| This dissertation considers auditory power in American literature. In the first section, I discuss the auditory as a semantic transaction in a social context which distributes and/or disrupts power. Great unrest develops out of auditory power's deceptive and influential nature, whether it be the projection of sound from one individual to another or the perception of sound within the individual him- or herself. I begin with Charles Brocken Brown's Wieland, which features literal ventriloquism and auditory hallucinations, before shifting to the gothic short fiction of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe, whose characters are undermined by auditory authority which upholds prevailing social customs instead of individual autonomy. I also discuss the silence/death correlative that is featured in the gothic. Then I turn to Herman Melville's Billy Budd, focusing on the use/abuse of auditory authority. Through auditory power, Melville dramatizes not only the silence/death pairing but also the social and hierarchical contexts of the auditory transaction. Billy's stutter brings into bold relief the potential, often untapped, of the auditory; his inability to speak, to use the auditory, condemns him. In the second section, I situate the auditory in a binary relationship with the visual which so thoroughly saturates American society, using the auditory as a device for understanding the power relationships that exist along racial-ethnic boundaries. I start by exploring how James Weldon Johnson and Langston Hughes interpret and reconfigure the auditory within a visually-constructed and racialized matrix, and the connections between identity and the auditory---here, early Blues music rather than speech acts. I also delve into the audiovisual relationship, asking questions of identity and integrity left underexplored by European-American writers. Lastly, I turn to Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, a novel that pushes the auditory into a head-on collision with the visual dominance of white America through the unnamed narrator's quest for his own voice. This text is invested with the oppressive power of the American visual system of meaning, which constantly impinges upon the narrator's auditory power to suppress his efforts to reconfigure his identity on his own terms rather than on the terms of those in power. |
