Sound Recording Technology And American Literature

Based on the author's dissertation (doctoral)--Columbia University, 2013.

"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.""

How did one of the great inventions of the nineteenth century—Thomas Edison's phonograph—eventually lead to one of the most culturally and economically significant technologies of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries? Sound Recording traces the history of the business boom and the cultural revolution that Edison's invention made possible. Recorded sound has pervaded nearly every facet of modern life—not just popular music, but also mundane office dictation machines, radio and television programs, and even telephone answering machines. Just as styles of music have evolved, so too have the formats through which sound has been captured—from 78s to LPs, LPs to cassette tapes, tapes to CDs, and on to electronic formats. The quest for better sound has certainly driven technological change, but according to David L. Morton, so have business strategies, patent battles, and a host of other factors.

Representational technologies including photography, phonography, and the cinema have helped define modernity itself. Since the nineteenth century, these technologies have challenged our trust of sensory perception, given the ephemeral unprecedented parity with the eternal, and created profound temporal and spatial displacements. But current approaches to representational and cultural history often neglect to examine these technologies. James Lastra seeks to remedy this neglect. Lastra argues that we are nowhere better able to track the relations between capital, science, and cultural practice than in photography, phonography, and the cinema. In particular, he maps the development of sound recording from its emergence to its confrontation with and integration into the Hollywood film. Reaching back into the late eighteenth century, to natural philosophy, stenography, automata, and human physiology, Lastra follows the shifting relationships between our senses, technology, and representation.

This study provides a history of sound recording from the acoustic phonograph to digital sound technology. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

This reader collects primary documents on the phonograph, cinema, and radio before WWII to show how Americans slowly came to grips with the idea of recorded and mediated sound. Through readings from advertisements, newspaper and magazine articles, popular fiction, correspondence, and sheet music, one gains an understanding of how early-20th-century Americans changed from music makers into consumers.

Morton (research historian for the IEEE History Center at Rutgers U.) examines the process of invention, innovation, and diffusion of communications technology in the development of the phonograph record, recording for radio, the dictation machine, the telephone answering machine, and home taping.

American Lit Remixed identifies a new sound in literature emerging after the digital revolution. It reads works by Jennifer Egan, Sherman Alexie, and others through the lenses of remix theory -- the term Eduardo Navas coined to describe the remix as a form of artistic and cultural discourse -- and the music industry’s preoccupations with nostalgia and authenticity, arguing that digital-age fiction, poetry, and drama remix the music and technology of the past to offer new modes of connecting to self, others, and place. Musical features such as references to popular songs, structural similarities to music recordings, and thematic treatment of the riffing and borrowing endemic within popular music lend a retro sound, feel, and structure to contemporary American texts, even when they refer to life in the digital era. Through engaging with the musical past, literature resists nostalgia and remixes the twenty-first century’s dystopian, disconnected ethos to find possibility and hope for the future. Critics often focus on technology’s negative impact on the music industry, but American Lit Remixed emphasizes music as a source of creative potential in twenty-first-century literature, including new ways of storytelling and relating.