[New-Poetry] the noise in lit

[Anny Ballardini]

> From: Philipp Schweighauser [mailto:schweighauser at ens.unibe.ch] 
> Sent: maandag 29 mei 2006 18:43


The University Press of Florida is proud to announce the publication of _The
Noises of American Literature, 1890-1985: Toward a History of Literary
Acoustics_ by Philipp Schweighauser. Schweighauser traces the acoustic
imagination of American literature from naturalism to postmodernism. He
reads the noises writers represent as fictional responses to the social, cultural,
and political changes and conflicts of modernity and postmodernity.
Exploring the social functions of literature, he also suggests that literature itself,
in its constant search for new language forms, has become a source of
revitalizing noise in the channels of cultural communication.
     The author provides substantial new readings of a broad range of
canonical texts, from the naturalism of Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, and Stephen
Crane to the modernism of Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, John Dos Passos, and
Djuna Barnes, to the postmodernism of Thomas Pynchon, Ishmael Reed, and Don
DeLillo.
Across almost 100 years of literary history, he listens to the hum of
traffic and the fracas of war and to immigrant accents and African-American
vocalization. From the late 19th-century writers' often anxious responses to
the new soundscapes brought about by industrialization and urbanization, to the
modernists' decision to let the noises of social discontent seep into the
very forms of their texts, to late 20th-century literary oscillations between
acoustic mysticism and ecological critique, he shows that changing
representations of sound indicate writers' stances on issues of class,
gender, and race.
     Drawing on soundscape studies, systems theory, sociology, media
archaeology, and literary theory, this book explores the acoustic worlds and
changing social functions of American literature.   
-- 
Dr. Philipp Schweighauser, Department of English, University of Berne,
Länggassstrasse 49, 3000 Bern 9, Switzerland. Phone: ++41 31 631 81 45; Fax:
++41 31 631 36 36.  http://www.cx.unibe.ch/ens/staff/schweighauser.htm


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Anny Ballardini
http://annyballardini.blogspot.com/
http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome
http://www.moriapoetry.com/ebooks.html
I Tell You: One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing star! 
Friedrich Nietzsche 
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