Virginia Woolf: Music, Sound, Language

Description

Arguing that sound is integral to Virginia Woolf's understanding of literature, Elicia Clements highlights how the sonorous enables Woolf to examine issues of meaning in language and art, elaborate a politics of listening, illuminate rhythmic and performative elements in her fiction, and explore how music itself provides a potential structural model that facilitates the innovation of her method in The Waves. Woolf's investigation of the exchange between literature and music is thoroughly intermedial: her novels disclose the crevices, convergences, and conflicts that arise when one traverses the intersectionality of these two art forms, revealing, in the process, Woolf's robust materialist feminism. This book focuses, therefore, on the conceptual, aesthetic, and political implications of the musico-literary pairing. Correspondingly, Clements uses a methodology that employs theoretical tools from the disciplines of both literary criticism and musicology, as well as several burgeoning and newly established fields including sound, listening, and performance studies. Ultimately, Clements argues that a wide-ranging combination of these two disciplines produces new ways to study not only literary and musical artifacts but also the methods we employ to analyze them. Cover Contents Acknowledgments Abbreviations Introduction I Woolf’s Musical Ear II Interdisciplinary Methods III “Hoity te, hoity te, hoity te …”: Tripartite Woolf Part 1 An Emerging Earcon: Woolf’s Singers 1 Finding a Voice I Resonant Beginnings: The Voyage Out II Sonic Networks in Jacob’s Room III Urban and Rural Interrelations in Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse 2 The Earcon Reproduces I “And what is a cry?”: The Waves II Integrating the Earcon in The Years III Aural Multiplicity in Between the Acts Part 2 Profound Listening and Acousmatics 3 Initial Apperceptions I Materialized Sonics and Listening Subjects in The Voyage Out II Involuntary, Yet Profound, Listening in Night and Day III International Acousmatics: War and Its Veterans in Jacob’s Room and Mrs. Dalloway 4 Bodies and Voices I To the Lighthouse and Family Acousmatics II The Gender of Listening in The Waves III “Hush! … Somebody’s listening”: The Years IV Heterogeneous Reattachments in Between the Acts Part 3 Music as Performance in Woolf’s Fiction 5 Performing Women I Women at the Piano in the First Three Novels II Performing Personal History in The Years III Historical Reenactments: Between the Acts 6 The Performativity of Language: The Waves Musicalized I Word Music: “(The rhythm is the main thing in writing)” II The Case of Ludwig van Beethoven III Transforming Beethoven’s Opus 130 and 133 into Words Coda: A Meditation on Rhythm Notes Works Cited Index