Abstract
This chapter maps the presence of sound and auditory language across three popular twentieth-century narratives concerned with biological contamination and disease emergence: Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (1954), Michael Crichton’s The Andromeda Strain (1969), and Richard Preston’s The Hot Zone (1994). The chapter examines how, in different ways, each of the three narratives invites the reader to reimagine twentieth-century scientific visuality through the problematizing prism of sound. Seeing and hearing do not only comprise ways of knowing and experiencing the world, they are also inherently political and provide models for its organization. At the same time, visual and auditory epistemologies converge and diverge to create critical dissonances.
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Peckham, R. (2020). Listening to Pandemics: Sonic Histories and the Biology of Emergence. In: Ahuja, N., et al. The Palgrave Handbook of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature and Science. Palgrave Handbooks of Literature and Science. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-48244-2_17
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