Towards a literary theory of acoustic ecology: Soundscapes in contemporary environmental literature.

摘要

Since the late 1970s, acoustic ecology has increasingly attracted attention from musicologists and others, who have found in it the possibility that it can be an antidote to the vision-dominant worldview of modern societies. In the arena of literary studies, however, acoustic ecology has scarcely been surveyed. Themes concerning sound and aural perception in literature have historically been discussed; however, they have never been investigated from a broader theoretical perspective. As contemporary American writers including Barry Lopez, Terry Tempest Williams, and W. S. Merwin, and Japanese writers such as Michiko Ishimure have demonstrated a special interest in the idea of listening in their speculations on alternative attitudes towards the natural environment, it is important to delineate a concrete framework for what I would like to call a "literary theory of acoustic ecology."; In order to achieve this goal, this dissertation investigates the cultural and literary significance of acoustic imagination in intimate relationships between humans and a natural world. Chapter One offers introductory explanations of the general notion of acoustic ecology and of my application of it to literary studies. Chapter Two discusses basic elements of a theory of acoustic ecology by examining Lopez's conceptualized presentation of soundscape. Chapter Three focuses on the physical dimensions of acoustic imagination by discussing Williams's ecofeminist approach to acoustic ecology. Chapter Four examines the political implications of soundscape which is most powerfully illustrated by Ishimure's representation of vernacular soundscape of a local dialect. Chapter Five investigates how silence functions to provoke the acoustic imagination of sustainable interaction between humans and nonhuman nature by examining Merwin's demonstration of silent soundscapes. And Chapter Six is a piece of experimental writing, which is part scholarly and part personal, that explores the possibility of finding a common place between academic studies and everyday experiences.