In Search of Alternative Soundscapes: International Modernism and Sonic Warfare in Late 1930s China

HAO Yucong

doi:10.19857/j.cnki.ICL.20225308

Volume 5 Issue 3

Sep. 2022

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HAO Yucong. In Search of Alternative Soundscapes: International Modernism and Sonic Warfare in Late 1930s China[J]. International Comparative Literature, 2022, 5(3): 136-155. doi: 10.19857/j.cnki.ICL.20225308

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HAO Yucong. In Search of Alternative Soundscapes: International Modernism and Sonic Warfare in Late 1930s China[J]. International Comparative Literature, 2022, 5(3): 136-155. doi: 10.19857/j.cnki.ICL.20225308

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In Search of Alternative Soundscapes: International Modernism and Sonic Warfare in Late 1930s China

doi: 10.19857/j.cnki.ICL.20225308

HAO Yucong^,

NYU Shanghai

Received Date: 2022-01-20
Accepted Date: 2022-03-05

Abstract

Abstract

This article traces the crossed paths of two types of wartime modernisms and their respective engagements with China's wartime soundscapes in the late 1930s:the first is represented by the modernist poetry of W.H.Auden, and the second is the political modernist documentary of Joris Ivens. Contextualizing the two artists within the network of international modernism in the 1930s, I examine how Auden's and Ivens's journeys to wartime China informed divergent modernist experiments with the expressive and affective capacity of sound and voice, and argue that they developed their own auditory aesthetics and constructed alternative soundscapes beyond wartime acoustic violence. Auden and Ivens followed a similar path from Madrid to Wuhan, embarking from the debris of the Spanish Civil War and arriving at the battlefield of wartime China. Their encounters with the Sino-Japanese War were crystallized, respectively, into the sonnet series of "In Time of War" (1939) and the solidarity documentary film, The 400 Million(1938). Both artists registered the complex soundscape of wartime China:while they were overwhelmed by the deadly blasts of aerial bombardment, siren sounds, and cries of war victims, they sought to redress this wartime crisis of perception by reimagining an alternative soundscape beyond the sonic warfare.
- modernism,
- sound,
- Sino-JapaneseWar,
- crisis of perception

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References(27)

References

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