Sound, Noisy Feelings, and the Audible Sublime in Nineteenth-Century Latin America

Abstract

Abstract: This article delves into the aural dimensions of Latin American literary tradition, exploring those instances when the sublime provides the vocabulary and syntax to textually inscribe sonic phenomena. As highlighted by Ana María Ochoa Gautier, the audible techniques cultivated by lettered elites found a way into their writing, thus forming a rich textual archive where they registered sounds, voices, and noises that often defied classification and overwhelmed the senses. In reading texts for sounds that emphasize adversity, discordance, and sono-racial designations, this article traces the sort of negative emotions characterizing Edmund Burke's and later theorists' definitions of the sublime as a combination of pleasure and pain, a negative moment of disturbance and confusion. Focusing on the sonic features of political writings by Simón Bolívar and foundational fictions such as Esteban Echeverría's La cautiva (1837) and Jorge Isaacs 's María (1867) , this article illustrates how sound shapes the discursive articulation of defining binaries such as civilization-barbarism, reason-emotion, nature-culture, and mind-matter.