Scholarship on the contemporary has a unique relationship to questions of canonicity and value. […]
View More Contemporary Canonicity (or, what not to read)Author: Rachel Sykes
Rachel Sykes is a Lecturer in Contemporary American Literature at the University of Birmingham. Her research and teaching focuses on three areas: 1) sound studies and aesthetics of quiet and loud in American culture, 2) memoir and contemporary life-writing, and 3) digital and popular cultures.
Loud Fictions: Noise in the Contemporary American Novel
In his 1946 essay, ‘Silence,’ the English novelist Aldous Huxley described the twentieth century as ‘the Age of Noise. Physical noise, mental noise and noise of desire – we hold history’s record for them all’ (149). Writers of the early twentieth century saw noise as a symptom and consequence of modernity and modernist writing, as Josh Epstein notes, was ‘infiltrated’ by ‘the sounds of air-raid sirens, trains, typewriters,
View More Loud Fictions: Noise in the Contemporary American Novel