listening to repeating

With these two posts (here & here) as precedents, I’ve drafted a version of my final exam list, “Sound, Sound Technologies, and Sonic Modernity.” This is my “focus” or “problem” area, which emerges from modernism and technoculture. As with the modernism list, the primary sources here are Anglo-American, so you will not see any Marinetti, Ball, Russolo, Khlebnikov, or the like.

This one still needs some work. My intent is to rethink or augment approaches to modernism that favor visual paradigms. (See Douglas Kahn, Martin Jay and Alexander Weheliye here for more.) In so doing, I also want to consider how sound technologies in the early to mid-20th century impacted the production of literature, including its performance (e.g., Stein), construction (e.g., Burroughs), circulation (e.g., Pound) and thematics/tropes (e.g., Woolf). Too, there’s obviously the issue of “the modern subject” and how that subject might be conceived of differently through a sonic (as opposed to visual) analytic (e.g., Ellison). In my rationale, I’m going to be thinking through these issues more thoroughly, with some more questions in mind.

(Once again, apologies for the format slop. And “*” implies that the text appears on another list, too.)

Suggestions and comments invited! I’m still compiling!

Primary Sources
Baldwin, James. Go Tell It on the Mountain. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1953.

Barnes, Djuna. “The Perfect Murder.” Collected Stories. Ed. Phillip Herring. Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1996. 436-445.

Beckett, Samuel. Krapp’s Last Tape and Other Dramatic Pieces. New York: Grove Press, 1960.
Selections:

All That Fall (1956)
Krapp’s Last Tape (1958)
Embers (1959)

—. Krapp’s Last Tape. Perf. Donald Davis. Dir. Alan Schenider. Spoken Arts (ST 788), 1961.

Bosanquet, Theodora. Henry James at Work. 1924. Ed. Lyall Powers. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006.

Burroughs, William S. The Naked Lunch. 1959. London: Corgi, 1976.

—. The Ticket That Exploded. New York: Grove Press, 1967.

—. Break Through in Grey Room. Brussels, Belgium: Sub Rosa, 1993.

Cage, John. Silence. Middletown, Conn: Wesleyan U P, 1961.

—. “Excerpt from Silence.” The Dial-A-Poem Poets: Disconnected. Giorno Poetry Systems (GPS-003), 1974.

—. “Writing for the Second Time Through Finnegans Wake.” The Nova Convention. Giorno Poetry Systems (GPS 014-015), 1979.

Conrad, Joseph. The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale. 1907. Ed. Roger Tennant. Oxford: Oxford U P, 1998.

Doolittle, Hilda. Reading of “Helen in Egypt.” PENNsound. University of Pennsylvania. 17 August 2007. <http://www.writing.upenn.edu/pensound/x/HD.html>.

*DuBois, W.E.B. Souls of Black Folk. 1903. New York: Penguin, 1996.

Duchamp, Marcel. The Writings of Marcel Duchamp. Ed. Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson. New York: Da Capo Press, 1973.

—. Music of Marcel Duchamp. Edition Block + Paula Cooper Gallery, 1991

Edison, Thomas A. The Papers of Thomas A. Edison: From Workshop to Laboratory, June 1873-March 1876, Volume 2. Ed. Robert A. Rosenberg et al. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins U P, 1989.

Eliot, T. S. Sweeney Agonistes; Fragments of an Aristophanic Melodrama. London: Faber & Faber, 1932.

*Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man. 1952. New York: Random House, 1980.

—. “Living with Music.” Shadow and Act. New York: Random House, 1972. 187-198.

Ginsberg, Allen. “Howl.” 1956. Howl, and Other Poems. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1996. 9-26.

Hopkins, Pauline E. Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South. 1900. New York: Oxford U P, 1988.

*Hurston, Zora Neale. Their Eyes Were Watching God. 1937. New York: Perennial Library, 1990.

*Joyce, James. Finnegans Wake. 1939. New York: Penguin, 1999.

Lee, Gerald Stanley. The Voice of the Machines: An Introduction to the Twentieth Century. 1906. New York: Dodo Press, 2007.

Lewis, Wyndham. Blasting & Bombardiering. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1937.

*Lewis, Wyndham, et al. BLAST 1. 20 June 1914. Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1981.

McLuhan, Marshall. The Medium is the Massage. Columbia Records, 1967.

Olson, Charles. “Projective Verse.” 1950. Collected Prose. Ed. Donald Allen and Benjamin Friedlander. Berkeley: U of California P, 1997. 239-249.

Pound, Ezra. “Ezra Pound Speaking”: Radio Speeches of World War II. Ed. Leonard William Doob. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1978.

—. Collected Poetry Recordings. Ed. Richard Sieburth. PENNsound. University of Pennsylvania. 17 August 2007. <http://www.writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Pound.html>.

Stein, Gertrude. Reading of “A Valentine to Sherwood Anderson.” 1922, 1934-35. UBUWEB. 17 August 2007. <http://www.ubu.com/sound/stein.html>.

—. Reading of “If I Told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso.” 1923. UBUWEB. 17 August 2007. <http://www.ubu.com/sound/stein.html>.

Stevens, Wallace. “The Auroras of Autumn.” 1948. The Palm at the End of the Mind: Selected Poems and a Play. Ed. Holly Stevens. New York: Random House, 1990. 307-316.

Strauss, Neil, and Dave Mandl, eds. Radiotext(e). New York, NY, USA: Semiotext(e), 1993.

*Toomer, Jean. Cane. Ed. Darwin T. Turner. New York: Norton, 1988.

Varèse, Edgard, et al. Ionisation; Ameriques; Density 21.5; Offrandes; Arcana; Octandre; Integrales. Sony Classical, 1977.

Varèse, Louise. Varèse: A Looking-Glass Diary. New York: Norton, 1972.

Vidor, King, et al. Hallelujah. 1929. [United States]: Turner Entertainment, 2006.

Williams, William Carlos. Collection of Readings and Sound Recordings. Ed. Richard Swigg. PENNsound. University of Pennsylvania. 17 August 2007. <http://www.writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Williams-WC.html>.

Woolf, Virginia. The Waves. 1931. New York: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1959.

—. The Years. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co, 1937.

—. “The Cinema.” The Captain’s Death Bed and Other Essays. London: Hogarth Press, 1950. 166-171.

Secondary Sources

Adorno, Theodor W. Essays on Music. Ed. Richard Leppert. Trans. Susan H. Gillespie. Berkeley: U of California P, 2002.
Selections:
“On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening” (1938)
“The Radio Symphony” (1941)
“On Popular Music” (1941)
“Music, Language, and Composition” (1956)

Armstrong, Tim. “Player Piano: Poetry and Sonic Modernity.” Modernism/Modernity 14.1 (2007): 1-19.

—. Modernism, Technology, and the Body. Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 2004.

Attali, Jacques. Noise: The Political Economy of Music. Theory and history of literature, v. 16. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985.

Barthes, Roland. The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1985.
Selections:
“Musica Practica” (1970)
“The Grain of the Voice” (1972)
“Music, Voice, Language” (1977)

Bergson, Henri. Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic. 1911. Trans. Cloudesley Shovell Henry Brereton and Fred Rothwell. New York: Macmillan, 2004.

Brooks, William. “Music: Sound: Technology.” The Cambridge Companion to Modern American Culture. Ed. C. W. E. Bigsby. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 332-353.

Bull, Michael, and Les Back, eds. The Auditory Culture Reader. Sensory Formations Series. Oxford, UK: Berg, 2003.

Chion, Michel. Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen. New York: Columbia U P, 1994.

Danius, Sarah. The Senses of Modernism: Technology, Perception, and Aesthetics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell U P, 2002.

Davis, Hugh. “A History of Recorded Sound.” Poésie Sonore Internationale. Ed. Henri Chopin. Paris: Jean-Michel Place Editeur, 1979. 13-40.

Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. 1968. Trans. Paul Patton. New York: Columbia U P, 1994.

—. The Logic of Sense. 1969. Trans. Mark Lester. Ed. Constantin V. Boundas. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990.

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattarri. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987.

Derrida, Jacques. From Speech and Phenomena. A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds. Ed. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Columbia U P, 1991. 6-30.

Eshun, Kodwo. More Brilliant Than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction. London: Quartet Books, 1998.

Gates, Henry Louis. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. London: Verso, 1993.

*Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999.

Hebdige, Dick. Subculture, the Meaning of Style. London: Methuen, 1979.

Jay, Martin. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

Kahn, Douglas. Noise, Water, Meat A History of Sound in the Arts. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999.

Kahn, Douglas, and Gregory Whitehead, eds. Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant-Garde. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1992.

Kern, Stephen. The Culture of Time and Space 1880-1918. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1983.

Kittler, Friedrich A. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Writing Science). Trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wautz. Stanford, CA: Stanford U P, 1999.

—. Discourse Networks, 1800/1900. Trans. Michael Metteer and Chris Cullens. Stanford, CA: Stanford U P, 1991.

Kleinberg-Levin, David Michael, ed. Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision. Berkeley: U of California P, 1993.

Lyotard, Jean-Francois. “Logos and Techne, or Telegraphy.” The Inhuman: Reflections on Time. 1988. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby. Stanford, CA: Stanford U P, 1991. 47-57

Marvin, Carolyn. When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking About Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham: Duke U P, 2002.

Miller, Paul D (DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid). Rhythm Science. Cambridge, MA: Mediawork/MIT Press, 2004.

Morris, Adalaide Kirby. Sound States: Innovative Poetics and Acoustical Technologies. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1997.

Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. The Gay Science. Trans. Walter Kaufmann. New York Vintage, 1974.

Sterne, Jonathan. The Audible Past. Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction. Durham: Duke U P, 2003

Stewart, Garrett. Reading Voices: Literature and the Phonotext. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.

Stubbs, K. “Telegraphy’s Corporeal Fictions.” New Media 1740-1915. Eds. L. Gitelman and G.B. Pingree. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003.

Thompson, Emily Ann. The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900-1933. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2002.

Tichi, Cecelia. Shifting Gears: Technology, Literature, Culture in Modernist America. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1987.

Tiffany, Daniel Newton. Radio Corpse: Imagism and the Cryptaesthetic of Ezra Pound. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1995.

—. Toy Medium: Materialism and Modern Lyric. Berkeley: U of California P, 2000.

Weheliye, Alexander G. Phonographies: Grooves in Sonic Afro-Modernity. Durham: Duke U P, 2005.