In this study, I explore listening’s relationship to reading and its inflection through the materiality of the silent page. More specifically, I aim to understand how listening functions to perceive and interpret bodies, ideas, and aesthetics of racial difference in creative and active scenes of audition across twentieth-century American and African American literature, poetry, and music. By analyzing how sonic interactions of literary race help shape our reading and interpretive imagination, this study foregrounds a practice of listening that is more self-aware and allows for an examination of how aural practices have generated particularly useful but sometimes limiting aesthetic notions of black racial identity over time. The dissertation is divided into two sections, each of which outlines a larger theoretical argument. In the first section, which considers how readers are implicitly trained to attend to the racial signifiers of voice in literary form, I examine the elliptical narrative acoustics that indirectly mediate and reinforce the sounds of racially marked speech in Jean Toomer, Ernest Hemingway, Ralph Ellison, and William Faulkner. In the second section, I expand this theoretical framework to include modernist and postmodernist American poetry and music, fields which, I argue, produced conceptual provocations asking us to rethink the relationships between sound, race, and aesthetic form. I begin by analyzing the musical structure of Charlie Parker’s solos during the bebop revolution of the 1940’s. Parker’s key aesthetic move, I argue, is to fragment overall narrative into discrete moments of virtuosity that refuse to cohere into the larger narrative structure prescribed by the song forms over which Parker’s improvisations take place, thus making it impossible for the sounds emerging from his horn to be heard as “telling a story.” I then push this account into the realm of language by turning to the poetry and poetics of Langston Hughes’s 1961 poem Ask Your Mama and Robert Creeley’s Words, both of which incorporate the conceptual advances proffered by Parker to construct a powerful new model of race- inflected aesthetics.
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Citation
Fung, Nicole,
"Stereo Types: Sounding Race in Twentieth-Century America"
(2020).
English Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.26300/5f6s-zd04
