Title: Soundscape Writing in Toni Morrison’s Paradise

Abstract: As the concluding work of Toni Morrison’s “trilogy on the African American experience,” Paradise presents the historical memory and spiritual trauma of African Americans through rich auditory narratives. While existing scholarship has largely focused on spatial politics and female communities in the novel, the soundscape and its narrative functions remain underexplored. Drawing on R. Murray Schafer’s soundscape theory and Cathy Caruth’s trauma theory, this article examines the soundscape writing in the novel and explores the multifaceted manifestations of trauma on the auditory level through three dimensions: negative soundscape, silence soundscape, and healing soundscape. This approach to trauma writing mediated through soundscapes provides a new angle for understanding Morrison’s traumatic narratives. In particular, the novel’s depiction of African American women’s quest for identity reconstruction through sound represents a noteworthy direction in contemporary trauma narrative.

Keywords: Toni Morrison, Paradise, soundscape, trauma, auditory narrative

Author: Yizhen Hong, Ph.D. Candidate, College of Foreign Languages and Literature, Fudan University, Shanghai, China.

DOI: 10.19967/j.cnki.flc.2026.02.010