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.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.115604 |
| Date | January 2008 |
| Creators | Feenstra, Robin E. (Robin Edward), 1972- |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Doctor of Philosophy (Department of English.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 003133029, proquestno: AAINR66295, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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