Hearing Virginia Woolf’s Novels: From The Voyage Out to Between the Acts

Abstract

This thesis takes as its central question what it is to “hear” the soundscapes in the British modernist writer Virginia Woolf’s novels. This notion of “hearing” responds to the thriving field of Sound Studies (and its active interaction with literary studies, and Modernist Studies in particular) in the last twenty or thirty years. It means to reflect on how modern technologically mediated auditory perception influences Woolf’s formal experimentation and the construction of literary soundscapes in her novels. Modern auditory perception generates new modes of hearing, i.e. acousmatic hearing, indiscriminate hearing, unconscious hearing and synesthetic hearing, each of which will be applied to the study of soundscapes in Woolf’s novels. Based on Murray Schafer’s soundscape scheme, Steven Connor’s concept of audiovision, as well as Angela Frattarola and other scholars’ theories in Sound Studies, this study will evaluate such auditory processes in Woolf’s novels as the unconscious hearing of keynote sound, ambient sound (noise), sounds of synesthetic effect, and elliptical sound. Hearing Woolf’s novels in these ways provides auditory access to Woolf’s modernist aesthetics, especially in terms of how she incorporates modern auditory experiences into the narrative to make her novels sound differently from their realist predecessors, how she attunes the reader’s ear to listen differently to Beethoven’s music, the ambient sounds in the Age of Noise, sounds in older art forms (i.e. Greek chorus and elegy), and the intersensory transaction among different art forms. More generally, the thesis will address how Woolf makes aesthetic use of the “magic formula” of auditory perception as a way of navigating the “crisis of representation” of the Real in the modernist period.