EALC 17215 Sound and Listening in Modern Chinese Literature
Whether it is the tonalities and idiosyncracies of individual speech and dialogue in the polyphonic novel, the depiction of urban sounds and noises in Eileen Chang’s prose about 1930’s Shanghai, the borrowing of folk songs in political lyrics during the Mao era, or Western pop and rock music in experimental fictions from the 1980s, sound culture in its various forms and transformations has long left its imprint on modern literary imaginations. Sound is inseparable from technologies and ideologies of listening; in this course, we will use literary texts as aural technologies to approach historical sonic cultures, and read them as archives of sonic experiences. Through reading modern Chinese literary works together with the history of Chinese sound cultures, we ask: how does literature from different historical periods capture transient sounds? What can literature tell us about how sound is experienced in different historical periods? What are the strengths and limits of language as a medium of articulating aural experiences? How is the difference between sound and noise, listening and other senses, drawn in different historical periods, and what role does literature play in it?