The Fact of Resonance returns to the colonial and technological contexts in which theories of the novel developed, seeking in sound an alternative premise for theorizing modernist narrative form. The book shows how the experience of reading is undergirded by the sonic.
Note on Abbreviations | ix
Overture: The Sound of a Novel | 1
1 Voice at the Threshold of the Audible: Free Indirect Discourse
and the Colonial Space of Reading | 13
Coda: Chantal Akerman and Lip Sync as Postcolonial Strategy | 59
2 The Echo of the Object: On the Pain of Self-Hearing in The Nigger
of the "Narcissus" and "The Fact of Blackness" | 67
Coda: Literary History as Miscegenating Sound: The Sound and the Fury | 103
Intersonority: Unclaimed Voices Circum-1900, or Sound and Sourcelessness
in The Souls of Black Folk | 115
3 A Sinister Resonance: On the Extraction of Sound and Language
in Heart of Darkness | 149
Reprise: Reverberation, Circumambience, and Form-Seeking Sound
(Absalom, Absalom!) | 211
Acknowledgments | 231
Notes | 235
Bibliography | 309
Index | 331
Julie Beth Napolin is Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities in the Literature Program at The New School. She has published on sound, media, and literature in qui parle, Symploke, Sounding Out!, and Social Text and in such volumes as Vibratory Modernism, Sounding Modernism, and Fifty Years after Faulkner. In 2012 she was awarded a Bruce Harkness Young Scholar Award by the Joseph Conrad Society of America.