Collections on sound studies have seldom explored the vexed relationship between literature - a medium largely defined by its silence - and the dynamics and technologies of sound. This Companion is designed to help sound studies scholars grapple with the auditory capacities of text and encourage literary scholars to take full cognisance of the rich soundscapes mapped, or created, by texts read quietly. The essays assembled here consider a broad range of sound studies topics, including music in writing; the inscription of listening; worlding through sound; military and industrial noise; the gender of sound; racialised soundscapes; theatrical sounds; literature and sound media; and sonic epistemology. Helen Groth and Julian Murphet present a comprehensive set of new research on the relationship between sound and writing over time from a range of eminent, established and emerging sound studies scholars.

This book analyzes contemporary literature in Los Angeles in relation to the city's form, its visual character and its recent political history. Writers such as Bret Easton Ellis and James Ellroy are considered as responding to racial and ethnic partitioning in LA, as well as to increasing cultural homogeneity. Unlike other books on contemporary American literature, this book builds a composite portrait of a single literary scene in order to demonstrate the significance of writing in a tendentially post-literate culture, and the difficulties of literary representation in a city committed to visual representation.

Multimedia Modernism explores the complex effects of a new media environment on avant-garde literary production in the early twentieth century. During this period, the likes of Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound and Louis Zukofsky wrote works which, in one way or another, attest to the immense effect that photography, cinematography, mechanical print technology and visual advertising had on the established arts. Re-reading modernism's technological origins through the lens of media theory, this innovative study proposes a serious new methodological approach to modernism in general. Examining a wide range of literature that includes Gertrude Stein's contributions to Camera Work, Louis Zukofsky's groundbreaking poem 'A' and Wyndham Lewis's celebrated Blast, this book embeds literary revolution within media evolution to show that literary criticism and media history have a lot to learn from each other.

Provides a comprehensive survey of twentieth-century prison writing from around the world Analyses texts from the UK, USA, Australia, Kenya, South Africa, Egypt, Ireland, Germany, and the USSR Texts by male and female writers considered with structural balance Approaches texts chronologically within an historical sequence of social and institutional changes Brings a specifically literary approach to material generally approached sociologically and criminologically Tracking the evolutionary arc of prison writing across the twentieth century in an international and comparative framework, this study proposes an integrated account of the major shifts and movements in this relatively neglected genre of autobiography. Dwelling on works memoirs, novellas, poems by actual detainees, the book offers a close stylistic analysis of 12 important texts to show how prison writing moved away from the confessional and self-scrutinizing modes of an earlier tradition, to espouse openly political sentiments and solidarities. Looking at works by Oscar Wilde, Rosa Luxemburg, Ezra Pound, Primo Levi, Bobby Sands, Angela Davis, Ng?g? wa Thiong'o, and Behrouz Boochani (among others), the book shows how themes such as the annihilation of experience, dehumanization, sensory deprivation, brutality, and numbing routine are woven into distinctive textual artefacts that give evidence of an abiding human resilience in the face of raw state power.

This book analyzes contemporary literature in Los Angeles in relation to the city's form, its visual character and its recent political history. Writers such as Bret Easton Ellis and James Ellroy are considered as responding to racial and ethnic partitioning in LA, as well as to increasing cultural homogeneity. Unlike other books on contemporary American literature, this book builds a composite portrait of a single literary scene in order to demonstrate the significance of writing in a tendentially post-literate culture, and the difficulties of literary representation in a city committed to visual representation.

This volume brings together a range of essays by eminent and emergent scholars working at the intersection of modern literary, cinema and sound studies.The individual studies ask what specific sonorous qualities are capable of being registered by different modern media, and how sonic transpositions and transferences across media affect the ways in which human subjects attend to modern soundscapes. Script, groove, electrical current, magnetic imprint, phonographic vibration: as the contributors show, sound traverses these and other material platforms to become an insistent ground-note of modern aesthetics, one not yet adequately integrated into critical accounts of the period. This collection also provides a commanding and wide-ranging investigation of the conditions under which modernists tapped technically into the rhythms, echoes and sonic architectures of their worlds.

This book gathers a suite of newly commissioned, original essays on the work of E. L. Doctorow. It reframes our understanding of his oeuvre by engaging it in entirety, including the significant accomplishments of the late period. The book features chapters by prominent fiction writers and friends of Doctorow, such as Don DeLillo, Victor Navasky and Jennifer Egan, and explores Doctorow's novels and his diverse preoccupations: corporate and religious power, cognitive science and media culture.

Modernism and Masculinity investigates the varied dimensions and manifestations of masculinity in the modernist period. Thirteen essays from leading scholars reframe critical trends in modernist studies by examining distinctive features of modernist literary and cultural work through the lens of masculinity and male privilege. The volume attends to masculinity as an unstable horizon of gendered ideologies, subjectivities and representational practices, allowing for fresh interdisciplinary treatments of celebrated and lesser-known authors, artists and theorists such as D. H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound, Henry Roth, Theodor Adorno and Paul Robeson as well as modernist avant-garde movements such as vorticism, surrealism and futurism. As diverse as the masculinities that were played out across the early twentieth century, the approaches and arguments featured in this collection will appeal especially to scholars and students of modernist literature and culture, gender studies and English literature more broadly.

Narrative and Media, first published in 2006, applies narrative theory to media texts, including film, television, radio, advertising, and print journalism. Drawing on research in structuralist and post-structuralist theory, as well as functional grammar and image analysis, the book explains the narrative techniques which shape media texts and offers interpretive tools for analysing meaning and ideology. Each section looks at particular media forms and shows how elements such as chronology, character, and focalization are realized in specific texts. As the boundaries between entertainment and information in the mass media continue to dissolve, understanding the ways in which modes of story-telling are seamlessly transferred from one medium to another, and the ideological implications of these strategies, is an essential aspect of media studies.

Films like Welcome to the Dollhouse and Happiness established Todd Solondz as independent cinema's premier satirist. Blending a trademark black humor into atmospheres of grueling bleakness, Solondz repeatedly takes moviegoers into a bland suburban junk space peopled by the damaged, the neglected, and the depraved.Julian Murphet appraises the career of the controversial, if increasingly ignored, indie film auteur. Through close readings and a discussion with the director, Murphet dissects how Solondz's themes and techniques serve stories laden with hot-button topics like pedophilia, rape, and family and systemic cruelty. Solondz's uncompromising return to the same motifs, stylistic choices, and characters reject any idea of aesthetic progression. Instead, he embraces an art of diminishing returns that satirizes the laws of valuation sustaining what we call cinema. It also reflects both Solondz's declining box office fortunes and the changing economics of independent film in an era of financial contraction.

Flann O'Brien & Modernism brings a much-needed refreshment to the state of scholarship on this increasingly recognised but still widely misunderstood 'second generation' modernist. Rather than construe him as a postmodernist, it correctly locates O'Brien's work as the product of a late modernist sensibility and cultural context. Similarly, while there should be no doubt of his Irishness, and his profound debts to Irish language, history and culture, this collection seeks to understand O'Brien's nationally sensitive achievement as the work of an internationalist whose preoccupations reflect global modernist trends. The distinct themes and concerns tracked in Flann O'Brien & Modernism include characterization in branching narrative forms; the ethics and paradoxes of naming; parody and homage; lies and deception; theatricality; sexuality; technology and transport; and the inevitable matter of drink and intoxication. Taken together, these specific topics construct a mosaic image of O'Brien as an exemplary modernist auteur, abreast of all the most salient philosophical and technical concerns affecting literary production in the period immediately before and after World War Two.

This new collection of essays on Coetzee examines how his novels create and unsettle literary authority. Its unique contribution is to show how Coetzee provokes us into reconsidering certain basic formal and existential questions such as the nature of literary realism, the authority of the author and the constitution of the human self in a posthumanist setting by consciously revealing the literary-theoretical seams of his work. Strong Opinions makes the innovative claim that Coetzee's work is driven not by a sense of scepticism or nihilism but rather by a form of controlled exposure that defines the literary. The essays in the volume variously draw attention to three of Coetzee's most recent and significant experiments in controlled exposure. The first is the exposure of place-Coetzee's decision to set his novels in his newly adopted country of Australia. The second is the exposure of form-Coetzee's direct, almost essayistic address of literary-philosophical topics within his novels. And the third is the exposure of limits-Coetzee's explicit deconstruction of the traditional limits of human life.

The Politics and Aesthetics of Cormac McCarthy's The Road brings together several leading literary scholars, one major philosopher, as well as a handful of emerging critical voices, all of whom deploy their own specialist methods in order to think through this bestselling, Zeitgeist-defining event of contemporary literature. There are two dominant modes of analysis gathered here: the first, performed by Julian Murphet, Paul Sheehan, and Mark Steven, is to locate the novel within its political, spiritual, and economic climates; the second, whose exponents include Paul Patton, Sean Pryor, Chris Danta, and Grace Hellyer, deals with the formal dimensions of McCarthy's characteristically brilliant prose in relation to its sparse narrative. By coupling historically sensitive analysis with incisive formal criticism, the contributors not only account for the matchless form of this exemplary novel; they also suggest that The Road has something unique to disclose about the world we inhabit.

The Politics and Aesthetics of Cormac McCarthy's The Road brings together several leading literary scholars, one major philosopher, as well as a handful of emerging critical voices, all of whom deploy their own specialist methods in order to think through this bestselling, Zeitgeist-defining event of contemporary literature. There are two dominant modes of analysis gathered here: the first, performed by Julian Murphet, Paul Sheehan, and Mark Steven, is to locate the novel within its political, spiritual, and economic climates; the second, whose exponents include Paul Patton, Sean Pryor, Chris Danta, and Grace Hellyer, deals with the formal dimensions of McCarthy's characteristically brilliant prose in relation to its sparse narrative. By coupling historically sensitive analysis with incisive formal criticism, the contributors not only account for the matchless form of this exemplary novel; they also suggest that The Road has something unique to disclose about the world we inhabit.

Showcases the life-work of one of America's greatest contemporary novelists Essays written by an international set of scholars Contributions by prominent fiction writers and friends of Doctorow: Don DeLillo, Victor Navasky, and Jennifer Egan Pays particular attention to the extraordinary novels of Doctorow in the last 20 years, including The Waterworks, City of God, and a set of his recent preoccupations: corporate and religious power, cognitive science, and media culture This book gathers a suite of newly commissioned, original essays on the work of E. L. Doctorow. It reframes our understanding of his oeuvre by engaging it in entirety, including the significant accomplishments of the late period. The book features chapters by prominent fiction writers and friends of Doctorow, such as Don DeLillo, Victor Navasky and Jennifer Egan and explores Doctorow's novels and his diverse preoccupations: corporate and religious power, cognitive science and media culture.

Films like Welcome to the Dollhouse and Happiness established Todd Solondz as independent cinema's premier satirist. Blending a trademark black humor into atmospheres of grueling bleakness, Solondz repeatedly takes moviegoers into a bland suburban junk space peopled by the damaged, the neglected, and the depraved.Julian Murphet appraises the career of the controversial, if increasingly ignored, indie film auteur. Through close readings and a discussion with the director, Murphet dissects how Solondz's themes and techniques serve stories laden with hot-button topics like pedophilia, rape, and family and systemic cruelty. Solondz's uncompromising return to the same motifs, stylistic choices, and characters reject any idea of aesthetic progression. Instead, he embraces an art of diminishing returns that satirizes the laws of valuation sustaining what we call cinema. It also reflects both Solondz's declining box office fortunes and the changing economics of independent film in an era of financial contraction.

Communism and Poetry: Writing Against Capital addresses the relationship between an upsurge in collective political practice around the world since 2000, and the crystallization of newly engaged forms of poetry. Considering an array of perspectives-poets, poet-critics, activists and theorists-these essays shed new light on the active interface between emancipatory political thought and poetic production and explore how poetry and the new communism are creating mutually innovative forms of thought and activity, supercharging the utopian imagination. Drawing inspiration from past connections between communism and poetry, and theorizing new directions over the years ahead, the volume models a much-needed critical solidarity with creative strategies in the present conjuncture to activate movements of resistance, on the streets and in verse.

Communism and Poetry: Writing Against Capital addresses the relationship between an upsurge in collective political practice around the world since 2000, and the crystallization of newly engaged forms of poetry. Considering an array of perspectives-poets, poet-critics, activists and theorists-these essays shed new light on the active interface between emancipatory political thought and poetic production and explore how poetry and the new communism are creating mutually innovative forms of thought and activity, supercharging the utopian imagination. Drawing inspiration from past connections between communism and poetry, and theorizing new directions over the years ahead, the volume models a much-needed critical solidarity with creative strategies in the present conjuncture to activate movements of resistance, on the streets and in verse.

These 13 essays consolidate and critique Ranciere's work on literature, from his archival investigations of the literary efforts of 19th-century workers to his engagements with specific novelists and poets, and from his concept of 'literarity' to his central positioning of the novel in his account of the three 'regimes' of literary practice.

These 13 essays consolidate and critique Ranciere's work on literature, from his archival investigations of the literary efforts of 19th-century workers to his engagements with specific novelists and poets, and from his concept of 'literarity' to his central positioning of the novel in his account of the three 'regimes' of literary practice.

This is part of a new series of guides to contemporary novels. The aim of the series is to give readers accessible and informative introductions to some of the most popular, most acclaimed and most influential novels of recent years from The Remains of the Day to White Teeth. A team of contemporary fiction scholars from both sides of the Atlantic has been assembled to provide a thorough and readable analysis of each of the novels in question.

Explores the transformations of sound in modern literary and cinematic forms from the 1890s to the mid-20th century This volume brings together a range of essays by eminent and emergent scholars working at the intersection of modern literary, cinema and sound studies. The individual studies ask what specific sonorous qualities are capable of being registered by different modern media, and how sonic transpositions and transferences across media affect the ways in which human subjects attend to modern soundscapes. Script, groove, electrical current, magnetic imprint, phonographic vibration: as the contributors show, sound traverses these and other material platforms to become an insistent ground-note of modern aesthetics, one not yet adequately integrated into critical accounts of the period. This collection also provides a commanding and wide-ranging investigation of the conditions under which modernists tapped technically into the rhythms, echoes and sonic architectures of their worlds. Key Features Addresses a growing demand for critical studies on the interface between literary history and the 'soundscape' of modernity Discusses the rich nexus of new sound recording technologies, new vocabularies of and for sonic phenomena, new standardisations of rhythm and speed, and the weird displacements of 'voice' peculiar to modernity Answers the need for an explicit engagement with the symbolic registrations of sonic modernity on textual forms in sound studies Systematically analyses modernist forms in terms of their capacities to mediate rhythms, sonic textures and vocal derangements

This new collection of essays on Coetzee examines how his novels create and unsettle literary authority. Its unique contribution is to show how Coetzee provokes us into reconsidering certain basic formal and existential questions such as the nature of literary realism, the authority of the author and the constitution of the human self in a posthumanist setting by consciously revealing the literary-theoretical seams of his work. Strong Opinions makes the innovative claim that Coetzees work is driven not by a sense of scepticism or nihilism but rather by a form of controlled exposure that defines the literary. The essays in the volume variously draw attention to three of Coetzees most recent and significant experiments in controlled exposure. The first is the exposure of place-Coetzees decision to set his novels in his newly adopted country of Australia. The second is the exposure of form-Coetzees direct, almost essayistic address of literary-philosophical topics within his novels. And the third is the exposure of limits-Coetzees explicit deconstruction of the traditional limits of human life.

This book treats William Faulkner's major fiction-from Flags in the Dust through to Absalom, Absalom!-to a searching reappraisal under the spotlight of a media-historical inquiry. It proposes that Faulkner's inveterate attraction to the paradigms of romance was disciplined and masked by the recurrent use of metaphorical figures borrowed from the new media ecology. Faulkner dressed up his romance materials in the technological garb of radio, gramophony, photography, and cinema, along with the transportational networks of road and air that were being installed in the 1920s. His modernism emerges from a fraght but productive interplay between his anachronistic predilection for chivalric chiches and his extraordinarily knowledgeable interest in the most up-to-date media institutions and forms. Rather than see Faulkner as a divided author, who worked for money in the magazines and studios while producing his serious fiction in despite of their symbolic economies, this study demonstrates how profoundly his mature art was shot through with the figures and dynamics of the materials he publicly repudiated. The result is a richer and more nuanced understanding of the dialectics of his art.