“Sounding Hawthorne: Silence, Acoustics, and Aurality”

MLA Panel for The Nathaniel Hawthorne Society

9-12 January 2025

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s fiction and nonfiction is rife with references to silent spaces, from the interior of the titular House of the Seven Gables to observations on aural solitude in The American Notebooks. In environmental acoustics, geophony refers to non-biological forms of sound, including water, while anthropophony references human-to-human sounds. Aural landscapes, human made and natural, abound in Hawthorne and American Romanticism, broadly speaking. In The American Notebooks, for example, Hawthorne recounts spending time on the shores of the Kennebec River, listening to geophonic sound. How are sound acoustics interwoven within Hawthorne’s fictional spaces? How do sounds and the human voice figure within The Elixir of Life and other stories?  Can aural phenomena in his works be understood in terms of larger, nineteenth-century history, technology, and discursive practices? How might the acoustics of natural environments figure within Hawthorne’s fiction? 

Some potential topics might include:

Aural sound and technology in Hawthorne’s novels and short fiction

Silence and disability

Natural sounds and anthropophic sounds

Private sounds and public acoustics

Art, architecture and interior soundscapes

Ecology and silent naturescapes 

Music and silent intervals

Aesthetic theory and silence

Please send 250-500 word proposals to Dana Medoro dana.medora@umanitopa.ca

 and Michael Martin michael.martin@nicholls.edu. The deadline is 27 March 2024.