Special Topics in English Literature: Modern and Contemporary
ENGLISH 290S-3
Sound of American Literature: Literature, Music, and Technology
Allison Neal
How can we best listen to literature? How is literature like or unlike a conversation, a piece of music, or the cacophony of a city street? This course will examine an arrayof twentieth-centurypoetry and prose inorder to probe theways that we mightlisten to a text in an age of mass culture. It will examine how various modern sound media—the radio, the telephone, the phonograph—affect how texts envision their audience, questioning the extent to which we might connect literature, sound, technology, and orality. Finally,we’ll listen to a variety of twentieth-century music, exploring howliterature succeeds and fails to capture sound in writing.
Texts read: The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, James Weldon Johnson; Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf; Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison; Krapps's Last Tape,Samuel Beckett. Wewill read essays onsound and orality bycritics like JacquesAttali and TheodorAdorno and sound studies scholars like Jonathan Sterne, Lisa Gittelman, Alexander Weheliye, and Jennifer Stoever. We will also read a large body of twentieth-century American poetry, by Marianne Moore, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, W.H. Auden, Charles Olson, Frank O’Hara, and Robert Creeley, among others
This course counts either as Area III or CTM for majors.
A major author, topic, or theme of modern and contemporary literature. Satisfies Area III for the English major. Topics vary each semester. See synopsis for more details.
