"The Noisiest Novel Ever Written": The Soundscape of Henry Roth's Call It Sleep

Listening to survive: Classical music and conflict in the musico-literary novel

“…To understand the impact of the cellist's performance on Sarajevan citizens, we must have an understanding of the aural experience of living in a city under siege. While the novel is a silent medium compared to film or television, Galloway creates a soundscape for the novel like those identified by Stephen Adams (1989), David Toop (2011), and Christin Hoene (2016), and Galloway extends this theme of sound perception to our experience of music alongside warfare, as we as readers never hear the sound of the cellist's music, nor do we hear it as it is perceived, but instead read what that listening experience is like, separating us further from the "original" sound. 11 A clear example of the soundscape is Galloway's use of "earwitness accounts," Raymond Murray Schafer's term for the "aural illusion" of warfare demonstrated through literary means, such as in Erich Maria Remarque's (1929) All Quiet on the Western Front: "As the shells were travelling at super-sonic speeds they arrived in advance of the sounds of their original detonations" (Schafer, 1994: 8-9).…”

“…To understand the impact of the cellist’s performance on Sarajevan citizens, we must have an understanding of the aural experience of living in a city under siege. While the novel is a silent medium compared to film or television, Galloway creates a soundscape for the novel like those identified by Stephen Adams (1989), David Toop (2011), and Christin Hoene (2016), and Galloway extends this theme of sound perception to our experience of music alongside warfare, as we as readers never hear the sound of the cellist’s music, nor do we hear it as it is perceived, but instead read what that listening experience is like, separating us further from the “original” sound. 11…”

The Quest for Whiteness in Willa Cather’s "My Ántonia" (1918) and Henry Roth’s "Call It Sleep" (1934)

“…in the city, familial unity is opposed to material improvement, and alienation and anonymity become a continuous threat (see Abramson 1982;Maior 2017: 113). One of the aspects that has caught the attention of scholars is roth's portrayal of the immigrant Jewish urban experience (Walden 1984;Adams 1989;Wirth-nesher 1995;rosenbloom 1998;Maior 2017). in this regard, many studies have delved into the use of language in the novel (Diamant 1986;Wirth-nesher 1990¸Wirth-nesher 3 While Edward A. Abramson's article (1982 highlights the importance of scandinavians, Germans, irish, italians and immigrants from Eastern or Middle Europe as the biggest migratory groups at the turn of the century, Dorothea schneider (2003) adds Chinese and Japanese to the former, noting how they have also left "a relatively rich trail of documents and a literature that dates back to the beginning of the twentieth century".…”