Writing, Sound, and Modernity

Around the turn of the nineteenth century, basic assumptions about modes of language and communication shifted drastically, as new technologies like the gramophone challenged the conventional association of writing with permanence and orality with ephemerality. Moreover, because of the new ability not only to preserve speech and song on recordings, but to project them to mass audiences, oral communication no longer took place only in the immediate physical presence of a speaker. This seminar examines the ramifications of these transformations as they were registered and revised in the American literature of this era. In other words, we will construct a historical and cultural perspective from which to understand our continuing interest in and valorization of literature, as one among other forms of cultural expression and communication. Among the fundamental questions we will pursue: How did these historical developments shape our basic understanding of reading and literature? How did they shape our conception of whether reading is a process based in how words look, or how they sound? How did acts of speaking, recording and listening figure come to figure as models of authorial production in this context? How did the ability to record and reproduce sound transform broader assumptions about what “counts” as a piece of cultural expression? How did the visual and material quality of print change and diversify in relation to these developments? More broadly, the seminar will continually return to a few questions of an even more fundamental sort: in what ways does it make sense to think of writing and literature as technologies? Why would we want to? Do we have a choice?
Resisting the temptation to see technology as a simple determining force in cultural transformations, we will also look closely at recent cultural historians’ investigation of the ways that ideas about literature shaped the development, design, and representation of technologies like the gramophone, phonograph, and telephone. In order to fortify this dialectical conception of the relationship between technology and culture, our study of both secondary and primary sources will trace the ways that literature, and writing more generally, offered conceptual and material models for these devices of sound reproduction, a phenomenon most obviously apparent in the etymology of the word phonograph.
In pursuing this dialectical approach, we will study the period’s tremendous boom in “dialect literature,” a mode that attempted mimic, in print, the “real” sound of various regional and ethnic accents. We will examine this work, with its often bizarre spellings and diacritical markings, alongside aesthetically driven experiments in typography and design taking place in both mass-audience magazines and small coterie book publications. Additionally, we will listen to early recordings of poets reading their work alongside early recordings of folk and classical music, probing changes in the notion of “recording” as a form of long-term preservation toward the more contemporary understanding of the term as the production of a cultural commodity of value chiefly for its consumption in the present.
We will also examine how these issues manifested themselves in the period’s notions of individual psychology, and its understanding of processes such as attention and cognition. Moreover, a significant portion of the early meetings of the seminar will focus on the notion of “modernity,” and how various intellectuals from this period onward have used that term to mark this period as embodying elemental changes in assumptions about the individual and her agency in the world. Pursuant to this topic, we will pay particular attention to representations of the new scale of urban spaces, in an attempt to pinpoint their role in transformative concepts of sound, noise, writing, and communication more generally.
Because the issues of this class are so firmly based in the specific look, sound, and feel of this era’s cultural productions, students’ major written work in the seminar will be research-based. They will be asked to develop a research project, using original materials of the era, such as periodicals and first editions, before midterm. A significant portion of the later sessions of the class will be given over to the discussion, planning, and revision of these research projects.
Primary (literary) texts will be drawn from:
Cable, The Grandissimes
Cather, The Song of the Lark
Crane, The Black Riders and Other Lines; War is Kind.
Chopin, The Awakening
Dickinson, poems
DuBois, The Soul of Black Folk
DuMaurier, Trilby
Dunbar, selected poems
H. James, "In the Cage"
W. James, Principles of Psychology and essays on telepathy (selections)
Stein, The Making of Americans, and essays on writing.
Secondary texts (books will be selections):
Attali, Noise
Barthes, “The Grain of the Voice”
Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”
Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era
Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1920
Kittler, Film, Gramophone, Typewriter
Ong, Orality and Literacy
Peters, Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication
Radano, Lying Up a Nation: Race and Black Music
Schmidt, Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment
Schafer, The Soundscape
Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life”
Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction
Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900-1933
Course Requirements: Two short papers and one final research paper.
*Limited enrollment to 15

Pre-requisites: Two 200 level English courses or consent of instructor.