"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.

Not long after the invention of sound recording technology, two phrases arose to describe a host of relationships to this new era of sound: high fidelity and low fidelity. The idea of fidelity when applied to sound was used to describe the accuracy of reproduction – how much did a sound reproduced by phonograph technology sound like the original? While the idea of fidelity continues to serve the function as a way to measure the quality of sound recording, through technical measurements of frequency response, signal-to-noise ratios, and the ability to reproduce extremes of quietude and loudness, fidelity also functions in ideologies of listening. High fidelity ideology, in its never-ending quest for perfect fidelity, insists upon hearing musical records as realistic recordings of original events, obscuring how the majority of musical recordings are assembled in the studio by an unheard engineer. Beyond music, high fidelity ideology insists that sounds can and, indeed, must be heard in certain ways. Low fidelity represents that which is left in high fidelity’s wake: outdated technology, poor sound quality, and the obvious intrusion of the process of recording into the media. What develops is a low fidelity mode of listening that does not listen for the perfect reproduction of an originary event or an imagined ideal. This project examines how experimental Black authors from the 1960s to the 1990s engaged with low fidelity sound recording technology in prose and poetry. The authors and works examined include: Amiri Baraka’s The Dead Lecturer (1964) and The System of Dante’s Hell (1965); Fran Ross’s Oreo (1974); Nathaniel Mackey’s Bedouin Hornbook (1986); and Erna Brodber’s Louisiana (1994). The chapters examine how these authors look to sound technologies such as monophonic LPs, tape editing decks in recording studios, cassettes, and early reel-to-reel tape recorders as a grounding for the experimental forms of the texts and their approach to creating literary voice. I conclude that by approaching these texts by close reading through the history of the media presented in each chapter that we can develop a form of low fidelity reading that offers a new approach to the interstices between sound and text.