• Login
  • Register
  • Search

The Aesthetics of the Acousmatics in the Fall of the House of Usher

Xinrui Guo

Abstract


In close reading of the incarnations of acousmatic sounds as they are artfully employed in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher, this paper attempts to elucidate Poe’s maneuver of diverse soundscapes in creating a type of acousmatic aesthetics. The capacity of sounds in the construction of Gothic atmosphere, or as an beacon in depicting the nervous breakdown of the protagonist “Roderick Usher” will be examined specifically. Poe’s sonic representations in The Fall of the House of Usher unfold panoramic and measured use of sounds, and the certain amount, though not tremendous, of ink has also presented scenes flourished with soundscapes and any less attention drawn to those perspectives would breed a want of understanding his subtle design in the flow of the novel. Several registers that sounds and voices have been endowed with in assuming the role of a necessary actor which appears in Gothic literature like acousmatic aesthetics, timbral sublime, excessive feelings, terror through disemboddied sounds, obscurity are here to dissected to stress the wise manifestations of sounds in Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher.

Keywords


The Fall of the House of Usher; Sounds; Gothic; Acousmatic aesthetics; Edgar Allan Poe

Full Text:

PDF

Included Database


References


[1]Alison. (1790). Essays on the nature and principles of taste [electronic resource] : By the Revd. Archibald Alison, LL. B. F. R. S. Edin. printed for Messrs. P. Byrne, J. Moore, Grueber and M’allister, W. Jones, and R. White.

[2]Burke, E. (1767). A Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful [electronic resource]. (The sixth edition. With an introductory discourse concerning taste, and several other additions.). printed for J. Dodsley in Pall-Mall.

[3]Cook, J. A. (2012). Poe and the apocalyptic sublime: The Fall of the House of Usher. Papers on Language & Literature, 48(1). 3-44.

[4]Edgar Allan Poe. (2015). The fall of the house of Usher and other tales. Signet.

[5]Fielding, H. (1821). The novels of Henry Fielding ... complete in one volume. To which is prefixed, a memoir of the life of the author [by sir W. Scott]. London: Hurst, Robinson & Co.

[6]Foley, M. (2016). “My voice shall ring in your ears”: The acousmatic voice and the timbral sublime in the Gothic romance. Horror Studies, 7(2), 173–188.

[7]Hirsch, D. H., & Thompson, G. R. (1973). Poe’s Fiction: Romantic Irony in the Gothic Tales. American Literature, 45(3), 459.

[8]Ljungquist, K. (1984). The grand and the fair: Poe’s landscape aesthetics and pictorial techniques. Scripta Humanistica.

[9]Passey, J. (2016). Sound and silence: The aesthetics of the auditory in the novels of Ann Radcliffe. Horror Studies, 7(2), 189–204.

[10]Radcliffe, A. (1796). A sicilian romance. T. 1[-2]. Printed For Hookham And Carpenter.

[11]Townshend, D. (2005, December). Gothic Visions, Romantic Acoustics | Romantic Circles. Romantic-Circles.org. https://romantic-circles.org/praxis/gothic/townshend/townshend

[12]Van Elferen, I. (2013). “The sonic Gothic”, in G. Byron and D. Townshend. The Gothic World, 429–440.

[13]Weisheng, T. (2018). Edgar Allan Poe’s Gothic Aesthetics of Things: Rereading “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Style, 52(3), 287–301.

[14]Wikle, O. (2020). Listening at a Distance: Reading the Sound World of Gothic Literature with Topic Modeling and Text Analysis. Digital Studies/Le Champ Numérique, 10(1). https://doi.org/10.16995/dscn.333

[15]Zimmerman, B. (2007). Sensibility, Phrenology, and “The Fall of the House of Usher.” The Edgar Allan Poe Review, 8(1), 47–56.




DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.18686/ahe.v7i30.10999

Refbacks
Copyright © 2020 Universe Scientific Publishing. All rights reserved.