批评的“重置”——评莱顿的《听物:文学中的声音机能》

A Review of Angela Leighton’s Hearing Things:The Work of Sound in Literature

当代英国批评家安吉拉·莱顿的近作《听物》试图揭示听觉在文学创作与解读过程中的关键功能。通过对丁尼生、叶芝、弗罗斯特、伍尔夫等作家作品的细读与辨听,《听物》向我们敞开了一个长期被视觉批评传统所遮蔽的文学阐释空间。其中,由于视听感官次序的重置,不仅抒情诗的概念得到重写,而且从19世纪到当代英语文学的互文谱系获得了创新性的开掘。除此之外,全书始终围绕文学与哲学的对话展开,以现在分词形式喻指文学语言在追索与抵达之间的某种永恒形态。通过对文学定义的重新勾勒,《听物》还引发了对当前文学批评立场和学术写作模式的反思,某种程度上实现了对文学本质的还原。

In her most recent book Hearing Things, contemporary British literary critic Angela Leighton seeks to expound the instrumental role of hearing in literary creations and interpretations. Through close reading of and attentive listening to poems by Tennyson, Yeats, Frost, Woolf and others, Hearing Things opens up a space for literary interpretations that has long been overshadowed by the predominance of a visually-oriented critical tradition. With a reversal of the order between seeing and hearing, not only does the idea of lyrical poetry receive a new examination, but the intertextual lineage in Englishlanguage literature from the nineteenth century to the present is also creatively explored and extended. In addition, a central objective of the study is to facilitate a dialogue between literature and philosophy. The author focuses on the present participle of a verb(-ing), regarding it as an apt indication of the permanently unsettled state of searching and arriving that is best captured by literary language. In her effort to rethink what constitutes literariness, the author offers critical reflections on trends in contemporary literary criticism as well as on current modes of academic writing. In the process, she succeeds in bringing back to our attention some key elements of literature.