Sonic Interventions: Silence, Sound, and Melody in Medieval Literature.
- Author/Editor
- Stern, Kortney,
- Title
- Sonic Interventions: Silence, Sound, and Melody in Medieval Literature.
- Published
- Stern, Kortney, "Sonic Interventions: Silence, Sound, and Melody in Medieval Literature." Ph.D. Dissertation. Indiana University, 2024. Dissertation Abstracts International A86.02(E). xi, 227 pp. Fully accessible via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global.
- Review
- Stern explores how literary depictions of sound "animate marginalized characters when their voices fail," treating silence in Chaucer's "Troilus and Criseyde," laughter in "Le Roman de Silence," crying in the "Book of Margery Kempe," and music in both Gower's "Tale of Apollonius of Tyre" ("Confessio Amantis," Book 8) and the "Historia Apollonii Regis Tyri" (HA). She tells us that "[e]ven when voice proves to be impossible for myriad reasons, these early literary works showcase marginalized characters that can temporarily rebel, refute, and resist through their authors' orchestration of what I refer to as 'sonic expressions' or the ability to express through sound" (xiv). In Stern's discussion of Gower's tale and its antecedent (Chapter 4), notions of music, literary voice, prosodic patterning, and the auditory imagination of reading and listening audiences complicate and perhaps muddy her concept of "sonic expressions," hazarding confusion, even dissonance. For example, the HA and Gower's Tale "are textual objects that are not sounded objects in a traditional sense. Still, they feature abundant music, performance, and song representations that beg us to consider how these textual features differ from conventional modes of communication, such as voice. In this sense, the text can be both unsounded and musical in its representations of what we might redefine as 'music'" (167). A "reader's engagement," Stern tells us, can "bring to life" the "musical engagements" of the Apollonius accounts because their "vibrational affect takes effect, pulsating from text to reader and back to text again," and "offer[s] ethics to counteract the inherent limitations of the story," especially when readers "attun[e] their thinking ears to the sonic features of the text" (170). Specifically, if we attend "to the sounds that derive from Thaise's/Tarsia's character's musical abilities, we, as readers, can begin to hear not the interpretation of the female voice but a form of musical expression that pulsates from the descriptions of her performances" and helps to "generate a more ethical approach" to these accounts (171). I'm not sure how it is generated by these concerns with sound, but Stern's ethical approach is briskly feminist so that, for example, "Gower's version eclipses the HA's in terms of its delivery of female agency . . . . Gower's rendition is a win for all women" (188). A bit later, Stern tells us that the ending of the HA "resonates with my feminist wishes" (193), while "Gower elects to spend the final pages of his 'Apollonius' story silencing, erasing, and 'fixing' the canonical tradition brought forth by musicality: female agency" (195). At the close of her discussion, Stern states: "Thus, I conclude that these two versions of the Apollonius story should be read thematically for their musical presentations, for to do so is to read Thaise's/Tarsia's character anew. No longer an empty signifier of the female voice, Thaise's/Tarsia's musical performances can be read as detectable and persistent. In imagining Thaise's/Tarsia's melodies, the song's sound can be heard, even in the face of oppressive editing practices. This is the most feminist reading one can make of a textual tradition that offers so little room for women to express themselves" (200-01). [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.1]
- Date
- 2024
- Gower Subjects
- Confessio Amantis
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations
Style, Rhetoric, and Versification