Sound and Desire: Queer Acoustics in Giovanni's Room and Goodbye to Berlin

This thesis attends to the literary soundscape in the novel as an underexplored site for thinking queer desire. Using two modernist texts, James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room (1956) and Christopher Isherwood's Goodbye to Berlin (1939), it argues that everyday sound is more than an aftereffect of desire; it is one of its conditions of production. Through a comparative analysis of these texts, this thesis names the processes through which normative acoustics discipline queer desire and excavates instances of what Brandon LaBelle terms queer acoustics—alternative modes of sounding and listening that unsettle normative structures and produce contingent time and space for queer living. In doing so, this project addresses the noticeable absence of queer perspectives within sound studies while extending queer studies' engagement with the sonic. The thesis also proposes a digital component designed to deepen scholarly engagement with the literary works under consideration, while inviting broader audiences to experience, interpret, and respond to the sonic dimensions of literature in a shared, digital space.