Sound Studies as an Interpretive Framework for Modernist Literature

Abstract

This article explores the potential of sound studies as a methodological framework for the analysis of modernist literature. It examines the key intellectual foundations of sound studies in the context of media ecology, the critique of visualcentrism, and the anthropological turn in the humanities. Particular attention is devoted to the works of Marshall McLuhan, Martin Jay, Jonathan Sterne, R. Murray Schafer, Jacques Attali, and other scholars who have proposed understanding sound not merely as an object of analysis but as an autonomous mode of organizing cultural experience. The article argues that the development of auditory technologies and the transformation of perceptual practices at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries contributed to the emergence of a new model of subjectivity, which found expression in the modernist text. Furthermore, it demonstrates the applicability of sound studies as a tool of literary interpretation and illustrates its analytical potential through selected works by Thomas Mann, William Faulkner, and James Joyce.