Sonic Modernity

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Author :
Publisher : Edinburgh University Press
ISBN 13 : 0748632565
Total Pages : 224 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (486 download)

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Book Synopsis Sonic Modernity by : Sam Halliday

Download or read book Sonic Modernity written by Sam Halliday and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2013-03-14 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reveals the many roles and forms of sound in modernism. Drawing on a wealth of texts and thinkers, the book shows the distinctive nature of sonic cultures in modernity. Arguing that these cultures are not reducible to sound alone, the book further shows that these encompass representations of sound in 'other' media: especially literature; but also, cinema and painting. Figures discussed include canonical writers such as Joyce, Richardson, and Woolf; relatively neglected writers such as Henry Roth and Bryher; and a whole host of musicians, artists, and other commentators, including Wagner, Schoenberg, Kandinsky, Adorno, and Benjamin. Conceptually as well as topically diverse, the book engages issues such as city noise and 'foreign' accents, representations of sound in 'silent' cinema, the relationship of music to language, and the effects of technology on sonic production and reception.

Phonographies

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Publisher : Duke University Press
ISBN 13 : 0822386933
Total Pages : 300 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (223 download)

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Book Synopsis Phonographies by : Alexander Ghedi Weheliye

Download or read book Phonographies written by Alexander Ghedi Weheliye and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2005-05-20 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Phonographies explores the numerous links and relays between twentieth-century black cultural production and sound technologies from the phonograph to the Walkman. Highlighting how black authors, filmmakers, and musicians have actively engaged with recorded sound in their work, Alexander G. Weheliye contends that the interplay between sound technologies and black music and speech enabled the emergence of modern black culture, of what he terms “sonic Afro-modernity.” He shows that by separating music and speech from their human sources, sound-recording technologies beginning with the phonograph generated new modes of thinking, being, and becoming. Black artists used these new possibilities to revamp key notions of modernity—among these, ideas of subjectivity, temporality, and community. Phonographies is a powerful argument that sound technologies are integral to black culture, which is, in turn, fundamental to Western modernity. Weheliye surveys literature, film, and music to focus on engagements with recorded sound. He offers substantial new readings of canonical texts by W. E. B. Du Bois and Ralph Ellison, establishing dialogues between these writers and popular music and film ranging from Louis Armstrong’s voice to DJ mixing techniques to Darnell Martin’s 1994 movie I Like It Like That. Looking at how questions of diasporic belonging are articulated in contemporary black musical practices, Weheliye analyzes three contemporary Afro-diasporic musical acts: the Haitian and African American rap group the Fugees, the Afro- and Italian-German rap collective Advanced Chemistry, and black British artist Tricky and his partner Martina. Phonographies imagines the African diaspora as a virtual sounding space, one that is marked, in the twentieth century and twenty-first, by the circulation of culture via technological reproductions—records and tapes, dubbing and mixing, and more.

Eardrums

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Publisher : Northwestern University Press
ISBN 13 : 0810140233
Total Pages : 312 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (11 download)

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Book Synopsis Eardrums by : Tyler Whitney

Download or read book Eardrums written by Tyler Whitney and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2019-06-15 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this innovative study, Tyler Whitney demonstrates how a transformation and militarization of the civilian soundscape in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries left indelible traces on the literature that defined the period. Both formally and thematically, the modernist aesthetics of Franz Kafka, Robert Musil, Detlev von Liliencron, and Peter Altenberg drew on this blurring of martial and civilian soundscapes in traumatic and performative repetitions of war. At the same time, Richard Huelsenbeck assaulted audiences in Zurich with his “sound poems,” which combined references to World War I, colonialism, and violent encounters in urban spaces with nonsensical utterances and linguistic detritus—all accompanied by the relentless beating of a drum on the stage of the Cabaret Voltaire. Eardrums is the first book-length study to explore the relationship between acoustical modernity and German modernism, charting a literary and cultural history written in and around the eardrum. The result is not only a new way of understanding the sonic impulses behind key literary texts from the period. It also outlines an entirely new approach to the study of literature as as the interaction of text and sonic practice, voice and noise, which will be of interest to scholars across literary studies, media theory, sound studies, and the history of science.

Modernity's Ear

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Publisher : NYU Press
ISBN 13 : 1479867012
Total Pages : 199 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (798 download)

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Book Synopsis Modernity's Ear by : Roshanak Kheshti

Download or read book Modernity's Ear written by Roshanak Kheshti and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2015-10-23 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inside the global music industry and the racialized and gendered assumptions we make about what we hear Fearing the rapid disappearance of indigenous cultures, twentieth-century American ethnographers turned to the phonograph to salvage native languages and musical practices. Prominent among these early “songcatchers” were white women of comfortable class standing, similar to the female consumers targeted by the music industry as the gramophone became increasingly present in bourgeois homes. Through these simultaneous movements, listening became constructed as a feminized practice, one that craved exotic sounds and mythologized the ‘other’ that made them. In Modernity’s Ear, Roshanak Kheshti examines the ways in which racialized and gendered sounds became fetishized and, in turn, capitalized on by an emergent American world music industry through the promotion of an economy of desire. Taking a mixed-methods approach that draws on anthropology and sound studies, Kheshti locates sound as both representative and constitutive of culture and power. Through analyses of film, photography, recordings, and radio, as well as ethnographic fieldwork at a San Francisco-based world music company, Kheshti politicizes the feminine in the contemporary world music industry. Deploying critical theory to read the fantasy of the feminized listener and feminized organ of the ear, Modernity’s Ear ultimately explores the importance of pleasure in constituting the listening self.

Composing for the Revolution

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Author :
Publisher : University of Hawaii Press
ISBN 13 : 0824885732
Total Pages : 297 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (248 download)

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Book Synopsis Composing for the Revolution by : Joshua H. Howard

Download or read book Composing for the Revolution written by Joshua H. Howard and published by University of Hawaii Press. This book was released on 2020-10-31 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Composing for the Revolution: Nie Er and China’s Sonic Nationalism, Joshua Howard explores the role the songwriter Nie Er played in the 1930s proletarian arts movement and the process by which he became a nationalist icon. Composed only months before his untimely death in 1935, Nie Er’s last song, the “March of the Volunteers,” captured the rising anti-Japanese sentiment and was selected as China’s national anthem with the establishment of the People’s Republic. Nie was quickly canonized after his death and later recast into the “People’s Musician” during the 1950s, effectively becoming a national monument. Howard engages two historical paradigms that have dominated the study of twentieth-century China: revolution and modernity. He argues that Nie Er, active in the leftist artistic community and critical of capitalism, availed himself of media technology, especially the emerging sound cinema, to create a modern, revolutionary, and nationalist music. This thesis stands as a powerful corrective to a growing literature on the construction of a Chinese modernity, which has privileged the mass consumer culture of Shanghai and consciously sought to displace the focus on China’s revolutionary experience. Composing for the Revolution also provides insight into understudied aspects of China’s nationalism—its sonic and musical dimensions. Howard’s analyses highlights Nie’s extensive writings on the political function of music, examination of the musical techniques and lyrics of compositions within the context of left-wing cinema, and also the transmission of his songs through film, social movements, and commemoration. Nie Er shared multiple and overlapping identities based on regionalism, nationalism, and left-wing internationalism. His march songs, inspired by Soviet “mass songs,” combined Western musical structure and aesthetic with elements of Chinese folk music. The songs’ ideological message promoted class nationalism, but his “March of the Volunteers” elevated his music to a universal status thereby transcending the nation. Traversing the life and legacy of Nie Er, Howard offers readers a profound insight into the meanings of nationalism and memory in contemporary China. Composing for the Revolution underscores the value of careful reading of sources and the author’s willingness to approach a subject from multiple perspectives.

Modernist Soundscapes

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Publisher : University Press of Florida
ISBN 13 : 0813052432
Total Pages : 205 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (13 download)

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Book Synopsis Modernist Soundscapes by : Angela Frattarola

Download or read book Modernist Soundscapes written by Angela Frattarola and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2018-11-12 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the turn of the twentieth century, new technologies such as the phonograph, telephone, and radio changed how sound was transmitted and perceived. In Modernist Soundscapes, Angela Frattarola analyzes the influence of “the age of noise” on writers of the time, showing how modernist novelists used sound to bridge the distance between characters and to connect with the reader on a more intimate level. Frattarola tunes in to representations of voices, noise, and music in works by Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Jean Rhys, and Samuel Beckett. She argues that the common use of headphones, which piped sounds from afar into a listener’s headspace, inspired modernists to record the interior monologues of their characters in a stream-of-consciousness style. Woolf’s onomatopoeia stemmed from a desire to render the sounds of the world without mediation, similar to how some contemporaries hoped that recording technology would eliminate the need for musicians. Frattarola also explains how Beckett’s linguistic repetition mirrors the mechanical reproduction of the tape recorder. These writers challenged ocularcentrism, the traditional emphasis on vision in art and philosophy, and instead characterized the eye as distancing and analytical and the act of listening as immediate and unifying. Contending that the experimentation typically associated with modernist writing is partly due to this new attentiveness to sound, this book introduces a fresh perspective on texts that set the course of contemporary literature.

Africa in Stereo

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Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0199936374
Total Pages : 289 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (999 download)

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Book Synopsis Africa in Stereo by : Tsitsi Ella Jaji

Download or read book Africa in Stereo written by Tsitsi Ella Jaji and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2014 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stereomodernism and amplifying the Black Atlantic -- Sight reading: early Black South African transcriptions of freedom -- Négritude musicology: poetry, performance and statecraft in Senegal -- What women want: selling hi-fi in consumer magazines and film -- 'Soul to soul': echo-locating histories of slavery and freedom from Ghana -- Pirate's choice: hacking into (post- )pan-African futures -- Epilogue: Singing songs.

Sonic Persuasion

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Publisher : University of Illinois Press
ISBN 13 : 0252093208
Total Pages : 210 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (52 download)

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Book Synopsis Sonic Persuasion by : Greg Goodale

Download or read book Sonic Persuasion written by Greg Goodale and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2011-04-01 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sonic Persuasion: Reading Sound in the Recorded Age critically analyzes a range of sounds on vocal and musical recordings, on the radio, in film, and in cartoons to show how sounds are used to persuade in subtle ways. Greg Goodale explains how and to what effect sounds can be "read" like an aural text, demonstrating this method by examining important audio cues such as dialect, pausing, and accent in presidential recordings at the turn of the twentieth century. Goodale also shows how clocks, locomotives, and machinery are utilized in film and literature to represent frustration and anxiety about modernity, and how race and other forms of identity came to be represented by sound during the interwar period. In highlighting common sounds of industry and war in popular media, Sonic Persuasion also demonstrates how programming producers and governmental agencies employed sound to evoke a sense of fear in listeners. Goodale provides important links to other senses, especially the visual, to give fuller meaning to interpretations of identity, culture, and history in sound.

The Soundscape of Modernity

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Author :
Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 9780262701068
Total Pages : 518 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (1 download)

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Book Synopsis The Soundscape of Modernity by : Emily Thompson

Download or read book The Soundscape of Modernity written by Emily Thompson and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2004-09-17 with total page 518 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A vibrant history of acoustical technology and aural culture in early-twentieth-century America. In this history of aural culture in early-twentieth-century America, Emily Thompson charts dramatic transformations in what people heard and how they listened. What they heard was a new kind of sound that was the product of modern technology. They listened as newly critical consumers of aural commodities. By examining the technologies that produced this sound, as well as the culture that enthusiastically consumed it, Thompson recovers a lost dimension of the Machine Age and deepens our understanding of the experience of change that characterized the era. Reverberation equations, sound meters, microphones, and acoustical tiles were deployed in places as varied as Boston's Symphony Hall, New York's office skyscrapers, and the soundstages of Hollywood. The control provided by these technologies, however, was applied in ways that denied the particularity of place, and the diverse spaces of modern America began to sound alike as a universal new sound predominated. Although this sound—clear, direct, efficient, and nonreverberant—had little to say about the physical spaces in which it was produced, it speaks volumes about the culture that created it. By listening to it, Thompson constructs a compelling new account of the experience of modernity in America.

Acoustemologies in Contact

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Publisher : Open Book Publishers
ISBN 13 : 1800640382
Total Pages : 198 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (6 download)

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Book Synopsis Acoustemologies in Contact by : Emily Wilbourne

Download or read book Acoustemologies in Contact written by Emily Wilbourne and published by Open Book Publishers. This book was released on 2021-01-19 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this fascinating collection of essays, an international group of scholars explores the sonic consequences of transcultural contact in the early modern period. They examine how cultural configurations of sound impacted communication, comprehension, and the categorisation of people. Addressing questions of identity, difference, sound, and subjectivity in global early modernity, these authors share the conviction that the body itself is the most intimate of contact zones, and that the culturally contingent systems by which sounds made sense could be foreign to early modern listeners and to present day scholars. Drawing on a global range of archival evidence—from New France and New Spain, to the slave ships of the Middle Passage, to China, Europe, and the Mediterranean court environment—this collection challenges the privileged position of European acoustical practices within the discipline of global-historical musicology. The discussion of Black and non-European experiences demonstrates how the production of ‘the canon’ in the cosmopolitan centres of colonial empires was underpinned by processes of human exploitation and extraction of resources. As such, this text is a timely response to calls within the discipline to decolonise music history and to contextualise the canonical works of the European past. This volume is accessible to a wide and interdisciplinary audience, not only within musicology, but also to those interested in early modern global history, sound studies, race, and slavery.

Sonic Warfare

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Publisher : MIT Press
ISBN 13 : 0262517957
Total Pages : 291 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (625 download)

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Book Synopsis Sonic Warfare by : Steve Goodman

Download or read book Sonic Warfare written by Steve Goodman and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2012-08-17 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An exploration of the production, transmission, and mutation of affective tonality—when sound helps produce a bad vibe. Sound can be deployed to produce discomfort, express a threat, or create an ambience of fear or dread—to produce a bad vibe. Sonic weapons of this sort include the “psychoacoustic correction” aimed at Panama strongman Manuel Noriega by the U.S. Army and at the Branch Davidians in Waco by the FBI, sonic booms (or “sound bombs”) over the Gaza Strip, and high-frequency rat repellants used against teenagers in malls. At the same time, artists and musicians generate intense frequencies in the search for new aesthetic experiences and new ways of mobilizing bodies in rhythm. In Sonic Warfare, Steve Goodman explores these uses of acoustic force and how they affect populations. Traversing philosophy, science, fiction, aesthetics, and popular culture, he maps a (dis)continuum of vibrational force, encompassing police and military research into acoustic means of crowd control, the corporate deployment of sonic branding, and the intense sonic encounters of sound art and music culture. Goodman concludes with speculations on the not yet heard—the concept of unsound, which relates to both the peripheries of auditory perception and the unactualized nexus of rhythms and frequencies within audible bandwidths.

Sound and Modernity in the Literature of London, 1880-1918

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Author :
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 1137540176
Total Pages : 202 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (375 download)

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Book Synopsis Sound and Modernity in the Literature of London, 1880-1918 by : Patricia Pye

Download or read book Sound and Modernity in the Literature of London, 1880-1918 written by Patricia Pye and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-10-13 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the literary representation of late Victorian and early Edwardian London from an auditory perspective, arguing that readers should ‘listen’ to impressions of the city, as described by writers such as Conrad, Doyle, Ford and Gissing. It was in this period that London began to ‘sound modern’ and, through a closer hearing of its literature, writers’ wider responses to modernity are revealed. The book is structured into familiar modernist themes, revisiting time and space, social progress and popular culture through an exploration of the sound impressions of some key works. Each chapter is contextualized by these themes, revealing how the sound of the news, social protest, music hall and suburbanization impacted on writers’ literary imaginations. Suitable for students of modernist literature and specialists in sound studies, this book will also appeal to readers with a wider interest in London’s history and popular culture between 1880-1918.

The Bloomsbury Companion to Modernist Literature

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Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1780936559
Total Pages : 561 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (89 download)

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Book Synopsis The Bloomsbury Companion to Modernist Literature by : Ulrika Maude

Download or read book The Bloomsbury Companion to Modernist Literature written by Ulrika Maude and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-11-01 with total page 561 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, leading international scholars explore the major ideas and debates that have made the study of modernist literature one of the most vibrant areas of literary studies today. The Bloomsbury Companion to Modernist Literature offers a comprehensive guide to current research in the field, covering topics including: · The modernist everyday: emotion, myth, geographies and language scepticism · Modernist literature and the arts: music, the visual arts, cinema and popular culture · Textual and archival approaches: manuscripts, genetic criticism and modernist magazines · Modernist literature and science: sexology, neurology, psychology, technology and the theory of relativity · The geopolitics of modernism: globalization, politics and economics · Resources: keywords and an annotated bibliography

The Age of Noise in Britain

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Publisher : University of Illinois Press
ISBN 13 : 0252099117
Total Pages : 370 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (52 download)

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Book Synopsis The Age of Noise in Britain by : James G Mansell

Download or read book The Age of Noise in Britain written by James G Mansell and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2016-12-08 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sound transformed British life in the "age of noise" between 1914 and 1945. The sonic maelstrom of mechanized society bred anger and anxiety and even led observers to forecast the end of civilization. The noise was, as James G. Mansell shows, modernity itself, expressed in aural form, with immense implications for the construction of the self. Tracing the ideas, feelings, and representations prompted by life in early twentieth century Britain, Mansell examines how and why sound shaped the self. He works at the crux of cultural and intellectual history, analyzing the meanings that were attached to different types of sound, who created these typologies and why, and how these meanings connected to debates about modernity. From traffic noise to air raids, everyday sounds elicited new ways of thinking about being modern. Each individual negotiated his or her own subjective meanings through hopes or fears for sound. As Mansell considers the different ways Britons heard their world, he reveals why we must take sound into account in our studies of cultural and social history.

The Acoustic Self in English Modernism and Beyond

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Author :
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1000538478
Total Pages : 205 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (5 download)

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Book Synopsis The Acoustic Self in English Modernism and Beyond by : Zoltan Varga

Download or read book The Acoustic Self in English Modernism and Beyond written by Zoltan Varga and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-02-17 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on the analogy between musical meaning-making and human subjectivity, this book develops the concept of the acoustic self, exploring the ways in which musical characterization and structure are related to issues of subject-representation in the modernist English novel. The volume is framed around three musical topics—the fugue, absolute music, and Gesamtkunstwerk—arguing that these three modes of musicalization address modernist dilemmas around selfhood and identity. Varga reflects on the manifestations of the acoustic self in examples from the works of E.M. Forster, Aldous Huxley, and Virginia Woolf, and such musicians as Bach, Beethoven, Handel, and Wagner. An additional chapter on jazz and electronic music supplements these inquiries, pursuing the acoustic self beyond modernism and thereby inciting further discussion and theorization of musical intermediality, as well as recent sonic practices. Probing the analogies in the complex interrelationship between music, representation, and language in fictional texts and the nature of human subjectivity, this book will appeal to students and scholars interested in the interface of language and music, in such areas as intermediality, multimodality, literary studies, critical theory, and modernist studies.

The Sonic Episteme

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Author :
Publisher : Duke University Press
ISBN 13 : 1478007370
Total Pages : 170 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (78 download)

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Book Synopsis The Sonic Episteme by : Robin James

Download or read book The Sonic Episteme written by Robin James and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2019-12-02 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Sonic Episteme Robin James examines how twenty-first-century conceptions of sound as acoustic resonance shape notions of the social world, personhood, and materiality in ways that support white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. Drawing on fields ranging from philosophy and sound studies to black feminist studies and musicology, James shows how what she calls the sonic episteme—a set of sound-based rules that qualitatively structure social practices in much the same way that neoliberalism uses statistics—employs a politics of exception to maintain hegemonic neoliberal and biopolitical projects. Where James sees the normcore averageness of Taylor Swift and Spandau Ballet as contributing to the sonic episteme's marginalization of nonnormative conceptions of gender, race, and personhood, the black feminist political ontologies she identifies in Beyoncé's and Rihanna's music challenge such marginalization. In using sound to theorize political ontology, subjectivity, and power, James argues for the further articulation of sonic practices that avoid contributing to the systemic relations of domination that biopolitical neoliberalism creates and polices.

Modern Fiction, Disability, and the Hearing Sciences

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Author :
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
ISBN 13 : 1040085296
Total Pages : 216 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (4 download)

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Book Synopsis Modern Fiction, Disability, and the Hearing Sciences by : Edward Allen

Download or read book Modern Fiction, Disability, and the Hearing Sciences written by Edward Allen and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-08-15 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The relationship between critical disability studies and the hearing sciences is a dynamic one, and it’s changing still, both as clinicians come to terms with the evolving health of deaf and hearing communities and as the ‘social’ and ‘medical’ understandings of disability continue to gain traction among different groups. What might a ‘cultural’ approach to these overlapping areas of study involve? And what could narrative prose in particular have to tell us that other sources haven’t sensed? At a time when visual media otherwise seem to have captured the imagination, Modern Fiction, Disability, and the Hearing Sciences makes the case for a wide range of literature. In doing so – through serials, short stories, circadian fiction, narrative history, morality tales, whodunits, Bildungsromane, life-writing, the Great American Novel – the book reveals the diverse ways in which writers have plotted and voiced experiences of hearing, from the nineteenth century to the present day.