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The sounds of beasts and birds: noise and nonhuman communication in medieval French and English texts written in Anglo-Norman England
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Abstract:
This thesis focuses on representations of nonhuman sounds in vernacular texts written in French and English in Anglo-Norman England. Through close analysis of a varied corpus of texts from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, including a medieval French bestiary, a multilingual treatise on language, a saint’s life, fables and a Middle English song, it highlights the multiple ways that the sounds of beasts and birds are represented for interpretation. It argues that the sonic phenomena associated with nonhuman creatures are used to construct acoustic environments in medieval texts that were exploited by writers to produce and reinforce human subjectivity as distinct from the nonhuman—forms of subjectivity that assert a human exceptionalism in large part based on physical or cognitive power, the expression of hierarchy and control of language. Close examination of a range of such episodes in medieval texts suggests that such networks of power relations were fundamental to the comprehension of human and nonhuman relationships; however, the sounds of beasts and birds also served to destabilise the primacy of the human in those relationships. If medieval texts insist upon human exceptionalism, they also suggest that such exceptionalism has to be asserted, rather than being taken for granted. Moreover, in their engagement with nonhuman sound, these works create spaces in which the human and the nonhuman may come into contact in surprising and unpredictable ways. This project analyses such spaces using insights drawn from sound studies and musicology, translation studies, continental philosophy and critical animal studies. In doing so, it argues that the kinds of cross-species communication made possible by medieval texts are often based on cross-linguistic contact and on the imitation of nonhuman sounds by humans. By placing the sounds of nonhumans into the mouths and minds of human audiences and performers, the medieval texts analysed here demonstrate that it is not only humans that converse with each other. Rather, these texts posit a range of cross-species networks in which human and nonhuman vocalisations such as barking, crying, singing and calling ‘cuccu’ mirror one another, thereby exposing not only the limits of human language but also the communicative possibilities of nonhuman sound-making.
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Keyword:
PC Romance languages; PN Literature (General); PQ Romance literatures
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URL: http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/137160/1/WRAP_Theses_Lewis_2019.pdf
http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/137160/
http://webcat.warwick.ac.uk/record=b3452899~S15
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