Thesis (Ph.D.). / Title from title page of PDF (viewed 2008/01/30). Written for the Dept. of English. Includes bibliographical references.

"Ears Taut to Hear" investigates the sustained engagement between American literature and sound reproduction technologies during the twentieth century. Through an analysis of texts by Gertrude Stein, John Dos Passos, Alan Lomax, Sidney Bechet, Langston Hughes, Amiri Baraka, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and August Wilson, I explore how literature across a number of genres and modes extended formal techniques in response to the advent of the phonograph, tape, and LPs. I contend that the development of sound recording technology not only shaped many of the formal innovations that we now associate with modernism, but that it compelled writers to theorize sound. For instance, Gertrude Stein's broken-record repetitions in "Melanctha" (1909) illustrate new ways of thinking about listening and repetition in the era of the "talking machine," while Langston Hughes' "LP Book," Ask Your Mama: 12 Moods for Jazz (1961), conceptualizes the relationship between stereo recording and the spatial dimensions of sound. Tracing the shifting role of sound over the century, each chapter features a pairing of literary texts alongside key historical events in the development of sound technology and the recording industry, including the invention of the phonograph (Stein and DosPassos), ethnographic uses of recording (Lomax and Bechet), subversive uses of the tape-recorder (Kerouac and Burroughs), and the advent of long-play albums and stereo (Hughes and Baraka). The final chapter reflects upon August Wilson's Ma Rainey's Black Bottom and encapsulates the ongoing tension between live and recorded performance. Ultimately, I contend that while literary innovations were shaped by phonographic technologies, texts also played a key role in tutoring the ear to listen amidst a modern multimedia environment.

This dissertation aims to study the variety of sounds described in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and to identify an aesthetic of noise in the poem, a soundscape which contributes to the work’s thematic undertones. The two entities which shape an understanding of the poem’s conception of noise are Chaos, the conglomerate of mobile, conflicting elements with which the poem begins, and the personified Fama, whose domus is seen to contain a chaotic cosmos of words rather than elements. Within the loose frame provided by Chaos and Fama, the varied categories of noise in the Metamorphoses’ world, from nature sounds to speech, are seen to share qualities of changeability, mobility, and conflict, qualities which align them with the overall themes of flux and metamorphosis in the poem. I discuss three categories of Ovidian sound: in the first chapter, cosmological and elemental sound; in the second chapter, nature noises with an emphasis on the vocality of reeds and the role of echoes; and in the third chapter I treat human and divine speech and narrative, and the role of rumor. By the end of the poem, Ovid leaves us with a chaos of words as well as of forms, which bears important implications for his treatment of contemporary Augustanism as well as his belief in his own poetic fame.

The modern soundscape buzzes with noise. In the 1930s, telephones, radios, and gramophones filled domestic spaces with technological noise, while crowds shouting in the streets created political clamour. During the war in the 1940s, bombs and sirens broke through buildings and burst through consciousness. This dissertation examines the response of three British modernist writers to the cultural shifts brought about by technology and politics, which altered everyday experience and social relations. Elizabeth Bowen, Evelyn Waugh, and George Orwell represent noise in their fiction and nonfiction as a trope of power. Noise, as a palpable emblem of discontent and the acoustic unconsciousness of the period, infiltrates sentences and rearranges syntax, as in the invention of Newspeak in Nineteen Eight-Four. Noise cannot leave listeners in a neutral position. The "culture racket" of the 1930s and 1940s required urgent new ways of listening and listening with ethical intent. / Chapter One provides a reading of Elizabeth Bowen's audible terrains in her novels of the 1930s, where silences and sudden noises intrude on human lives. In Bowen's novels, technological noise has both comedic and tragic consequences. Chapter Two examines noise as a political signifier in The Heat of the Day, Bowen's novel of the blitz. Chapter Three takes up the significance of the culture racket to Evelyn Waugh's novels and travel writing of the 1930s; noise assumes a disruptive, if highly comedic, value in his works, an ambiguity that expresses what it means to be modern. Chapter Four examines Waugh's penchant for satirizing the phoneyness of contemporary culture---its political vacillations---especially in Put Out More Flags, set during the Second World War. Chapter Five considers Orwell's engagement with the emerging social and political formations amongst working, racial, and warring classes in the 1930s. Documenting noise in his reportage, Orwell sounds alarms to alert readers to the mounting social and political crises in his realist novels of the decade. Chapter Six argues that Orwell's final two novels of the 1940s, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, represent the politics of noise in as much as they announce the noise of politics in totalitarian futures. Noise demarcates the insidiousness of propaganda as it screeches from telescreens, the keynote in Big Brother's ideological symphony of domination. Noise, throughout Orwell's writing, signifies the struggle for power. In its widest ramifications, noise provides an interpretive paradigm through which to read Bowen's, Waugh's, and Orwell's fiction and non-fiction, as well as modernist texts generally.

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Through careful analysis of sound in Walden with some attention to related works, this study demonstrates the three major facets of Thoreau's use of sound: first, an unusual aural sensitivity illustrated by his many varied sound images, which add concreteness and experiential immediacy; next, the depth of meaning that sound has as his metaphysical symbol in perception and expression of spiritual truth; finally, his effectiveness with such auditory devices as rhythm, alliteration, assonance, and onomatopoeia to achieve a poetic quality-. Of equal importance to Thoreau are the sounds of his writing and the sounds in his writing. Realizing the reality, depth, and texture Thoreau gives his prose through his remarkable treatment of sound increases one's appreciation of Walden as art and of Thoreau as literary artist.

The cultural and historical construction of African American identity in the United States has been closely tied to the dialectical relationship formed between sound and silence. This thesis examines the modernist and postmodernist representation of sound and silence in the African American novels Passing (1929), by Nella Larsen, and Jazz (1992), by Toni Morrison, as indicators of African American identity and racial oppression during the Harlem Renaissance. I analyze the soundscapes of both texts to expose the mobility of language, power, and space, especially as these soundscapes relate to the production of sound (both musical and non-musical) by African Americans, and the surveillance of these sounds by white audiences. Through my analysis of repetitive sound-images and embodied silence in Passing and Jazz, as well as textual representations of oral performance, I argue that there is harm in restricting African American voices to approved modes of audibility and/or limiting African American voices to one a singular narrative. This thesis introduces critics and theories from the disciplines of sound studies and African American studies, and applies the widely known theory of double consciousness, established by critic and author W.E.B. Du Bois, as the foundation for my literary and cultural analysis of sound in print. / Graduation date: 2013