Sound Recording Technology and American Literature: From the Phonograph to the Remix (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture, Series Number 187)

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. "When Gertrude Stein published Three Lives, her first book-length work, in 1909, readers were struck by her peculiar, repetitive style. As one dust jacket review put it, Stein's prose was like a "stubborn phonograph." Taken in passing, the comparison might seem unremarkable, but in 1909, when the phonograph was still a relatively new technology, the dust jacket remark penned by Georgiana Goddard King (a Reader in English at Bryn Mawr College) reveals how at least one early reader heard Gertrude Stein. According to King, Stein had "pushed the method of realism as far as it would go," and "the patient iteration, the odd style, with all its stops and starts, like a stubborn phonograph, are a part of the incantation. The reader must take it or leave it,-but always, taken or left, it remains astonishing.""-- Provided by publisher Cover Half-title page Series page Title page Copyright page Dedication Contents List of Figures Acknowledgments Introduction Resonant Reading: Listening to American Literature after the Phonograph Chapter 1 Ears Taut to Hear: John Dos Passos Records America Chapter 2 Ethnographic Transcription and the Jazz Auto/Biography: Alan Lomax, Jelly Roll Morton, Zora Neale Hurston, and Sidney Bechet Chapter 3 Press Play: Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and the Tape Recorder Chapter 4 The Stereophonic Poetics ofLangston Hughes and Amiri Baraka1 Chapter 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 Notes Works Cited Index Introduction. Resonant Reading: Listening to American Literature After the Phonograph -- Ears Taut to Hear: John Dos Passos Records America -- Ethnographic Transcription and the Jazz Auto/Biography: Alan Lomax, Jelly Roll Morton, Zora Neale Hurston, and Sidney -- Press Play: Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, and the Tape Recorder -- Stereophonic Poetics of Langston Hughes and Amiri Baraka -- 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