Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: The history of Romantic listening is a history of change and responsiveness to change.Both soundscapes and modes of listening were shifting throughout the period that we now call Romantic (Perry 3), shaped by new forms of attention, new technologies and new environments (Grande and Raz 1-12).Given such unstable terrain, how can we begin to investigate the ways in which Romantic conceptions of the sound of nature have shaped our sense of environmental awareness?In what follows, we argue that listening in the Romantic period was often understood as an active skill as well as an art, one that could be learned or fall into disuse, and one that many Romantic writers sought to finetune through continued acts of listening and textual recording (Castell et al,(5)(6)(7).Such practices shaped the environmental awareness of poets and writers in various ways in the Romantic period, sharpening their sense of what might be lost, as well as gained, in the translation of raw sound into written words.Romantic listening also continues to have an impact on the ways that we conceptualize and listen to the sound of nature in our own moment of ecological crisis.To test this, we explore Romantic attentiveness to sound as a transhistorical phenomenon and demonstrate its connection to developing traditions of environmental awareness through a creative experiment: a series of sound walks in the present day which reimagine the practice of listening and writing undertaken by writers such as John Clare and the Wordsworths.Our sound walks were designed, above all, to provide an opportunity for participants to engage in an extended period of active listening.However, their context and structure also encouraged reflection upon the continuities and discontinuities between our practices of listening and those of the Romantics.In both the walks and in the texts themselves, we find a consistent variousness of response not only in Romantic modes of listening to the sounds of nature, but also in how we continue to listen with them.John Clare's poetry was particularly attuned to change, a record not only of the shifting sands of shifting sounds, but also of how one might translate and represent them in language.Take, for example, the fragmentary lines written later in Clare's life Journal of Literature and Science 17 (2024) Castell & Mackenney, "Listening with the Romantics": 50-61
DOI: 10.12929/jls.17.2.04
Authors: James Castell, Francesca Mackenney
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4411027959