Sound and Meaning in Spanish Golden Age Literature; a diachronic view on the romance

01.02.2020

Leitung: Simon Kroll

Projekt: “Sound and Meaning in Spanish Golden Age Literature; a diachronic view on the romance”
Leitung: Simon Kroll
Programmschiene: FWF-Einzelprojekt
Laufzeit: 2020-2023

What can the mere sound of spoken words evoke? What do Spanish Golden Age poetry and theatre actually sound like? How are sound and sense associations used in poetry and theatre? Recent investigation in neurolinguistics has revealed surprisingly stable associations between sounds and feelings, movements and even shape, to the degree that chance can be excluded in explaining this phenomenon. At present, literary criticism often ignores the acoustic materiality of texts. Considering the sixteenth and seventeenth concepts of world harmony and the importance of hearing for religious purposes, this is particularly surprising.
Therefore, this project aims to answer these questions: Where and in which contexts does this conceptual use and semantization of sound structures occur? For what purposes were these sound structures thought? To this end, this project combines literary history and literary criticism under the perspective of current neurolinguistic, Sound Studies and digital humanities. The elaboration of new open-source programs and databases for sonic aspects will be necessary to study the vast corpus from the medieval romancero viejo, the romance nuevo (Lope, Góngora and Quevedo) and the romances used on stage by Lope, Calderón and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz.

Weitere Informationen: homepage.univie.ac.at/simon.kroll/