Phono-Graphien. Akustische Wahrnehmung in der deutschsprachigen Literatur von 1800 bis zur Gegenwart ed. by Marcel Krings (review)

This thorough and topical collection of twenty-one essays explores the historical and methodological implications of the so-called 'sonic turn' for German literary studies. To what extent, each essay asks in its own way, does literary history also constitute an invaluable sonic archive, a crucial reservoir of auditory experience, and in what ways might the act of writing itself be approached as an act of 'sonification,' of seeking to render audible by means of language and textual symbols the complex and historically specific soundscapes of the past? How have issues surrounding auditory perception been thematized within the German literary tradition and how has hearing, at least since Herder, been understood as inextricably bound up with linguistic development and expression? To what extent have new acoustic experiences inspired formal innovations and served a poetological function? The book is divided into four sections: I. Traditionen; II. Neue Wahrnehmung und Anthropologie um 1800; III. Epochen und Entwicklungen; IV. Phonographien in Einzelinterpretationen. It begins with the poetry of the Middle Ages and moves on to Romantic music narratives, the cacophonic textual experiments of the historical avant-garde, representations of technical noise in literary modernism, discussions of radio's perceived influence on the written word, and, finally, the coding of silence and speech according to gender binaries in contemporary Austrian literature.

In the editor's introduction, Marcel Krings observes that, in contrast to other philological disciplines, Germanistik has fallen short of considering the auditory dimension of literary works in any "wünschenswerter Weise" (13). The statement is, on the one hand, a fair criticism of the discipline's longstanding preoccupation with vision and visual perception and a much-needed provocation to begin examining the literary dimension of other sense modalities such as hearing and touch. On the other, the claim is misleading since it chooses to ignore, or at least downplay, domains of auditory experience that have in fact already received detailed consideration by literary scholars. It is surely not true, for example, that a topic such as music and literature has escaped scholarly notice, especially in the context of Romanticism. It would also be difficult to argue that, with the emergence of poststructuralism and Derrida's critique of phonocentricism in particular, issues of the voice and orality have failed to attract adequate attention.

In connection with the more specific technological mediation of the voice, the work of the late media theorist Friedrich Kittler (Aufschreibesysteme 1800/1900, München 1985; Grammophon, Film, Typewriter, Berlin 1986; Zwischen Rauschen und Offenbarung, Berlin 2002) has opened innumerable avenues for literary critics seeking to understand the ways in which the introduction of new acoustic media such as the phonograph and telephone impacted conceptions of authorship and textual representation and set the communicative potential of literature against the backdrop of noise and linguistic nonsense. Finally, Krings and his collaborators seem oblivious to related interdisciplinary work on literature and the history of scientific research on sound and hearing such as Christoph Hoffmann's superb account of Robert Musil ('Der Dichter am Apparat', München 1997) or Julia Encke's equally impressive investigation of the impact of World War I on both acoustical research as well as concurrent textual representations of sound in works by Kafka, Musil, and the historical avant-garde (Augenblicke der Gefahr, München 2006). Whether or not these studies constitute 'adequate' consideration of the relations between sound and literature is perhaps up for debate. In any case, Krings's description of the discipline's alleged shortcomings covers over the fact that recent scholarship on German literature has provided invaluable resources—especially with regard to interdisciplinary approaches aimed at drawing connections among literature, media, and the history of science—that might be borrowed by scholars in other philological disciplines in order to investigate sound and its textual representation.

As the title Phono-Graphien suggests, many of the essays propose that we think of literary representations within the...