Day, L;
(2021)
Lost Aural Landscapes in ‘Hard of Hearing’.
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, Article 4. 10.14324/111.1755-4527.116.
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Abstract
Norman Nicholson’s lesser-known autobiographical lyric ‘Hard of Hearing’ explores how the speaker’s deafness shapes their experience of the surrounding Cumbrian landscape. As Nicholson describes how the world aurally darkens, he describes voices by their appearance and vowels by their diminishing colours. Within a rural landscape characterised by silence, the speaker seeks to redefine his selfhood and to adapt so that he can navigate this newly silent landscape. For those of us with perfect hearing, Nicholson’s poem provides us with an opportunity to try to comprehend what it would be like to live in a world without sound. Contributing scholarship to Nicholson studies, this paper presents a thematic discussion of the poem which calls for a reassessment of the role of sound in ambience, implicitly demonstrating the importance of avoiding ableist conceptions of literature and encouraging the curation of soundless ambient literatures. The poem – ‘Hard of Hearing’ – explores three thematic threads: sound and the relation to selfhood; the creation of space using sound, and the resultant sense of belonging; and the relationship between sound and community.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Lost Aural Landscapes in ‘Hard of Hearing’ |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.14324/111.1755-4527.116 |
| Publisher version: | https://10.14324/111.1755-4527.116 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © 2021 Laura Day. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC-BY) 4.0https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. |
| Keywords: | Poetry, ambience, ambient literature, hard of hearing, space, sound, community, |
| URI: | https://discovery-pp.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10138497 |
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