Sylvia Mieszkowski was visiting faculty in our department in 2012-13, and visiting scholar in Spring 13.
She has very recently published Sound Effects: The Object Voice in Fiction, together with co-editor Jorge Sacido-Romero from the University of Santiago de Compostela.
Sound Effects combines literary criticism and psychoanalytic theory in eleven original articles which explore the potential of the object voice as an analytic tool to approach fiction. Alongside the gaze, the voice is Jacques Lacan’s original addition to the set of partial objects of classical psychoanalysis, and has only recently been theorised by Mladen Dolar in A Voice and Nothing More (2006). With notable exceptions like Garrett Stewart’s Reading Voices (1990), the sonorous element in fiction has received little scholarly attention in comparison with poetry and drama. Sound Effects is a contribution to the burgeoning field of sound studies, and sets out to fill this gap through selective readings of English and American fiction of the last two hundred years.
Perhaps AUP is a particularly voice- and noise-focused place, as David Nowell Smith, who taught with us for a year before taking a position at the University of East Anglia, has just published his study of voice in poetry; and Russell Williams has a peculiar appetite for noise.
After a temporary professorship at the University of Zürich, Sylvia is now teaching at the University of Bayreuth.
Comparative Literature & English 