Who Speaks?: Narrative Acoustics and Imperial Listening from the Modernist Novel to GenAI

What does it mean to listen, and where does a voice actually take place? This lecture overviews the concept of “narrative acoustics” to argue that reading, like listening, is not a simple transmission of a message from sender to receiver, but a complex, relational traversal across physical, psychic, and historical space. The talk anchors this framework in Joseph Conrad’s modernist masterpiece Almayer’s Folly, focusing on its famously disruptive opening shout: “Kaspar! Makan!”. Issued by a subaltern woman whose original name is violently erased from the text, this untranslated command exposes the workings of colonialism and imperialism within modernist narrative acoustics. Through free indirect discourse and techniques of “selecting” and “deselecting” sounds for representation, Conrad’s novel operates as a sound technology, but one whose formal boundaries are fundamentally structured by histories of extractive violence. The talk speculatively tests these acoustic questions of empire against the contemporary digital threshold of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), specifically examining the phenomenology of “Advanced Voice Mode” and conversational algorithms. While AI developers design these tools to simulate the warmth and immediacy of human dialogue — not unlike the novel and early cinema once did — GenAI conversation asks us to keep company with datasets build from our own media traces. They cannot replicate the intersubjective nature of listening. But can the novel? Is it merely a precursor to newer modes of vocal simulation or a different technology altogether? As the talk aims to show, traditional literary critiques of voice and citation are more urgent now than ever, offering a vocabulary with which to resist digital extraction and reclaim an embodied, historically grounded practice of listening.

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Julie Beth Napolin is associate professor of digital humanities at The New School. Her first book, The Fact of Resonance: Modernist Acoustics and Narrative Form (Fordham UP, 2020) was shortlisted for the Memory Studies Association First Book Award. She has been a postdoctoral fellow at the Price Lab for Digital Humanities and is currently co-editor of The Faulkner Journal and an External Faculty Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center. She is also a radio producer and practicing musician.

At Princeton, Napolin will be a Media & Meaning Short-Term Visiting Fellow in the Princeton Humanities Initiative and the Department of English in fall 2026.

Napolin’s 2026-27 project, “Stay with Me: Conversation Before and After AI,” asks how the ways humans talk, listen, and keep company with one another are being reshaped in the era of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI). Conversation is a process of resonance, memory, and shared presence that creates a “third space” between people, something that lingers long after the dialogue ends. This book examines what happens to that space when machines begin to simulate listening and speech. Cultural critics of GenAI are familiar with its deleterious effects on climate, labor, and education, as well as the philosophical question of its intelligence. But with the advent of ChatGPT Advanced Voice Mode, popular accounts increasingly describe users turning to GenAI for companionship, spiritual counsel, and love. What is missing from these reports is the historical sense that we have long turned to media objects for company, while they also lack a theoretical definition of conversation to ground its claims about what can or cannot be simulated by GenAI. Centering dialogue as a resonant, co-created space, “Stay with Me” traces how literature, film, and performance have modeled presence, memory, and listening as forms both anticipating and resisting GenAI. They reveal the role of memory and grief in sustaining both conversation and the enduring human desire to be heard.

Napolin’s first book, The Fact of Resonance (Fordham 2020), returns to the colonial and technological contexts in which anglophone and francophone narrative and novel theory developed, seeking in “resonance” an alternative premise for theorizing modernist narrative form. It follows transformations in narrative acoustics through the resonances between the work of Joseph Conrad, Frantz Fanon, Sigmund Freud, W.E.B. Du Bois, William Faulkner, and Chantal Akerman.