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  • Eardrums: Literary Modernism as Sonic Warfare by Tyler Whitney
  • David Imhoof
Eardrums: Literary Modernism as Sonic Warfare. By Tyler Whitney. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2019. x + 219 pages + 20 b/w illustrations. $99.95 hardcover, $34.95 paperback and e-book.

This book effectively uses metaphor as argument. The eardrum serves as a literal and figurative percussive instrument to help us understand changing ways in which people experienced sound from the 1870s to the 1920s. Studying auditory culture reveals the major shifts in German-language modernist literature. Drawing from literary, scientific, and journalistic sources, Eardrums examines the impact of sound on humans, specifically at the eardrum itself. That membrane turns out to be either a way to absorb sonic violence or a division between inner and outer experiences. Whitney uses this changing role of the eardrum to describe the shifting contours of modernist literature and its reaction to an increasingly militarized society.

Although the book's aim is literary analysis, it mobilizes sound studies to this end. In fact, Eardrums is one of the most successful examples of this multi-disciplinary field to appear in some time. Whitney's narrative tempers some salient concepts in [End Page 126] sound studies. He agrees, for example, with Emily Thompson's assumption that modernist thinkers sought to control sound but goes further to show that some writers in the modernist period also embraced the wild violence of sound and explored its irrepressible influence on thought. And like many scholars in this field, Whitney takes cues from yet challenges the techno-determinism of Friedrich Kittler. Whitney's detailed probing also reveals the ways in which gender, race, class, and sexuality mediated sonic experience. Questions of identity, however, could have been explored in greater depth.

Whitney highlights three major "tympanic regimes"—another concept from sound studies—from the 1870s through the 1920s, each one closely identified with an author or two. First, phonographic and impressionistic authors in the last three decades of the nineteenth century built connections between the military drum and the human ear drum. Detlev von Liliencron especially drew from his experiences during Germany's Wars of Unification (1864–1871). His poetry used onomatopoeia to reflect the increasing militarization of everyday life in Germany. This literary trend mirrored the growing number of militarized organizations, activities, and sounds in newly unified Germany. Likewise, the expanding impact of industrial noise added to the sonic assault urban Germans experienced. Both the eardrum and writing thus became forms of transduction, "registering sound's physical force beyond language" (24). Whitney challenges the assumption in many scholarly treatments of this era that present the phonograph as a device that reshaped expression. Liliencron made clear that onomatopoeia played just as important a role in this process.

Viennese impressionist writer Peter Altenberg similarly drew parallels in his writing between the increasingly loud noises of urban life and the sonic violence of the battlefield. Altenberg assumed the eardrum to be the epicenter of urban sonic warfare. And more than Liliencron, he celebrated silence as a goal, seeing it as a way to protect people (especially the educated middle class) from the sonic violence of industrialization, class conflict, and military activity. Together these two authors, whose works Whitney buttresses with non-literary sources, reveal the range of literature's approach to sonic aggression: from bellicose poetry to celebration of silence.

The second regime, Dadaism, stood between these approaches and 1920s high modernism. Whitney investigates Richard Huelsenbeck's work, especially his Cabaret Voltaire performances with drum and onomatopoetic exclamation. Dadaism relied heavily on the symbolic and actual sonic violence of drums to react to the Great War. Whitney's subtle analysis of how colonialism and ideas of the African Other functioned in Huelsenbeck's work is one of the highlights of the book. This examination reveals Dadaism's simultaneous embrace and rejection of European culture. Whitney is not the first to note this schizophrenic quality of Dada, but sound studies here explains well the important place of this brief movement within the larger story of modernist literature. And this analysis helps explain the major sonic break in literature and listening caused by the Great War.

Third, chapters on Robert Musil and...

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