Navigating Urban Soundscapes

Navigating Urban Soundscapes: Dublin and Los Angeles in Fiction offers an innovative analytical framework to explore sound in different media and across two distinct urban soundscapes. Studying a wide range of novels, films, and radio dramas, using Dublin and Los Angeles as case studies, Annika Eisenberg asks how sounds are aestheticised to signify urban space in fiction, and how sounds allow such fictional urban spaces to be navigated, both by auscultators, the characters listening within a work of fiction, and by auditeurs, the implied audience of a fictional work. Eisenberg argues that the concept of “urban sound” is a cultural and aesthetic construct, and in doing so, she shows why aesthetics needs to be front and center in sound studies.

"Annika Eisenberg’s compelling multivalent study of urban literary soundscapes models new ways of reading and thinking about the relationship between the sonic and the literary.  Drawing on media aesthetics, this book attends closely to aesthetic modes of registering the spatial qualities of sound in urban fictions.  Moving adeptly between how the sonic can be thought through cognate media such as cinema and radio, Eisenberg never loses focus on the specific ways literature aestheticizes the sonic experience of urban space.   What emerges from this book’s trans-medial comparison of fictional soundscapes of Dublin and Los Angeles is not a literal empirical study of how these two very different cities sound, but a nuanced consideration of the sheer variousness of literature’s mediation of urban sound. Engaging with recent work on listening, Eisenberg’s book develops a dynamic understanding of how literary soundscapes function as resonant convergences of sonic sensations, whilst avoiding established hierarchies of listeners and listening.  This is a capacious and ambitious work which will have broad appeal to sound studies and literary studies scholars and students." (Helen Groth, University of New South Wales)  
"Listening to novels, films, and radio dramas from the first half of the twentieth century, Annika Eisenberg’s remarkable book explores how characters and audiences negotiate liminal soundscapes in Dublin and Los Angeles—with special attention to Joyce and Chandler—and examines how sound perception differs from visual perception in these works. Blending theoretical inventiveness with attentive textual analysis, Eisenberg’s study constitutes a valuable contribution to media aesthetics." (Trey Strecker, Louisiana State University)

"The latest foray into multi-modal sound studies. Specifically interested in media aesthetics, Eisenberg focuses on cultural representations of Dublin and LA to investigate how novels, radio plays and films, from the first half of the 20th century, use sound to produce urbanity for auscultators, auditeurs and sound scholars. On her way through these soundscapes as deployments, their respective aestheticisations and semantic charges, she revisits and/or revises established (critical) terms (hallmark sound, signal sound, aquacity, acousmêtre, eavesdropping, echo, point of audition, evocation, cocooning, sonorous listening, embedded listening), which firmly roots her study in a flourishing field of research. Beyond that, Eisenberg also grows new concepts (layered listening, intersound, parasound, tunement, urban sonar, ping, sonic shelter, sound masking, sonic shorthand), which will enrich future cultural analyses of the liminal transgressiveness of sound as space." (Sylvia Mieszkowski, University of Vienna)

Annika Eisenberg received her PhD from Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany, where she is currently employed. She specialises in literary sound studies, media aesthetics, and representations of urban spaces in fiction and has published on these topics.