Acoustico-politics of the modernist novel

This dissertation examines the use of acoustic phenomena in Heart of Darkness, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Mrs Dalloway, in order to argue that such phenomena have political implications. The recent surge in sound studies has already pinpointed the acoustic aspects of modernist novels, but they focused on the literary representation of emerging sound technologies. My approach reads these works as literary compositions, not simply as archives of political sounds. Each chapter incorporates a dedicated section on the novel's acoustic form, demonstrating that the presence of acoustic phenomena is not contingent but an integral component of the narrative structure. I remain within familiar territory of oft-examined passages in an attempt to bring a new perspective to their close readings, reading them via such concepts as voice, infancy, and testimony. My argument hinges on the power of the sound beyond meaning as a central acoustic phenomenon across these novels. Chapter 2 examines the political power of Kurtz's voice and Africans' trance music. Chapter 3 looks at Stephen's encounter with unknown political words and his response to two vocations. Chapter 4 reads the beggarwoman's song and Septimus' mad language as resistance to established order. Modernist novels are noisy and political, and this study shows that these two are fundamentally connected.