Sound and Literature

A Spiritual Exploration of Exotic Wandering Female—On the Acoustic Narrative Strategy of "Miss Brill"

“…Some scholars have criticized Mansfield's works as "full of endless wandering, without center, without fixed identity and status, and without eternal meaning" (Song Xiaoping, 2000). The historic dominance of vision has not only minimized the critical energy devoted to histories and cultures of sound and hearing but has also shaped the understandings of particular sites of modernity, such as the city, which have revolved around spectacle and the gaze (Snaith, 2020).Narrating stories from a traditional visual perspective inevitably places characters under the fixed gaze of social stereotypes. In the auditory dimension, the binary opposition between observer and observed disappears.…”

“…Therefore, like "visual perspective," "auditory perspective" is closely related to narrative, as what characters hear can influence what they say and think. In addition, hearing is associated with interiority, subjectivity, affect, temporality and passivity, whereas sight is harnessed to distance, reason, spatiality and control (Snaith, 2020). Auscultation is not intuitive and requires people to make inferences and judgments about sound signals, adding a layer of imagination compared to observation and enriching narrative forms.…”