"In this breathtaking study Michael Gaudio invites us to listen to visual media that seem couched in silence or in deceptive tranquility. He studies the graphic character of speech and dance in copperplate engravings of Jean de LÉrys encounter with the New World; soundscapes of seventeenth-century paintings depicting Dutch holdings in Brazil; Enlightenment art depicting thunder and lightning; the voice of nature in American painting of the early 1800s; the sound of music in very early cinema. Of broad scope, written with uncommon force and elegance, Sound, Image, Silence inspires by virtue of a unique aural vision. It changes the direction of our appreciation of the visual arts."-Tom Conley, Harvard University
"Sound, Image, Silence is a study of how art making is a dance among sensorial pathways and human encounter. Michael Gaudio searches for interstitial meanings between many kinds of binaries in our cultures and histories-between what is heard and not heard, mimesis and invention, assimilation and otherness. What results is an enthralling, crackling, heady journey into heretofore silent territories of artistic imagination."-Asma Naeem, Eddie C. and C. Sylvia Brown Chief Curator, The Baltimore Museum of Art
"One of the many merits of Gaudios bracing book is how it avoids positing sound as synonymous with speech, as a mere metaphor for how certain pictures mean. Thus Sound, Image, Silence, in a refreshing way, moves us away from the enduring Derridian preference for diffÉrence as something written rather than heard."-CAA Reviews
"With both eyes and ears in sound studies, Michael Gaudios clairaudience brilliantly achieves, in Sound, Image, Silence, to tune in to that uncertain Atlantic passage, turning it on into a captivating journey between sight and sound."-Visual Studies
"Generous in its approachability and well-suited for the early American studies classroom."-Early American Literature
