The seminar will introduce students into American Cultural Studies research concerned with sound and listening in the time period from Early to Modern America. More than just music, sound will be considered “as a cultural form with a material force” whose study “occasion[s] examination into the sonic and aurality as processes of economic, social and political negotiations” (Banet-Weiser in Keeling & Kun). Due to the historical period in focus, such processes cannot be considered through audio-documents but will require close engagement with “in-audible” archives such as literature, documents of public oratory or the socio-sonic effects of public space. Engaging both the intellectual and experiential dimension of Early to Modern America, the seminar will thus offer students historical knowledge as well as the conceptual and methodological tools necessary for researching non-contemporary cultural phenomena and their socio-political significance.
Literature:
Bosco, Ronald A. “Lectures at the Pillory: The Early American Execution Sermon.” American Quarterly 30.3. (Summer 1978): 156-176. Print.
Bull, Michael & Les Back. “Into Sound … Once More with Feeling”. The Auditory Culture Reader. 2nd. Ed. By Bull & Back. New York & London: Bloomsbury, 2015. pp. 1-20. Print.
Cruz, Jon. Culture on the Margins. The Black Spiritual and the Rise of American Cultural Interpretation. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1999. Print. (Extracts)
Flegelman, Jay. Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language and the Culture of Performance. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1993. Print. (Extracts)
Lipsitz, George. “Listening to Learn and Learning to Listen: Popular Culture, Cultural Theory and American Studies”. American Quarterly 42.4. (Dec. 1990): 615-636. Print.
Lorenzkowski, Barbara. Sounds of Ethnicity: Listening to German North America, 1850-1914. Winnipeg: U of Manitoba P, 2010. Print. (Extracts)
Naeem, Asma. “Splitting Sight and Sound: Thomas Dewing’s A Reading, Gilded Age Women, and the Phonograph.” Sound Clash: Listening to American Studies. Eds. Kara Keeling & Josh Kun. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 2012. pp.17-42. Print.
Rath, Richard Cullen. How Early America Sounded. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2003. Print. (Extracts)
Schmidt, Leigh Eric. Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2002. Print. (Extracts)
Smith, Mark E. Listening to Nineteenth-Century America. Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2001. Print. (Extracts)
Stern, Jonathan. “Sonic Imaginations”. The Sound Studies Reader. By Sterne. New York & London: Routledge, 2012. pp. 1-18. Print.
Thompson, Emily Ann. The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900—1933. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002. Print. (Extracts)
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