- Henry James Society
While James’s hyper-active eye, his keen sensitivity to the visual, and abundant literary use of painting, have been the subject of extensive and probing scholarship, his attention to sound, and indeed his general relationship with it, have been only sporadically examined. And yet even a cursory glance at James’s long career reveals his continuing alertness and discriminating responsiveness to auditory experience. From his early tales of the 1860s to his three massive novels of the first decade of the twentieth century, from his first travel pieces to The American Scene and Italian Hours, and throughout his criticism, autobiographies, notebooks, correspondence and unfinished work, James recorded the constantly changing soundscapes of the United States and Europe and left significant evidence of his interest in, and commitment to, the aural dimension of his writing. No less than his eye, James’s ear captured the minutest nuances of social, cultural, local and national difference and transformation, together with the impact of technology, and the role of music as an element of setting or a delineator of character.
The Henry James Society invites papers and complete panel proposals on the many facets of James’s relationship with sound. Possible topics include but are not limited to:
The new sounds of modernity and technology
Noise
The sounds of multi-ethnic America
The question of speech (American vs British)
Speech as a marker of class
Gender-based speech
The distinctive voice of James’s narrators
Sound effects in James’s writing
The role of listening or hearing
The sonics of James’s style
Silences in James’s writing
James’s use of foreign words and/or rendering of foreign languages and accents in English
Pronunciation and diction
The sound of James in translation
Music in James and/or James set to music
The effect of dictation on James’s writing
The sound of James in stage, radio, film, and television adaptations
Jamesian echoes during his lifetime and after
Please send an abstract (250 words) and a short biographpy (one paragraph) as well as panel proposals to Leonardo Buonomo, conference director (buonomo@units.it), Giulia Iannuzzi (giannuzzi@units.it), and Greg Zacharias (gwzach@creighton.edu) by December 15, 2018.
https://centerforhenryjamesstu