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The modern soundscape buzzes with noise. In the 1930s, telephones, radios, and gramophones filled domestic spaces with technological noise, while crowds shouting in the streets created political clamour. During the war in the 1940s, bombs and sirens broke through buildings and burst through consciousness. This dissertation examines the response of three British modernist writers to the cultural shifts brought about by technology and politics, which altered everyday experience and social relations. Elizabeth Bowen, Evelyn Waugh, and George Orwell represent noise in their fiction and nonfiction as a trope of power. Noise, as a palpable emblem of discontent and the acoustic unconsciousness of the period, infiltrates sentences and rearranges syntax, as in the invention of Newspeak in Nineteen Eight-Four. Noise cannot leave listeners in a neutral position. The "culture racket" of the 1930s and 1940s required urgent new ways of listening and listening with ethical intent. / Chapter One provides a reading of Elizabeth Bowen's audible terrains in her novels of the 1930s, where silences and sudden noises intrude on human lives. In Bowen's novels, technological noise has both comedic and tragic consequences. Chapter Two examines noise as a political signifier in The Heat of the Day, Bowen's novel of the blitz. Chapter Three takes up the significance of the culture racket to Evelyn Waugh's novels and travel writing of the 1930s; noise assumes a disruptive, if highly comedic, value in his works, an ambiguity that expresses what it means to be modern. Chapter Four examines Waugh's penchant for satirizing the phoneyness of contemporary culture---its political vacillations---especially in Put Out More Flags, set during the Second World War. Chapter Five considers Orwell's engagement with the emerging social and political formations amongst working, racial, and warring classes in the 1930s. Documenting noise in his reportage, Orwell sounds alarms to alert readers to the mounting social and political crises in his realist novels of the decade. Chapter Six argues that Orwell's final two novels of the 1940s, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, represent the politics of noise in as much as they announce the noise of politics in totalitarian futures. Noise demarcates the insidiousness of propaganda as it screeches from telescreens, the keynote in Big Brother's ideological symphony of domination. Noise, throughout Orwell's writing, signifies the struggle for power. In its widest ramifications, noise provides an interpretive paradigm through which to read Bowen's, Waugh's, and Orwell's fiction and non-fiction, as well as modernist texts generally.

"Down and Out in Paris and London" is typically perceived as non-political. Orwell's first book, it examines his life with the poor in two cities. Although on the surface "Down and Out" seems not to be about politics, Orwell covertly conveys a political message. This is contrary to popular critical opinion. What most critics fail to acknowledge is that Orwell wrote for a middle- and upper-class audience, showing a previously unseen view of the poor. In this he suggests change to the policy makers who are able to bring about improvements for the impoverished. "Down and Out" is often ignored by both critics and readers of Orwell. With an examination of Orwell's politicizing background, and of the way he chooses to present himself and his poor characters in "Down and Out," I argue that the book is both political and characteristic of Orwell's later work.

This dissertation makes the case that treating digitized corpora of literary works as cognitive artifacts can provide particular insight into how the reading mind apprehends events within an imagined world and, thereby, provide potentially useful functional models for event perception, emotional memory, and determining what’s “real.” Most essentially, it will make the case that the deepest feature of narrative cognition may involve an “information distribution” assessment, wherein the variation of information density over time cues the mind to attend to denser events with increased attention, potentially saving more of their content for long-term memory. This mimics what cognitive research has frequently established for real-world processing of emotionally stimulating events, wherein emotional memory tends to be better retained over time, with more detail, fewer conflations, and more resistance to fading, while neutral events tend to be relegated to gist or forgotten. Put together, this produces an ordering of autobiographical memory that resembles a glimmering string of pearls: densely detailed memories strung together over time, separated by thinner, looser memories and gist, with a particular cluster of these “pearls” towards the middle for the memory bump of the mid-teens to mid-twenties. While many have argued for larger schemas or socially influenced self-regard as the major driver for memory emphasis in one’s Life Story, if autobiographical memory is anything like a novel, it may prove a bit simpler: most of the bigger pearls mark where one’s sensory array “dilated” in moments of arousal, and their lustrous, persistent “shine” may be a matter of how likely it was that one returned to those memories over time. Chapter 1 examines what we do and don’t know about the reading mind, settling on a narrower definition of immersive narrative reading as an exceptional cognitive state which moves in and out of what cognitive psychologists call “flow” and a more passive, vivid “daydream.” This is an inherently unstable activity that requires a great deal of assistance from the text, thereby providing useful targets of analysis for researchers interested in perception, emotion, and memory, with a particular eye towards embodied cognition. It then discusses key gaps in the scientific literature and literary scholarship around event perception and narrative cognition, some of which this project aims to partially fill through quantitative analysis of literary texts. This chapter will also discuss the promise and perils of treating literary corpora like the novels in Project Gutenberg as cognitive artifacts: the known limitations of using “canon” texts as a representative sample of literature in general, the rarity of reading, and what it means to “backsolve” cognition through its artifacts. Chapter 2 describes a series of experiments conducted on a corpus of a few thousand novels and nonfiction narratives contained in Project Gutenberg and the Nickels and Dimes Project. Leaning on the “string of pearls” metaphor for autobiographical memory organization, this chapter will promote a model of long-form narrative’s fundamental mnemonics as something that mimics that organizational pattern: information density that varies over time, predicting not only the pace of in-narrative time passing, but which “moments” or features of the narrative will be important for the reader to remember over multiple reading events, while others will be forgotten or relegated to gist. This pattern closely mimics models of autobiographical memory in cognitive psychology, not only of so-called “flashbulb memory” or surprising, high-affect events, but also of Life Story in general: vast periods of fleeting detail, with dense memory clusters around events that were encoded in moments of arousal, with curious memory affects just before and after those events, possibility illustrating what Jefferey Zacks presents as a “gating” model of event perception. Drawing on the scientific literature on event segmentation, arousal and memory, and time perception, and likewise drawing on literary scholarship on time and stylistics in the novel, this chapter will explore the implications and limitations of using POS tagging to try and tease out quantifiable units of “information” from large corpora of novels utilizing one-way repeated measures MANOVA. Applications for these findings in literary scholarship will be discussed throughout—for instance, while scenes involving sex or violence are predictably information-dense in most texts in the corpus that were hand-scored for accuracy (and subsequently used as training texts for the algorithm), in-book variation from the norm and from nearby passages is more predictive than a raw density score alone. For example, when Stephen Dedalus has sex in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, imagistic detail goes down compared to nearby scenes and compared to the more detail-dense passages in the text, which seems to be typical of Joyce: while he does vary density according to temporality and that maps roughly to “significant” scenes, the most emotional scenes tend to be written more sparely (spare for that author, that is—Joyce is not Hemingway). That may be an authorial quirk, or it may be that he relies upon a second strategy to stimulate a reader’s emotional response: semantic content that’s normally cued to a strong negative or positive valence. Chapter 3 will attend to the ways some authors resist narrative’s “ease of use” in order to prompt their readers to interrogate what’s Real. This chapter zooms in on a specific period of American and British literature, and a genre within that brief time: the rise of Creative Nonfiction and/or New Journalism, with a close read or “case study” of George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia and James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. This chapter proposes that the authors set out to create narratives that would reflect the “real” lives of their subjects, with an objective of making those lives feel real to their readership. But were they successful? Drawing on cognitive psychology research in psychosis, metacognition, and temporal sense, this chapter aims to elucidate how literary narratives like these may “aim to fail” at certain features of deep narrative form (as discussed in the prior chapters) in order to “startle” their readers into a less passive state, in order to better mimic the qualia of witnessing something in the real world, and thereby produce a sense that the subjects within the text are Real. These embedded structural failures are often more subtle than anything Brechtian, but nevertheless can be found both quantitatively and in close reading, which may indicate that when a long-form narrative text purposefully aims to make a reader uncomfortably aware of Reality--especially when motivated by known, deep ethical concerns--it may “work” in ways that have less to do with the subject or content of the text and more to do with form.

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Ce mémoire considère trois œuvres littéraires des décennies d'après-guerre dans lesquelles le contrôle social est omniprésent, soit Nineteen Eighty-Four de George Orwell, Player Piano de Kurt Vonnegut, et One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest de Ken Kesey. L'analyse propose que ces auteurs examinent les réponses individuelles et collectives possibles face au contrôle socio-sonique, incluant le conformisme et la déviance, à travers la musicalité de leurs personnages. Mon approche repose sur des théories reliées à la sociologie, la musicologie et les études sonores afin d'élaborer une perspective holistique des paysages sonores de la modernité qui caractérisent les romans. Ce cadre théorique permet de traiter deux idées centrales, soit le contrôle social par l'institutionnalisation de cultures sonores et la musicalité sous forme de carrière déviante. Mon argument principal est qu'Orwell, Vonnegut, et Kesey présentent la réception sonore de leurs personnages comme étant doublement liée à leurs réactions face à la répression. D'une part, les auteurs représentent la musique et le son en tant qu'outils de contrôle produits et utilisés par des pouvoirs autoritaires. Dans les romans, ces pouvoirs établissent des normes socio-soniques qui supportent un système social basé sur la subjugation de la population sous une idéologie hégémonique. D'autre part, les auteurs présentent la musicalité en tant que moyen de résistance : ils établissent un parallèle entre les réactions déviantes de leurs protagonistes envers le son et les postures contre-culturelles de ceux-ci. La musique et le son font partie intégrante de la prose d'Orwell, Vonnegut, et Kesey; je soutiens que leurs représentations de musicalité traduisent une évaluation des notions d'agentivité et d'opposition contre-culturelle à l'autoritarisme. Ce mémoire offre une approche innovatrice à l'analyse des œuvres de par son interdisciplinarité, qui mène à de nouvelles considérations illuminant la relation entre le contrôle socio-sonique et la musicalité déviante dans les dystopies antiautoritaires d'après-guerre. / This thesis considers three literary works from the postwar decades in which social control is omnipresent: George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano, and Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. The analysis posits that these authors depict potential individual and collective responses to socio-sonic control, including conformism and deviance, through the musicality of their characters. My approach, grounded in theorizations related to sociology, musicology, and sound studies, develops a holistic perspective of the soundscapes of modernity that characterize the novels. This theoretical framework allows for an examination of two central notions in the narratives; namely, the institutionalization of sonic cultures for purposes of social control, and the concept of musicality as part of a deviant career. My main argument is that Orwell, Vonnegut, and Kesey present their characters' reception of sound as being doubly tied to their reactions to repression. On one hand, the authors represent music and sound as tools of control produced and used by authoritarian powers. In the novels, such powers enforce socio-sonic norms that support a social system based on the subjugation of the population under a hegemonic ideology. On the other hand, the authors present musicality as means of resistance: they interlink their protagonists' deviant reactions vis-à-vis sound and their countercultural postures. Music and sound are an integral part of Orwell's, Vonnegut's, and Kesey's prose; I argue that, through their portrayals of musicality, they foreground the possibility for individual agency and countercultural resistance to oppose authoritarianism. The thesis offers an innovative approach to the narratives, as its theoretical interdisciplinarity leads to new considerations illuminating the relationship between socio-sonic control and deviant musicality in postwar anti-authoritarian dystopias.

In “Documents of Revolution” I compare various non-fiction prose genres with incipient journalistic media, including scrapbooks, photographs, films and radio poems, to explore the new internationalisms that emerged during the Spanish Civil War. Many studies of the war have prioritized visiting authors and their experience of travelling Spain. By contrast, I show how local critics, writers, and poets, such as the anarchist filmmaker Mateo Santos, the memoirist María Teresa León, and the poet Miguel Hernández, were crucial intermediaries between Spanish working-class oral cultures and foreign visiting authors, such as George Orwell, Nancy Cunard, Langston Hughes and Nicolás Guillén. I describe three modes of relation between intellectual elites and the working class: occupying, broadcasting, and archiving. By reading for the living internationalism of the working-class, I unearth various internationalisms (anarchist, Black Hispanophone, and feminist-humanitarian) that have not received due attention. These overlapping networks and diasporas ensured that the revolutionary and multimedia documentary poetics of the war disseminated far beyond Spain’s borders.

Nineteen Eighty-Four de George Orwell, A Clockwork Orange d'Anthony Burgess et Meccania: The Superstate d'Owen Gregory révèlent trois régimes oppressifs qui manipulent la science dans le but de contrôler leurs populations. Les auteurs dénoncent la déshumanisation et l'esclavage générés par cette collaboration politico-scientifique. Ainsi, cette étude va explorer les dystopies susmentionnées en analysant leur critique du mariage politico-scientifique. Je vais montrer que la coopération entre les politiciens et les scientifiques est destinée à contrôler les individus et à pénaliser les éléments dissidents. Je vais examiner les mécanismes politico-scientifiques de surveillance et de punition, tout en montrant que les politiciens usent de la science pour assurer la continuité et la stabilité des régimes tyranniques. Finalement, je vais souligner la capacité de l'écriture à dévoiler les abus politico-scientifiques, et à prévenir une coalition entre la connaissance scientifique et le pouvoir despotique.

From the first electric lights in London along Pall Mall, and in the Holborn Viaduct in 1878 to the nationalisation of National Grid in 1947, the narrative of the simple ascendency of a new technology over its outdated predecessor is essential to the way we have imagined electric light in London at the end of the nineteenth century. However, as this thesis will demonstrate, the interplay between gas and electric light - two co-existing and competing illuminary technologies - created a particular and peculiar landscape of light, a 'lightscape', setting London apart from its contemporaries throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Indeed, this narrative forms the basis of many assertions made in critical discussions of artificial illumination and technology in the late-twentieth century; however, this was not how electric light was understood at the time nor does it capture how electric light both captivated and eluded the imagination of contemporary Londoners. The influence of the electric light in the representations of London is certainly a literary question, as many of those writing during this period of electrification are particularly attentive to the city's rich and diverse lightscape. Though this has yet to be made explicit in existing scholarship, electric lights are the nexus of several important and ongoing discourses in the study of Victorian, Post-Victorian, Modernist, and twentieth-century literature. This thesis will address how the literary influence of the electric light and its relationship with its illuminary predecessors transcends the widespread electrification of London to engage with an imaginary London, providing not only a connection with our past experiences and conceptions of the city, modernity, and technology but also an understanding of what Frank Mort describes as the 'long cultural reach of the nineteenth century into the post-war period'.