Book contents
- Sound and Literature
- Cambridge Critical Concepts
- Sound and Literature
- Copyright page
- Epigraph
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Part I Origins
- Part II Development
- Part III Applications
- Chapter 10 What We Talk about When We Talk about Talking Books
- Chapter 11 Prose Sense and Its Soundings
- Chapter 12 Dissonant Prosody
- Chapter 13 Deafness and Sound
- Chapter 14 Vibrations
- Chapter 15 Feminism and Sound
- Chapter 16 Wireless Imaginations
- Chapter 17 Attending to Theatre Sound Studies and Complicité’s The Encounter
- Chapter 18 Bob Dylan and Sound: A Tale of the Recording Era
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 13 - Deafness and Sound
from Part III - Applications
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 29 May 2020
- Sound and Literature
- Cambridge Critical Concepts
- Sound and Literature
- Copyright page
- Epigraph
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Part I Origins
- Part II Development
- Part III Applications
- Chapter 10 What We Talk about When We Talk about Talking Books
- Chapter 11 Prose Sense and Its Soundings
- Chapter 12 Dissonant Prosody
- Chapter 13 Deafness and Sound
- Chapter 14 Vibrations
- Chapter 15 Feminism and Sound
- Chapter 16 Wireless Imaginations
- Chapter 17 Attending to Theatre Sound Studies and Complicité’s The Encounter
- Chapter 18 Bob Dylan and Sound: A Tale of the Recording Era
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
This chapter explores the ways that Deaf epistemologies and ontologies revise our understanding of sound as both an acoustic and cultural phenomenon. While it is often assumed that deafness constitutes a total lack of sound, deaf people engage with sound both directly and indirectly in range of ways and through diverse modalities. There is also a historical link between the development of technologies of sound recording and deafness; more specifically, the desire to teach deaf people to speak. The connection between sound reproduction and the ideology of oralism functions as a vital reminder of the dangers of the conflation of verbal speech and agency in the English word ‘voice.’ After reviewing the physiological and historical ways sound has functioned in deaf lives, the chapter considers its cultural role through a reading of the work of contemporary Deaf sound artist Christine Sun Kim. Kim’s art explores the visual and tactile components of sound as well as its social dynamics, highlighting similarities between sound and signed languages as spatial systems of meaning that are also both ephemeral and highly inflected.
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- Sound and Literature , pp. 272 - 286Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2020
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