William Allen
Published: 21 January 2019
Sonic Neurologies: Sound and Schizophrenia in the Work of David Foster Wallace and Richard Powers.
University of Glasgow
Sonic Neurologies: Sound and Schizophrenia in the Work of David Foster Wallace and Richard Powers.
I’m interested in the intersections between sound and neurology in literary texts, and so want to consider the work of David Foster Wallace and Richard Powers aurally. Not quite as pieces of sonic art, but as texts loudly preoccupied with their own sounds.
Drawing on phenomenological criticism, neurocriticism, and sound studies, my methodology proposes a type of close reading that attends to the virtual and verbal soundscapes of these texts, listening to both the fictional sounds of their storyworlds, and the real sounds their words form on the page. Hearing a syncopation between sound-effect and affect, I will suggest that the ways in which Wallace and Powers engage with aurality innovate postmodern and phenomenological literary representations of consciousness and neurological disorder. Contextually, I’m really interested in the twentieth century’s misappropriation of schizophrenia as a cultural trope. Postmodern cultural theory seems saturated with mute, pictorial models that reduce the illness to a vague code-word for fragmentation or perceived incoherence. I want to contrast this overtly visual emphasis with a sonic phenomenology of schizophrenic speech and experience which, as Louis Sass writes, is often led by ‘acoustic qualities,’ ‘rhyme and alliteration,’ and meanings ‘generated by individual syllables.’
First published: 21 January 2019