Virginia Woolf in the Age of a “New Aurality”: Reprising Scholarship on Woolf and Sound 25 Years On
In 2000 Taylor & Francis published my edited collection, Virginia Woolf in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, part of the Border Crossings series edited by Daniel Albright. The collection focused on Woolf’s writings in relation to a range of new technologies of her day. Two contributions in particular featured sound technologies: Bonnie Kime Scott’s analysis of the gramophone in Between the Acts, and Melba Cuddy-Keane’s discussion of “the New Aurality” of the modernist era, providing scholars with a new vocabulary for analyzing sound in Woolf’s writings. A decade later I published two pieces on sound: “Audible Identities: Passing and Sound Technologies” (Humanities Research, 2010) and “Virginia Woolf: Radio, Gramophone, and Broadcasting,” in The Edinburgh Companion to Virginia Woolf and the Arts, ed. Maggie Humm (2010). My talk will review this scholarship and its insights into the soundscape of modernism and the relationship among new technologies, mass culture, and the arts.
