)? Are there well-articulated modes of listening to literary works, along the lines of Chion's defined modes of listening to sound in cinema, namely: causal listening, semantic listening, and reduced listening (25–34)? A literature scholar (perhaps one of a certain era) might think, first, of something like Alexander Pope's poetic axiom that, in artful literature, "[t]he Sound must seem an Eccho to the Senfle" (22). They might then consider all terms, tools, and methods that exist in the field that are used to generate observations about sound patterns in poetry, and about the significance of such patterns for literary expression. So, literary metrics and prosody, including methods and techniques of scansion (identifying patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables in lines of verse), the analysis of rhyme (ABAB, etc.), and other sonic elements or patterns found in a written text are all signs that literary critics have developed audile techniques for their critical methodology. Certainly, categories like iambic trimeter versus iambic [End Page 264] tetrameter, assonance versus consonance, alliteration, onomatopoeia, and others, are examples of concepts designed to help critics make distinctions based on sonic qualities in the analysis of literary works. So, the history of literary prosody and metrics, as pursued by scholars Meredith Martin (The Rise and Fall of Meter) and Ben Glaser (Modernism's Metronome), is most certainly one important (and extensive) area to consider in an account of the history of literary listening. But there are many other episodes in this category of literary history to consider, beyond that of the long-developed toolbox of literary metrical and prosodic methods critics...