Modernist Soundscapes

While the Western world may not have gotten noisier in the early twentieth century, there is evidence that people perceived the world as noisier. Emily Thompson explains that in the Victorian period the 'sounds that so bothered Carlyle and Goethe were almost identical to those that had been identified by the Buddha centuries earlier: organic sounds created by humans and animals at work and at play' (Soundscape 116). It is not until the early twentieth century, according to Thompson, that machine-generated noises started to impinge upon the everyday lives of people.

Called the 'Age of Noise,' the turn of twentieth century was filled with the sounds of auditory technologies (the microphone, radio, telephone, and phonograph), public transportation (the elevated train and subway), World War I, construction, factories, steam locomotives, industrial whistles and bells, machine shops, cash registers, washing machines, sewing machines, vacuum cleaners, typewriters, printing machines, automobiles, trucks, and motorcycles.

This course explores how modernist writers represented this soundscape. How did they make their narratives sound out? How did the changing soundscape influence and shape their representations of sound and listening?