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Chapter 14 - Vibrations

from Part III - Applications

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 May 2020

Anna Snaith
Affiliation:
King's College London
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Summary

This chapter begins with a brief chronological outline of how vibrations figure in scientific and literary texts from the eighteenth-century to twentieth-century Modernism. It outlines approaches to the transmission of scientific and spiritualist concepts of vibratory energies and atoms through literature, going on to consider literary form and materiality as vibratory, focusing briefly on Conrad’s work. Moving further beyond the confines of literary periods, it then relates analysis of literature in its material forms to the work of music and sound studies scholars who are interested in the materiality of sound as vibration, focusing initially on contemporary bass music, and how it can affect its audience palpably and without linguistic signification. This latter area of research provides pointers for how literary approaches might engage with the materiality of texts and of reading/listening experiences, and, further, with an expanded sense of sound as a form of vibration that extends into the ‘infrasensory’ and operates both within and beyond discourse. The chapter goes on to use Dickens’s fiction to bring together approaches to textual, phenomenological and ontological vibrations. In its sonorous materiality, Dickens’s fiction records an experience of railway vibrations for its readers, while it also conveys a sense of their existence as borderline infrasound and of vibrations that escape perception and discourse.

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Sound and Literature , pp. 287 - 314
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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  • Vibrations
  • Edited by Anna Snaith, King's College London
  • Book: Sound and Literature
  • Online publication: 29 May 2020
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108855532.015
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  • Vibrations
  • Edited by Anna Snaith, King's College London
  • Book: Sound and Literature
  • Online publication: 29 May 2020
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108855532.015
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Vibrations
  • Edited by Anna Snaith, King's College London
  • Book: Sound and Literature
  • Online publication: 29 May 2020
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108855532.015
Available formats
×