Forum on Disciplinary Listening: An Introduction

As we prepared our call-for-papers for this special issue, “New Sonic Approaches in Literary Studies,” we went back and forth about if it should be in or to in our title. We started out with to but then caught ourselves switching to in whenever we wrote or spoke about it. We decided that in was the word we wanted because this special issue has been designed to consider how new sonic approaches find their ways into literary studies. The sonic approaches described in the essays in this collection may not originate in literary studies, but here they are—in literary studies. That word in also conveys that the aim of this special issue is not necessarily to determine what sonic approaches tell us about literary studies (although we have welcomed this, too) but to learn about new sonic approaches as popping up, existing, thriving, meddling, intervening in literary studies through situated methods of listening within particular case studies. As such, in shaping this special issue, we have been profoundly aware of disciplinarity and how it informs the authors’ listening practices as they have approached their subjects. All of the articles enact literary studies through their listenings, but we would argue that what listening means for each author is deeply conditioned by the disciplines through which they were trained and within which they now work. The question of how we listen called for closer consideration and we, as ediForum on Disciplinary Listening: An Introduction