The relationship between critical disability studies and the hearing sciences is a dynamic one, and it’s changing still, both as clinicians come to terms with the evolving health of deaf and hearing communities, and as the ‘social’ and ‘medical’ understandings of disability continue to gain traction among different groups. What might a ‘cultural’ approach to these overlapping areas of study involve? And what could narrative prose in particular have to tell us that other sources haven’t sensed?
At a time when visual media otherwise seem to have captured the imagination, Modern Fiction, Disability, and the Hearing Sciences makes the case for a wide range of literature. In doing so – through serials, short stories, circadian fiction, narrative history, morality tales, whodunits, Bildungsromane, life-writing, the Great American Novel – the book reveals the diverse ways in which writers have plotted and voiced experiences of hearing, from the nineteenth century to the present day.
List of Contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Placing Quietness
Edward Allen
1. Stethoscape: Auscultation in British Fiction
Justin Tackett
2. ‘Redemption from probable destruction’: Deafness, Isolation, and Identity in the
Autobiography of Harriet Martineau
Clare Walker Gore
3. Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and the Biopolitics of Interwar Noise Abatement
Anna Snaith
Earpiece 1: ‘Feel dumb. Don’t cry’: Inside a Soundproof Gray Room
Jaipreet Virdi
4. Automatic Voices: Modernism, Telephony, and Delusion
Andrew Gaedtke
5. ‘The Zoom of a Hornet’: Virginia Woolf, Aural Biopolitics, and the Phenomenology of
an Air Raid
Beryl Pong
6. Sleuthing Deafness in Detective Fiction
Edward Allen
Earpiece 2: Learning to be Hearing
Ben Holmes
7. The Jabber of Money: Tinnitus as Metaphor and Martin Amis’s Critique of Neoliberalism
A. Elisabeth Reichel
8. Sound Minds: Schizophonia and Schizophrenia in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest
William Allen
9. Teju Cole’s ‘art of listening’
Rachel Farebrother
Earpiece 3: ‘Really a part of me’: Dementia Conversations
Catherine Charlwood
Index
Biography
Dr. Edward Allen is a Lecturer in English at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Christ’s College.
