Everyone knows what noise is. Or do they? Can we in fact say that one man's noise is another teenager's music? Is noise in fact only an auditory phenomenon or does it extend far beyond this realm? If our common definitions of noise are necessarily subjective and noise is not just unpleasant sound, then it merits a closer look (or listen). Greg Hainge sets out to define noise in this way, to find within it a series of operations common across (...) its multiple manifestations that allow us to apprehend it as something other than a highly subjective term that tells us very little. Examining a wide range of texts, including Sartre's novel Nausea and David Lynch's iconic films Eraserhead and Inland Empire, Hainge investigates some of the Twentieth Century's most infamous noisemongers to suggest that they're not that noisy after all; and it finds true noise in some surprising places. The result is a thrilling and illuminating study of sound and culture. (shrink)

This article sets out to think through the double absence of literary language posited by Blanchot in L’Espace littéraire in the shadow cast by a consideration of Alvin Lucier’s piece I am sitting in a room and the sound installation practice of Bernhard Leitner. What I wish to suggest is that a consideration of these sound works enables us to identify a parallelism in the mechanics of the literary sign that creates the space of literature in Blanchot and the phenomenological (...) experience of the visitor entering into and thereby enacting the space of installation. If the term “phenomenological” here requires a parenthetical qualifier, this is because the double absence enacted on the sign in Blanchot is deployed here from within the visitor in the creation of the space of installation in a move that requires us to reformulate our thinking about the creation of space of all kinds. In revisiting Blanchot’s L’Espace littéraire in this way, it is suggested that the ethical and... (shrink)

Fergus Daly and Garin Dowd _Leos Carax_ Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2003 ISBN 0-7190-6315-9 188 pp.

_French Cinema in the 1990s: Continuity and Difference_ Edited by Phil Powrie Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999 ISBN 0-19-815958-7 286 pp.