Hearing Deliberately: Sensible Communication and Perception in Walden

Abstract

Abstract:This article takes up Thoreau's concerns in Walden with the stakes of standardized speech, hearing, and auditory communication. I reframe Thoreau's frequent preoccupations with hearing and sound through the histories and sensory epistemologies of deafness, which can highlight the threads that lace through Thoreau's work about comprehending nonnormative perception in the midst of an American cultural landscape increasingly preoccupied with demanding particular types of auditory and verbal behaviors. Following scholars like Christopher Krentz and Rebecca Sanchez, I "deafen" Thoreau by putting his work in dialogue with the alternative sensory, linguistic, and embodied histories and phenomenologies given to us by deaf experience. Thoreau frames sound and hearing, alongside broader notions about communication and perception, as fluid and individually variant processes rather than standard sensory givens. Thoreau's deeply subjective way of thinking through the body and its processes of perception and self-expression can highlight how the standardizing impulses of modernity work against more fluid human types of "multimodality" and the "heterogeneity" of sensing and communicating. The subjectivity and particularity that characterize Thoreau's explorations of nonnormative hearing and communicating ultimately prompt a deeper critique of standard sensory experience as a prerequisite for social legibility and interaction.