Sound Recording Technology and American Literature
From the Phonograph to the Remix

This book investigates the sustained engagement between American literature and sound recording technologies during the twentieth century.

Jessica E. Teague (Author)

9781108840132, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 20 May 2021

280 pages
16 x 23.5 x 2 cm, 0.54 kg

Phonographs, tapes, stereo LPs, digital remix - how did these remarkable technologies impact American writing? This book explores how twentieth-century writers shaped the ways we listen in our multimedia present. Uncovering a rich new archive of materials, this book offers a resonant reading of how writers across several genres, such as John Dos Passos, Langston Hughes, William S. Burroughs, and others, navigated the intermedial spaces between texts and recordings. Numerous scholars have taken up remix - a term co-opted from DJs and sound engineers - as the defining aesthetic of twenty-first century art and literature. Others have examined modernism's debt to the phonograph. But in the gap between these moments, one finds that the reciprocal relationship between the literary arts and sonic technologies continued to evolve over the twentieth century. A mix of American literary history, sound studies, and media archaeology, this interdisciplinary study will appeal to scholars, students, and audiophiles.

Introduction: Resonant Reading: Listening to American Literature After the Phonograph
1. Ears Taut to Hear: John Dos Passos Records America
2. Ethnographic Transcription and the Jazz Auto/Biography: Alan Lomax, Jelly Roll Morton, Zora Neale Hurston, and Sidney Bechet
3. Press Play: Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and the Tape Recorder
4. The Stereophonic Poetics of Langston Hughes and Amiri Baraka
5. From Cut-Up to Mashup: Literary Remix in the Digital Age, feat. Kevin Young, and Chuck Palahniuk
A Post-Electric Postscript: Recording and Remix Onstage.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: general [DSB], Literature: history & criticism [DS], Literature & literary studies [D], Music [AV], The arts [A]