Aestheticising War Noises as Literary Devices: Ford Madox Ford’s Epistolary and Essayistic Poetics of Sound(scape)s

Rogério Miguel Puga

doi:10.5334/as.207

Abstract

Ford Madox Ford was in active service through almost the full extent of World War I. Between 1915 and 1929, he published several war narratives and poems in which words like Shrapnel and several war noises and silences are recurrent. The possibility of imminent death stimulated the drive to write and sometimes to dismiss or ignore danger. In 1916 and 1917, the author wrote several essays and letters, including three “notes upon [war] sounds” (Ford, Letters 73) to Joseph Conrad that could and did become useful future material for novels. This article deals with the diverse war and natural soundscapes and acoustic plots used in Ford’s fragmentary epistolary and essayistic texts (“Arms and the Mind”; “War and the Mind”) to convey the violence and traumatic dimensions of war, as well as a new way to perceive and represent life on the Front.

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Aestheticising War Noises as Literary Devices: Ford Madox Ford’s Epistolary and Essayistic Poetics of Sound(scape)s

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