Writing with Microphones, Taping Texts. Amplified Textuality in Contemporary Literature
Philipp Leonhardt
Compared to vision and sight, sounds and “the second sense” (Burnett, Fend & Gouk 1991) have been historically (mis-)understood as inferior, contingent, and unreliable, even after phonographs first captured the ephemeral phenomenon in the later 19th century (and texts had done so since antiquity). However, avant-garde composers (like Pierre Schaeffer or John Cage) and pioneering sound scholarship since the late 1960s (The World Soundscape Project) have helped to turn a historically eye-centered hierarchy of the senses on its ear, bringing sounds, listening, and “sound as a way of knowing” (Steven Feld’s “acoustemology”) into the foreground of critical thinking and academic inquiry. Since the acoustic turn of the 2000s, the field of sound culture studies has not only emerged as an institutionally recognized space in the humanities (“Is There a Field Called Sound Culture Studies? And Does It Matter?” – Michele Hilmes asked at an often-quoted tipping point in 2005), but continues to proliferate into a diverse body of interdisciplinary scholarship, including American studies: “the era of sound’s marginality in American studies scholarship […] seems to be over, as more and more scholars across a variety of disciplines are beginning to not only take the culture, consumption, and politics of sound seriously but are making it the centerpiece of their research, publishing, and pedagogy” (Keeling & Kun 2011, 446).
Adopting a transnational approach to American literature, my dissertation project investigates the affordances of sound recording technologies (e.g., microphones, tape recorders, field recordings) and the impact of technologically mediated experiences of listening (e.g., headphones, earbuds, loudspeakers) on writing and reading practices in contemporary literature. It examines how generations of authors who are not only familiar with the perceived immediacy of listening to sound through binaural headphones but used to producing and working with sound recordings have tried to emulate and (re-)create such intensified modes of auditory perception through the medium of language in literature, for example, Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be? (2010), Hari Kunzru’s White Tears (2018), Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive (2018), and Chuck Palahniuk’s The Invention of Sound (2020). Instead of framing these questions as a techno-determinist argument (à la Marshall McLuhan), my project explores how writers make creative use of audio technologies during the writing process and how microphones and recordings enter their texts on several levels: as a subject matter and practice conducted by recording protagonists (foley artists, sound documentarians, field recordists), as the deliberate incorporation or fictional invention of sound documentary material (“documentary fiction”), and as a conceptual projection and literary form that presents readers with immersive soundscapes and literature as text-as-tape and transcript.
In addition, my project includes autobiographical texts by authors who write about their hearing loss and the experience of learning to hear anew by perceiving the world through technologically amplified audio signals (hearing aids, cochlear implants), for example, Michael Chorost’s Rebuilt. My Journey Back to the Hearing World (2005) and Terry Galloway’s Mean Little Deaf Queer (2009). Based on a phenomenological understanding of listening, impaired hearing and deafness, my project stresses the relational, embodied, affective, and situated experience of “sound as a way of knowing” as captured, narrated and mediated by literary texts. The media-theoretical objective of my research interrogates the coalescences of sound recording and (life) writing as compositional practices, reading and listening as audiovisual modes of reception and asks how a multisensory approach of accessing literary soundscapes on the page may offer a new way of engaging with the materiality, tactility, and intermediality of “amplified” textuality.