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Category Archive – page 3

Extending Genetic Criticism to Audiotexts: A Conversation with Jason Wiens (Post)

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Jason Wiens’ interest in teaching poetry with sound recordings has led his critical attention back to a tradition of textual analysis that emerged in France in the late 1970s, known as “genetic criticism” (La Critique génétique), with its interest in approaching texts as entities whose emergence is traceable through the study of “avant-texts”.  In this interview conducted by Jason Camlot, Wiens talks about recent experiments and assignments he has used in teaching Canadian poetry with sound recordings, and explains his interest in genetic criticism as it relates to the study of audiotexts.

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Aphasic Poetry: Making sense of it with Katharina Fuerholzer (Post)

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It seems appropriate that Dr. Katharina Fuerholzer would recommend the soundtrack to the hit series ‘The End of the F***ing World’, considering the state of the world, but more too, her work on aphasic poetry in Harryette Mullen’s ‘Sleeping with the Dictionary’. The songs are fitting— romantic and unnerving— in the way that Mullen’s dictionary— “In the dark night’s insomnia, the book is a stimulating sedative, awakening my tired imagination to the hypnagogic trance of language”—is. Listen to the soundtrack while you read the following interview (and, let it spill into your other work), where I talk to Katharina about aphasic poetry, interdisciplinarity, and the femme aphasique. Here, we consider aphasia’s varied metaphoric, medicinal, and literary meanings.

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“Immersive Media” and the Phenomenological Experience of Listening: A Conversation with Deanna Fong and Jon Saklofske (Post)

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As a video game enthusiast, Ali Barillaro was initially drawn to interview Deanna Fong and Jon Safloske because they had submitted a proposal for the Listening, Sound, Agency Symposium about the dark, fantasy-action adventure game, Hellblade. But when Ali sat down to draft some questions for Deanna and Jon, she found herself curious to hear about how their research partnership began and how it has progressed over the past year. So this interview is as much about how research collaborations develop through shared interests in sound and sound studies methodologies, as it is about their recent work on Hellblade.

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Queer Listening: Unsettling the Archive with Mathieu Aubin (Post)

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As a new member of the SpokenWeb team, I was thrilled to connect with Postdoctoral Fellow and SpokenWeb researcher, Mathieu Aubin, and learn about his work in a more specific context than our weekly meetings. Aubin’s research examines queerness in oral histories and audio recordings of literary events, engaging activist and marginalized voices, content, and […]

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An Aural Version of Situated Knowledge: A Conversation with Ellen Waterman (Post)

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Ellen Waterman’s creative and research practices are all about listening together across and through distance and difference. When I spoke with her during our socially distanced summer of the pandemic, I was interested to hear how our current situation has influenced her thinking about what it means to create sound and sound-based work together. What follows is an interview that still attempts to be spontaneous and to listen, even in written form.

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Sound Pedagogy – Teaching the Audible Dimensions of Poetry: A Conversation (plus clips and sample syllabus) with Chris Mustazza (Post)

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In 2018 I had the opportunity to visit one of Chris Mustazza’s interdisciplinary literature classes taught at the University of Pennsylvania, a course called Poetry Audio Lab: Modernism & Sound Studies. I was amazed at how seamlessly he had woven questions of poetics, performance, media history, and digital approaches to listening and analysis into his syllabus.  As one of the early experimenters in teaching poetry through a major audio poetry archive (PennSound), and as a regular collaborator with Al Filreis, another innovator in this area who draws upon the audio archive in his wide-reaching ModPo MOOC, talking to Chris about teaching proved a unique opportunity to think about rationale, methods and effects of teaching poetry with sound.

Article, Interviews, SPOKENWEBLOG

“Mistakes” in the Sound Archive: An Interview with Leah Van Dyk (Post)

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In May, I reached out to Leah VanDyk shortly after she was awarded a Killam scholarship for her research in environmental humanities. Having met Leah before and heard her present at the “Text/Sound/Performance” conference in Dublin, Ireland in April 2019, I was excited to catch up with her and hear about her ongoing research. As I quickly found out, while her research focuses on environmental humanities, pedagogy, and accessibility, Leah is also often thinking about serendipitous moments activated through sound.

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Zoom Aid or Zoom Raid?: An Interview with Stephen J. Neville (Post)

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The transition wasn’t gradual; it happened over night. In March 2020, due to the global COVID19 pandemic, university classes and seminars, research meetings, supervisory chats, scholarly conferences, and more, all moved online. Suddenly the screen became the office, the boardroom, and the classroom. Suddenly the screen became the sole mediator of collective thinking, discussing, and sharing of information. While some might argue for the efficacy of this collective move online, Stephen J. Neville—who would have presented at the SpokenWeb Listening, Sound, Agency symposium this July—published early research on the flip side of online videoconferencing, discovering the racist and misogynist underpinning of many so-called Zoom-bombing attacks (co-authored with Prof. Greg Elmer and Anthony Glyn Burton). Here I ask him a few further questions about his latest, highly relevant research.

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Black Voice, Red Record: An Interview with Kristin Moriah (Post)

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As sound scholars, we can sometimes take for granted the existence of a sonic trace to blow open our research. However, if you’re working between sound and Black Studies like Dr. Kristin Moriah, Assistant Professor of English at Queen’s University, contending with sonic absence shapes—and often compels—the work. Kristin’s research examines Black performance and recording, spanning from Black feminist political mobilization against lynching in the United States to African-American performers in Berlin during the fin-de-siècle. We discussed the intrinsic relationship between Black activism and Black soundscapes via music, poetics, and oration, and its importance toward liberation during this pertinent contemporary moment.

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On Mobilizing ‘Unvoice’: An Interview with Eric Schmaltz (Post)

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Situated at the intersection of sound and literature, artist and scholar Dr. Eric Schmaltz exemplifies the flexible thinking proper to such an innovative, interdisciplinary field. Recently, I spoke with Dr. Schmaltz about his upcoming critical work— the radical potential of silence and of body in the formation of a poetics of the ‘unvoice’—and of the sounds, important, informing his recent research activities. Most meaningfully, our conversation speaks to the possibilities inflecting our ever-growing sound studies scape; the connected and vital work of confronting our literary histories.

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