When Machines Fail: Sonic Malfunction and Modernist Listening in Joyce and Woolf

This article studies the role of broken sound technologies such as the gramophone, megaphone, and piano in forming the aesthetic logic of James Joyce's Ulysses (1922) and Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts (1941). My reading puts these devices in dialogue with the cultural history of early twentieth-century listening practices and argues that both authors develop what I call a ‘poetics of malfunction’ in which mechanical glitches become sources for formal play and meaning-making. I draw on key concepts such as audile technique and schizophonia from the field of sound studies to show how Joyce and Woolf reconfigure technological failure not as disruption but a generative narrative condition. These moments in the novels, I suggest, reflect a broader modernist investment in the dynamics of error and an improvisatory, situated model for listening.