Listening to the Sonic Life of Literature
By Kelly van der Meulen & Sven Verouden
This issue focuses on cross-disciplinary understandings of sound and silences in literature. In Western literary tradition, literature has traditionally been thought of as a silent medium, but this overlooks the way literature can give a voice to its authors, or the multitude of techniques used to represent sound, noise, music or silence in literary texts. We hope that by reading this issue, full of sounds and silences, you tune in and become, what Robert Stephto has so strikingly coined, a “storylistener” (151).
Stepto, Robert B. A Home Elsewhere: Reading African American Classics in the Age of Obama. Harvard UP, 2010.