Jason Camlot

Phonopoetics (eBook, ePUB)

The Making of Early Literary Recordings

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

Phonopoetics tells the neglected story of early "talking records" and their significance for literature, from the 1877 invention of the phonograph to some of the first recorded performances of modernist works. The book challenges assumptions of much contemporary criticism by taking the recorded, oral performance as its primary object of analysis and by exploring the historically specific convergences between audio recording technologies, media formats, generic forms, and the institutions and practices surrounding the literary. Opening with an argument that the earliest spoken recordings were a mediated extension of Victorian reading and elocutionary culture, Jason Camlot explains the literary significance of these pre-tape era voice artifacts by analyzing early promotional fantasies about the phonograph as a new kind of speaker and detailing initiatives to deploy it as a pedagogical tool to heighten literary experience. Through historically-grounded interpretations of Dickens impersonators to recitations of Tennyson to T.S. Eliot's experimental readings of "The Waste Land" and of a great variety of voices and media in between, this first critical history of the earliest literary sound recordings offers an unusual perspective on the transition from the Victorian to modern periods and sheds new light on our own digitally mediated relationship to the past.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 248
• Erscheinungstermin: 11. Juni 2019
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781503609716
• Artikelnr.: 55203998

Autorenporträt

Poet, songwriter, and scholar Jason Camlot is Professor of English and Associate Dean in the Faculty of Arts and Science at Concordia University.

Inhaltsangabe

Contents and Abstracts
Introduction: Introduction: Audiotextual Criticism
chapter abstract
The introduction explores the strange sonic and material qualities of early
sound recordings and outlines a methodology for the critical study of early
spoken recordings as literary artifacts. It defines concepts that are at
the core of the book, including the meaning of "literary recording",
"sound", "signal", "audiotextual genres" and "sound media formats." In
outlining a sound-based approach to literary studies, and in considering
the synergies between textual criticism and literary sound recordings, it
provides a schema for the pursuit of audiotextual criticism, that is, the
formal and historical study of literary sound recordings.
1The Voice of the Phonograph
chapter abstract
Chapter 1 analyzes the early promotional discourse surrounding the
phonograph as a medium of natural fidelity and then situates the idea of
the phonograph as a "pure voice" medium within the context of popular
recitation anthologies in order to identify key elocutionary preconceptions
that informed the vocal performances heard in early spoken recordings. In
revealing the affinities that existed between late Victorian short spoken
recordings and the brief texts meant for speaking aloud that were collected
in nineteenth-century recitation anthologies, this opening chapter explains
the preconceived notions about the phonograph as a new media technology and
the significance of sound recording for the performance of literary texts,
in particular.
2Charles Dickens in Three Minutes or Less: Early Phonographic Fiction
chapter abstract
Chapter 2 focuses on the development and production of the earliest sound
recordings drawn from the novels of Charles Dickens. The Dickens recordings
of Bransby Williams and William Sterling Battis stand as the earliest
fiction-based audio adaptations produced specifically for pedagogical
application, and represent an interesting bridge between earlier
conceptions of the talking record as a novel form of popular entertainment
and the later, pedagogically motivated category of the literary recording.
To shed light on the historical transition from "talking record" to
"literary recording" and the emergence of what we now call educational
technology, this chapter examines the particular kinds of literary
adaptation in early recordings produced specifically for teaching
literature in the classroom.
3Alfred, Lord Tennyson's Spectral Energy: Historical Intonation in Dramatic
Recitation
chapter abstract
Chapter 3 tells the story of the multiple recordings made between 1890 and
1920, both by the poet himself and by actors and elocutionists, of
Tennyson's poem "The Charge of The Light Brigade." It analyzes the kinds of
performance and genre that informed the production of these recordings and
locates the speech sounds heard on them in debates of the period about
elocution and verse speaking. An account of late Victorian methods of
"dramatic" interpretation as elaborated by Samuel Silas Curry in
Imagination and Dramatic Instinct opens into a longer genealogy of oral
interpretation, and considers the import of New Criticism as a method of
literary interpretation that worked to silence oral performance in the
classroom. The close listening in this chapter also explores the potential
of digital speech analysis tools to help us to fix and visualize
elocutionary, prosodic features of these recordings of "Charge."
4T. S. Eliot's Recorded Experiments in Modernist Verse Speaking
chapter abstract
Chapter 4 offers a series of interpretive takes on T. S. Eliot's 1930s
electrically recorded voice experiments in reading his poem The Waste Land
aloud. It traces Eliot's attempt to invent a way to read modernist poetry.
Explaining the production context of the 1933 recordings, the chapter
situates Eliot's audible reading experiments within contemporary debates
surrounding the English verse-speaking movement, and Eliot's work for the
BBC. Finally, it provides a close-listening analysis of Eliot's reading
experiments with duration and amplitude, as well as a series of nonsemantic
phrasing and intonation techniques, and especially the use of monotone in
reading. Eliot's method of reading is interpreted as a performance of the
abstract conception of "voice" that functions as an organizing principle in
New Critical discourse. Eliot's recorded readings are heard to sound an
organizing method of incantation that evokes the possibility of an
overarching oracular or otherworldly voice.
Conclusion: Conclusion: Analog, Digital, Conceptual
chapter abstract
The Conclusion to Phonopoetics explores conceptions of voice preservation
and models of the voice archive. It takes early ideas of the audible
archival artifact (the sound recording) and the event-oriented scenario of
its use as useful points of departure for a historically motivated
theorization of the voice recording and voice archive at the present time.
Specifically, it considers the impact of digital media technologies on the
status of the record and its archive. The Conclusion mediates on how the
analogue artifact of the sound archive has shaped our ideas and
expectations about what a digital repository should be, and reflects on the
status of the artifact of study as we move increasingly from the study of
material media artifacts to virtual instantiations of the signals those
media may once have held, in the form of digital media files.