Sound States - by Adalaide Morris (Paperback)

About the Book

By focusing on "earplay" in texts by James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and other modern writers, this collection's twelve essays investigates the relationship between acoustical technologies and 20th-century experimental poetics. The accompanying CD offers soundtracks of early radio sounds, poetry readings, Dada cabaret performances, jazzoetry, audio-poems and contemporary Caribbean DJ dub poetry.

Book Synopsis

By investigating the relationship between acoustical technologies and twentieth-century experimental poetics, this collection, with an accompanying compact disc, aims to 'turn up the volume' on printed works and rethink the way we read, hear, and talk about literary texts composed after telephones, phonographs, radios, loudspeakers, microphones, and tape recorders became facts of everyday life.

The collection's twelve essays focus on earplay in texts by James Joyce, Ezra Pound, H.D., Samuel Beckett, William Burroughs, Amiri Baraka, Bob Kaufman, Robert Duncan, and Kamau Brathwaite and in performances by John Cage, Caribbean DJ-poets, and Cecil Taylor. From the early twentieth-century soundscapes of Futurist and Dadaist 'sonosphers' to Henri Chopin's electroacoustical audio-poämes, the authors argue, these states of sound make bold but wavering statements -- statements held only partially in check by meaning.

The contributors are Loretta Collins, James A. Connor, Michael Davidson, N. Katherine Hayles, Nathaniel Mackey, Steve McCaffery, Alec McHoul, Toby Miller, Adalaide Morris, Fred Moten, Marjorie Perloff, Jed Rasula, and Garrett Stewart.

Review Quotes

[The book] reminds us of the sheer playfulness that informs and generates artistic work.

Peter Quartermain, University of British Columbia

ÝThe book¨ reminds us of the sheer playfulness that informs and generates artistic work.

Peter Quartermain, University of British Columbia

A first-rate contribution to the ongoing reformulation of our understanding of what literature means, or is becoming.

"Stanford Humanities Review"

An original and innovative anthology by people thinking with an 'ear-mind.'

Rachel Blau DuPlessis, poet and critic

"[The book] reminds us of the sheer playfulness that informs and generates artistic work.

Peter Quartermain, University of British Columbia"

"A first-rate contribution to the ongoing reformulation of our understanding of what literature means, or is becoming.

"Stanford Humanities Review""

"An original and innovative anthology by people thinking with an 'ear-mind.'

Rachel Blau DuPlessis, poet and critic"

The contributions are always intriguing.

"Virginia Quarterly Review"

About the Author

Adalaide Morris is professor of English and chair of the English department at the University of Iowa.