The Sound of Writing

The Sound of Writing makes a substantial contribution to scholarship about the relations among various writing systems and the aural dimensions of literary cultures. An especially notable achievement of this collection is that its contributors bring established methods of prosody and manuscript analysis to bear upon broader, messier, more generative questions about sound and inscription.

The Sound of Writing is a significant contribution to the material history of literature. Its essays often remind us of the immodest assumptions we unconsciously make when opening a book or a score from hundreds of years past and turn us back to our own implications in the layers of mediation and artifacts of inscription that are closer to being 'the object at hand.' This is good and sobering advice.

An eloquent guide to why being a good reader means being a good listener, too. Exquisitely attuned to the supposedly silent page's sonic dimensions, The Sound of Writing makes a resounding case for the benefits of reading with our ears as well as our eyes.

Listening closely to problems of sound and meter that might seem entirely embedded in the formal world of poetry, the essays in this collection reverse engineer both sensory and social dimensions of the historical soundscapes in which these poems first emerged. The result is a series of vivid and imaginative reconextualizations that, unlike some versions of historicism, always also take us further into the experience offered by the poems.

Speaking statues, buzzing bees, and a whole host of metrical and melodious manuscripts—beware of opening this noisy book in a quiet library! The concert's stars, however, are its expert editors and contributors, who offer one virtuosic performance after another of the art of reading as an art of listening.