"Towards new understandings of silence"
James G. R. Cronin, History of Art and Centre for Adult and Continuing Education, University College Cork.
Presentation Introduction:
Contemporary studies on silence are richly multi-disciplinary in nature. Studies on different types of silence include visual and spatial silence, as well as the relationships between silence, noise and sound. The value of recent scholarship has been to demonstrate how closely bound up silence is with other forms of communication -- oral, written, visual and musical. Silence can make listening and viewing more sensitive and in this sense silence is not an absence, but rather a powerful presence. The most beneficial studies on silence are those that have taken a phenomenological approach. This session will explore a phenomenological case study. “Fruit of Silence”, a reflective case study by Marilyn Nelson (2006), considers the role of silence/meditation, what she terms as “contemplative pedagogy”, as a learning tool in teaching a literature class to cadets being trained at West Point followed by cadet responses to silence during their military service in Iraq during the Second Gulf War (2003--). Through letters, two former West Point cadets, who subsequently became Black Hawk helicopter pilots, communicate how they used silence as a tool to centre themselves in times of anxiety while on campaign in a theatre of war. The session will project this study’s focus to survey recent multi-disciplinary approaches to silence with the purpose of asking: are new ontologies of silence emerging?
