Feeling for Deaf Resonance in the Eighteenth Century and Beyond

The article examines how resonance has anchored deaf self-representation in the eighteenth century and the present. Through an interdisciplinary framework that foregrounds Deaf and sound studies in the context of the eighteenth century, the article conducts a close reading of writing from two of the first published deaf authors, Pierre Desloges and Charles Shirreff. The argument is that synchronous vibration figures centrally into their sentimental self-fashioning at a time when organized deaf education was first being implemented in Europe. The article also reveals personal stakes in examining resonance alongside John Bulwer's seventeenth-century multisensory model of perception in Philocophus: or the Deafe and Dumbe Man's Friend (1648). Along the way, the article introduces the term deaf resonance to theorize the transhistorical, transformative possibilities that inhere in deaf sociability, and to affirm the multimodal character of sound and communication in deaf self-representation.