Soundscape

From origins to possible directions in literature

Abstract

Recent studies demonstrate a significant level of interest to literature as a source of insight on sound and hearing. Attention has focused on the new ways to approach the acoustic dimensions of text, featuring narrative representation of sound in its physical characteristics and the psycho-somatic peculiarities of perception. Accordingly, the concept of soundscape, has entered critical scholarship to analyze the audible world in fiction. This essay addresses soundscape as a concept by scrutinizing the terms in which it was defined and situating soundscape in relation to nineteenth-century Gothic literature. My point of departure is the foundational work of R. Murray Schafer The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World (1977), which introduces the concept and outlines the territory of soundscape studies as the intersection of science, the arts and society, and delineates terms central to the idea of the soundscape. I will elaborate on soundscape in its threefold dimensions: the panoply of sounds, the specific location, and the subjective experience of an individual inhabiting the space. The essay then considers the concept in light of the recent studies of sound in Gothic fiction and narrows down the topic to selected short stories by British and American nineteenth-century writers: E.A. Poe, E. Nesbit, S. Warren, and M.P. Shiel, among others. The shared features of the audible world in Gothic short stories and more distinctive elements of Gothic soundscapes offer some resources for thinking about a more complex elaboration of the concept, as well as implications and future directions for scholarly work.