Reviewed by: Kafka and Noise: The Discovery of Cinematic Sound in Literary Modernism by Kata Gellen Ted Dawson Kata Gellen, Kafka and Noise: The Discovery of Cinematic Sound in Literary Modernism. Northwestern UP, 2019. 250 pp. Kafka's writings resound with odd sounds, from the inhuman squeaks in Gregor Samsa's voice to the mysterious noise in "The Burrow." Only, as literature, these texts cannot actually resound at all. This is Kata Gellen's point of departure for her compelling book Kafka and Noise, which investigates the "sounds" of Kafka's texts alongside the "sounds" of silent film in order to show that "nonsounding media can reveal aspects of sonic modernity that are unavailable to sounding media" (33). Gellen knows she is not the first scholar to listen for Kafka's strange noises (34). [End Page 101] As becomes clear in the first chapter, her methodological innovation involves her focus on film. After considering the early sketch "Great Noise" to exemplify her premise that "noise, a phenomenon with no apparent function, meaning, or value, presents a productive obstacle to modernist literary narration" (4–5), Gellen spends much of the chapter reading the opening of "The Metamorphosis" alongside the "silent" film The Artist (Michael Hazanavicius, 2011), focusing on both pieces' use of the "acoustic closeup" (19). By considering The Metamorphosis with a tool derived from Balázs film theory, Gellen is able to highlight the way sounds expand time around the moment of awakening and develop new insights into Gregor's transformation. She does not suggest that Kafka himself conceived of this as an acoustic closeup, though. What sets Gellen's work apart from other writings on Kafka and film, such as Peter-André Alt's Kafka und der Film and Anna Brabandt's Franz Kafka und der Stummfilm, is that Gellen understands silent film not merely as an influence on Kafka's writing but also sees both film and Kafka's works as indices of changing modernist perceptions around sound (83–84). In other words, Gellen is aware that Kafka's "literary engagement with sound was certainly influenced by his experience of its technological mediation," but she is primarily interested in a longer evolution of discourses around sound and noise, including earlier technologies that shaped both Kafka's and film's imagination of sound (29). The second chapter takes up the inability of literature or silent film to be heard, considering not only "Josefine the Singer" and the impossibility of representing Josefine's singing, but also "The Knock at the Courtyard Gate," in which it cannot be said whether a character actually knocked or simply feigned knocking, and "The Silence of the Sirens," in which the reader finally cannot know whether the sirens actually sang for Odysseus. These latter texts draw attention to "the basic instability of representing sound in silent media," for the reader is invited to imagine sounds which may or may not have ever been audible (83). In the third chapter, the focus shifts to sounds that are heard, as Gellen considers the anxieties around the advent of sound film together with the role of recitation in Kafka's works, looking at the imagined recitation in "Report for an Academy" and at its near opposite, the "Speech on the Yiddish Language," a text "primarily spoken and only secondarily written" (137). The sounds of the second and third chapter—knocking, singing, reciting—are notably not sounds generally considered "noise," and a certain [End Page 102] ambivalence around this term is one of the few weaknesses of this otherwise strong book. The word noise seems sometimes to be used only in the sense of "a noise," that is, any sound, while at other times it appears as "unwanted sounds, acoustic refuse" (187). Missing in Gellen's wide-ranging bibliography are many of the important texts on noise—we do not find Douglas Kahn or David Nowak or even a sidelong glance at Jacques Attali. This is unsurprising insofar as Gellen has explicitly deselected sound studies for developing her theoretical approach, opting instead to draw on the critical vocabulary of film theory (7, 28). While this choice may provide fresh insights—and Gellen is certainly correct that sound studies has...