“Reverb” recovers the resonance between American literature and sonic media from the invention of the telephone and phonograph (the 1870s) to the end of the golden age of radio (the 1950s). It reads realist and modernist works for the insights they offer into the crucial role the auditory register plays in producing racial and national identity. Contributing to the burgeoning field of sound studies, the project places texts by Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Gertrude Stein, and Ralph Ellison in conversation with forgotten audio artifacts and discourses. Reconnected with their sonic contexts, these works offer compelling evidence that identity travels through more sensorially expansive and socially complex channels than visual studies accounts acknowledge. By listening to the vexed materiality of sonic media, Twain, Crane, Stein, and Ellison destabilize sociocultural assumptions about who qualifies as a person and imagine alternative ways (beyond racial stereotyping) of preserving individuality in an increasingly mechanistic modern world. They attend to delayed telephone communications, noisy phonograph recordings, and errant radio broadcasts to challenge the rhetoric of representational accuracy and cultural mastery underlying not only seamless audio but also the act of literary depiction. Contrary to traditional media studies accounts that firmly separate sound recording and writing, this project argues that the border between the written and the acoustic is porous. Inspired by audio (mis)communications, Twain, Crane, Stein, and Ellison unsettle several of the key formal components literature employs to convey identity, including dialect, description, and narrative voice.
Keck, Sean M.,
"Reverb: American Literature and Sonic Media, 1876-1952"
(2015).
English Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.7301/Z0542M06
