John O. Jordan: “Dickens and Soundscape: The Old Curiosity Shop”
Please join the Dickens Project for the rescheduled Dickens Universe talk by John Jordan, Dickens Project Co-Founder and Co-Director. Delve into the sounds of The Old Curiosity Shop on Sunday, December 7, from 1:00-2:30 PM (Pacific time).
Critics have long recognized and commented on the striking visual quality of Dickens’s writing, including the ways in which his novels seem to have anticipated and even influenced the development of certain film techniques. With the exception of studies that focus on speech and voice, relatively little attention has been paid to Dickens’s representation of sound more generally. In this paper, Professor Jordan takes a sound studies approach to Dickens’s writing, focusing on The Old Curiosity Shop and examining the various uses to which sound is put in this exceptionally “noisy” book.
John O. Jordan is a research professor of literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz and the Co-Director of the Dickens Project. His primary research interests include Victorian literature and culture, Charles Dickens and narrative theory. John is the author of Supposing Bleak House and co-editor, with Robert Patten and Catherine Waters, of the Oxford Handbook of Charles Dickens.
