UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations
UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title The Acoustics of Narrative Involvement: Modernism, Subjectivity, Voice Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1ws2f1tr Author Napolin, Julie Beth Publication Date 2010 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California The Acoustics of Narrative Involvement: Modernism, Subjectivity, Voice By Julie Beth Napolin A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Rhetoric in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Ramona Naddaff, Chair Professor Trinh T. Minh-ha Professor Carolyn Porter Professor Ramona Naddaff Fall 2010 The Acoustics of Narrative Involvement: Modernism, Subjectivity, Voice by Julie Beth Napolin Doctor of Philosophy in Rhetoric University of California, Berkeley Professor Ramona Naddaff, Chair The theory and history of the modernist novel traditionally emphasizes a shift away from “telling” towards “showing.” The project argues that the overly visual account of modernism misses a crucial opportunity to “hear” modernist narrative and composition. The project is an acoustics of modernist narrative backed by two case studies, the work of Joseph Conrad and William Faulkner. These writers propose a way of listening to the modernist novel and to the neglected importance of sounds and voices within it. I attend to Conrad’s peculiar transnational voice, Faulkner’s regional, southern voice, and their shared sensitivity to the physical, rhetorical, and musical properties of speech and writing. In Chapter One, “The Incanted Image: Vision, Silence, and Belonging in Conrad’s Theory of the Novel,” I pose an alternative reading of Conrad’s famous 1897 preface to The Nigger of the “Narcissus” .
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