Author: Kelly Van der Meulen

Coffeeshop Discourse: An Exercise in Creative Writing in Search of Meaning Academic writing can, at times, lead to more obfuscation than clar- ity for students, which this paper attempts to solve through using creative writing as a method. This experimental approach makes theories accessible by reframing the discussion in a more approach- able format. It… Continue reading 35.2 | Yuqi Khoo

For the People Hear Us Singing “Bread and Roses”: The Myth of a Poem Turned Labor Song This article examines the afterlife of the 1911 poem “Bread and Roses,” that is commonly associated with a 1912 factory strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, and showcases how a 1974 musical rendition of the poem ‘stuck’ in the cultural… Continue reading 35.2 | Marit van de Warenburg

Persephone Screams, and We Listen: An Analysis of Sound in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter This paper analyses the thematic interactions with sound, dialogue, and the metapoetics of performance in the myth of the rape of Persephone as recounted in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter. A product of the ancient Greek oral tradition, this text… Continue reading 35.2 | Judith Hendriksma

How Beale Street Talks and Whispers: The Political Soundscapes of James Baldwin’s Novel Through the critical application of Angela Leighton’s recently published sonic framework Hearing Things: The Work of Sound in Literature (2018), this article shows how in his novel If Beale Street Could Talk (1974) James Baldwin uses sound to compose a socio-political soundscape… Continue reading 35.2 | Florien Kijlstra

Powerful Silence as a Decolonizing Writing Strategy in Maria Dermoût’s De juwelen haarkam In this article, I analyze Maria Dermoût’s short story De juwelen haarkam (“The Jeweled Hair Comb”), a literary retelling of an anticolonial revolt that took place in the Dutch East Indies in 1817. I argue that Dermoût’s use of silence in this… Continue reading 35.2 | Gerlov van Engelenhoven

Bad Vibrations: Tone and Translation in The Animals in that Country This article focuses on Laura Jean McKay’s The Animals in That Country (2020), a prize-winning novel that responds to the interlocking crises of the Anthropoceneand the Phonocene by reworking the traditional animal fableand the motif of the speaking animal. Drawing on the work of… Continue reading 35.2 | Ben de Bruyn

Listening to the Sonic Life of LiteratureBy 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… Continue reading 35.2 | Foreword