Sound in 19th Century Fiction
Sounds are omnipresent in our everyday lives: cars whizzing around the corner or honking their horns, the wind rustling in the autumn leaves, people chatting, whispering, laughing. In literary texts, there is also a fictional soundscape, playfully animated by sound words such as adjectives, nouns or verbs used to describe sounds realized by characters or present in the ambience of the fiction. Since the beginning of the century, literary scholars have been increasingly immersed in the analysis of these descriptions, whether it be the analysis of the soundscape of Dicken's fictionalized London by Picker (2003) or of voices in the Gothic by Foley (2023).
This seminar is cosponsored with the Department of English.
The presentation will include lunch and take place at the Stanford Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis in Wallenberg 433A. A Zoom link is available upon request from Office Management Intern, Daniela Perez (perezd20 [at] stanford.edu (perezd20[at]stanford[dot]edu)).
About the Presenter
Svenja Guhr is a research associate at the fortext lab at the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany. As a scholar of computational literary studies, her PhD project focuses on the operationalization and analysis of sound and loudness as narratological phenomena in 19th and early 20th century German-language literary prose. Her research interests include the application and development of methods for critical-reflective textual analysis in the field of digital humanities. In addition to her dissertation, she has worked in collaborative (interdisciplinary) projects on the annotation and automatic recognition of scenes and narrative levels in literary prose, the annotation of gender categories, and domestic space, the creation of literary text corpora, systematic text annotation with CATMA, and sentiment analysis.