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"A thrilling journey to the edges of the mind--and into the heart and soul of language and literature. Guiding us through famous poems and forgotten treatises with equal ease, Yamaguchi unfolds a powerful new picture of how words work."--
Shane Butler, Johns Hopkins University
"Liesl Yamaguchi's beautifully written and carefully argued book investigates the role played by vowel color in nineteenth and early twentieth century theories about language, from Indo-European linguistics, to French Symbolist poetics, to the science of acoustics. The idea that the notion of vowel color is crucial for the development of free verse as a modern poetic category is explosive and exciting. With clarity and precision, Yamaguchi zeroes in on one of the most stubbornly nebulous categories in the linguistic and poetic tradition."--
Sarah Pourciau, Duke University
Treatments of synesthesia in the arts and humanities generally assume an inviolable distinction between the neurological condition and the literary device. A synesthete's description of seeing a color in connection with a vowel, for example, is understood to be categorically distinct from common expressions that require transposition across sensory dimensions ("bright vowels").
On the Colors of Vowels challenges this assumption by tracing the historical interests that drove its emergence in the twentieth century and investigating the ambiguity of visual vocalic description in the nineteenth. The book's five chapters expose the centrality of colored conceptions of vowels to discourses in physical acoustics, poetics, phonetics, phonology, and opera, casting major works by Hermann von Helmholtz, Stéphane Mallarmé, Roman Jakobson, Richard Wagner, and Ferdinand de Saussure in a whole new light.
Bringing out the diverse ways in which visual conceptions of vowels have inflected the arts and sciences of modernity,
On the Colors of Vowels makes it possible to see how discourses of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries crafted the enigma we now readily recognize as "synesthesia."
Liesl Yamaguchi is Assistant Professor of French at the University of California, Berkeley.
List of contents
Introduction: After "Voyelles" | 1
1 Klangfarbe: Vowels in Helmholtz's Sensations of Tone | 21
2 The Interaction of Color | 49
3 Mallarmé and the Tension of Timbre | 65
4 The Colors of the Universal Alphabet | 84
5 L'être imaginaire: Saussure's Colored Vowels | 103
Conclusion: Remarks on "Synesthesia" | 121
Acknowledgments | 141
Notes | 143
Works Cited | 185
Index | 203
About the author
Liesl Yamaguchi is Assistant Professor of French at the University of California, Berkeley.
Summary
On the Colors of Vowels investigates the nineteenth-century emergence of discourses attributing visual properties (color, brightness) to vowels in linguistics, poetics, acoustics, opera, and experimental psychology.
