Beth Staley
West Virginia University
Beth Staley is a PhD candidate at West Virginia University. She recently launched the Dickinson Soundscape Project to compare seasonal audiovisual recordings of sound at the Dickinson Homestead to inscriptions of sound in Dickinson’s texts. Her essays appear or are forthcoming in South Atlantic Review, Jacket, and the Dickinson Electronic Archive.
“Beth Staley, West Virginia UniversityIn nineteenth-century poetry, syllables were measures of meaning that brought the human, nonhuman, and nonliving world into vocal legibility. Dickinson acknowledged unspeakable syllables... [ view full abstract ]
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Beth Staley, West Virginia University
In nineteenth-century poetry, syllables were measures of meaning that brought the human, nonhuman, and nonliving world into vocal legibility. Dickinson acknowledged unspeakable syllables that were measures of meaning beyond vocal legibility. In her work, speakable syllables belonged to daytime, Truth, evening, Love, angels, Fame, words, letters of correspondence, and Grief, and they oriented (even inspired) subjects to navigate the world by speaking. Beyond the borders of vocal legibility, unspeakable syllables, including non-syllables, belonged to Robins, Nature, Flowers, Death, Heavens, the Future, Martyr Poets, the dead, and inevitable responses. These syllables reoriented (even re-inspired) subjects to navigate the world by listening instead of speaking. I’ll discuss how processing sound recordings from the Dickinson Homestead through acoustic ecology software offers a point of departure for analyzing how Dickinson’s syllables orient subjects to vast registers of legibility and illegibility that slip into one another and even trade places. If speakable syllables made the world legible, even containable, for a romantic “I” or democratic “we," unspeakable syllables rendered that world less legible and containable, prompting Dickinson’s subjects to surrender their status as speakers, anticipating occasions for speaking that locate legibility with regard to (not at the expense of) illegibility.
