Author(s)

Jingxuan Liu ¹

Affiliation(s)

¹ Hunan Institute of Engineering, Xiangtan, 411100, Hunan, China

Corresponding Author

Jingxuan Liu

ABSTRACT

This article examines T. S. Eliot's dramatic works, focusing on Murder in the Cathedral and The Cocktail Party, through the lens of auditory narratology and cultural politics. It proposes a three-tiered model of Eliot's stage soundscape: sacred, secular, and disruptive, to analyze how sound functions as a narrative and ideological mechanism. The study argues that sacred sounds, Latin liturgical chant sung by an unseen choir and the ritualized utterance of the chorus, construct ecclesiastical authority through ritualized repetition; secular sounds, including telephone rings, doorbells, and the gramophone, embed modern technological and consumer logic into religious narratives; while disruptive sounds, such as the knights' sudden prose addresses and the vernacular cry of the Women of Canterbury, expose subjective anxiety and the fissures of power. By integrating close reading with cross-media comparison, this article demonstrates that Eliot employs auditory narrative as a sophisticated apparatus for the imaginative restoration of mid-twentieth-century British religious and cultural crisis, while also anticipating the complex turns of "sound politics" in postcolonial contexts.

KEYWORDS

T. S. Eliot; audionarratology; soundscape; modernist drama; cultural politics

CITE THIS PAPER

Jingxuan Liu. "Hearing" the Stage: The Auditory Narrative Mechanism and Cultural Politics in T. S. Eliot's Drama. Art and Performance Letters (2026). Vol. 7, No.1, 129-135. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.23977/artpl.2026.070120.

REFERENCES

[1] Eliot, T. S. (1935). Murder in the Cathedral. Faber and Faber.
[2] Mildorf, J., & Kinzel, T. (Eds.). (2016). Audionarratology: Interfaces of Sound and Narrative. De Gruyter.
[3] Bourdieu, P. (1991). Language and Symbolic Power (G. Raymond & M. Adamson, Trans.). Polity Press.
[4] Eliot, T. S. (1950). The Cocktail Party. Faber and Faber.
[5] Schafer, R. M. (1994). The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World. Destiny Books.
[6] Fu, X. (2021). A Study of Auditory Narratology. Peking University Press. (In Chinese)
[7] Foucault, M. (2007). Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–78 (G. Burchell, Trans.). Palgrave Macmillan.
[8] Barthes, R. (1972). Mythologies (A. Lavers, Trans.). Hill and Wang.
[9] Derrida, J. (1976). Of Grammatology (G. C. Spivak, Trans.). Johns Hopkins University Press.
[10] Adorno, T. W. (2002). Aesthetic Theory (R. Hullot-Kentor, Trans.). Continuum.
[11] British Theatre. (2015). Review: The Cocktail Party, Print Room at the Coronet. BritishTheatre.com. https://www.britishtheatre.com/posts/review-the-cocktail-party-print-room-at-the-coronet-4stars (accessed 22 July 2026)

Sponsors, Associates, and Links

---

• Journal of Language Testing & Assessment
  
  
• Information and Knowledge Management
  
  
• Military and Armament Science
  
  
• Media and Communication Research
  
  
• Journal of Human Movement Science
  
  
• Lecture Notes on History
  
  
• Lecture Notes on Language and Literature
  
  
• Philosophy Journal
  
  
• Science of Law Journal
  
  
• Journal of Political Science Research
  
  
• Journal of Sociology and Ethnology
  
  
• Advances in Broadcasting