Stanford Humanities Center
Lucía Martínez Valdivia is associate professor of English literature and humanities at Reed College, where she teaches courses on early modern poetry, poetics, and humanist thought. Her first monograph, Common Meter: A Revised History of English Poetry, 1548–1948, is currently under review, and she has published various articles and chapters on early modern English poetry and prosody.
SHC Project
Audiation: Listening to Writing
Audiation: Listening to Writing imports and introduces the concept and keyword of audiation from music education to literary criticism and sound studies, describing the faculty by which we “hear” in the mind. For literary criticism, audiation facilitates a focus on the mental soundscapes text can convey, on the range of non-lexical and non-vocal sounds alphabetically represented language can record and communicate, and on its capacity to create mental experiences of sound that exceed the possibilities of physical speech and the acoustic worlds available to our physical senses. Surveying and reconsidering the sound-related phenomena and vocabularies that typically attach to literary critical and neurocognitive discussions of silent reading in general, and of reading lyric poetry in particular, this project models possible affordances of the concept of audiation for theorizing literature and sound.
