• myGriffith
    • Staff portal
    • Contact Us⌄
      • Future student enquiries 1800 677 728
      • Current student enquiries 1800 154 055
      • International enquiries +61 7 3735 6425
      • General enquiries 07 3735 7111
      • Online enquiries
      • Staff phonebook
    View Item 
    •   Home
    • Griffith Research Online
    • Book chapters
    • View Item
    • Home
    • Griffith Research Online
    • Book chapters
    • View Item
    JavaScript is disabled for your browser. Some features of this site may not work without it.

    Browse

  • All of Griffith Research Online
    • Communities & Collections
    • Authors
    • By Issue Date
    • Titles
  • This Collection
    • Authors
    • By Issue Date
    • Titles
  • Statistics

  • Most Popular Items
  • Statistics by Country
  • Most Popular Authors
  • Support

  • Contact us
  • FAQs
  • Admin login

  • Login
  • The Silence of Sounds

    Author(s)
    McDonald, Donna Marie
    Griffith University Author(s)
    McDonald, Donna M.
    Year published
    2009
    Metadata
    Show full item record
    Abstract
    How do writers portray the absence of one or more of our senses? In particular, how do they convey the absence of hearing? The question arises for me because I was born deaf. While I have the occasional complex or awkward experience because the world is designed by the hearing for the hearing, I have never experienced the sensation of my other-hearingness as a grief or a loss. Instead, I experience my deafness as another sensory perception: different from the hearing person, but a sense all the same. In this essay, I take up the challenge of examining the portrayal of deafness in contemporary fiction by comparing Vikram ...
    View more >
    How do writers portray the absence of one or more of our senses? In particular, how do they convey the absence of hearing? The question arises for me because I was born deaf. While I have the occasional complex or awkward experience because the world is designed by the hearing for the hearing, I have never experienced the sensation of my other-hearingness as a grief or a loss. Instead, I experience my deafness as another sensory perception: different from the hearing person, but a sense all the same. In this essay, I take up the challenge of examining the portrayal of deafness in contemporary fiction by comparing Vikram Seth’s novel, An Equal Music, in which the heroine, Julia, is a deaf concert pianist, with Frances Itani’s novel, Deafening, a fictionalized account of a Canadian deaf woman, Grania. I show how, in Seth’s novel, the reader witnesses the impact of hearing loss on Julia through the observations and experiences of Michael, her former lover and fellow musician. In Itani’s novel, I show how the reader is vicariously immersed in the experience of deafness through the cumulative impact of the omnipotent (and apparently hearing) narrator’s reports of the reactions of the other characters to Grania’s deafness, together with Grania’s interior monologue in which she reports her own observations of hearing people’s reactions to her deafness. Of course, while some of my observations inevitably draw on my particular insights as a deaf reader, this does not mean my observations are representative of all deaf people (just as one hearing reader is not representative of all hearing people).
    View less >
    Book Title
    Literature and Sensation
    Publisher URI
    https://www.cambridgescholars.com/product/978-1-4438-0116-4
    Subject
    Literary Studies not elsewhere classified
    Publication URI
    http://hdl.handle.net/10072/45069
    Collection
    • Book chapters

    Footer

    Disclaimer

    • Privacy policy
    • Copyright matters
    • CRICOS Provider - 00233E
    • TEQSA: PRV12076

    Tagline

    • Gold Coast
    • Logan
    • Brisbane - Queensland, Australia
    First Peoples of Australia
    • Aboriginal
    • Torres Strait Islander