""The Ear Besieged"": War and the Transformations of Sense-Perception in Modern Literature. Weiner's Crazy Silence
Abstract
The paper focuses on R. Weiner's 1916 short story collection Lítice / Furies which captures his direct experience from the Serbian front.
I present a reading of the story Crazy Silence from the broader perspective of the aesthetics of war and the related issues of perception and representation, language and imagination, pursued from the viewpoint of the ""way of interiority"", i.e. the processes of metaphorical and allegorical transmutation of the war events, as well as from the viewpoint of the history and economy of sense-perception, as Weiner's prose reflects the changes incurred by the impact of the military apparatus. This war-time ""mobilization of hearing"", as reflected in literature, is then situated within the broader context of transformations of sense-perception accompanying the processes of modernization.