Two-step, Nerve-tap, Tanglefoot: Tapdance Typologies in Cinema

Tap dance reminds cinema of its origins in the turn-of-the-century vernacular of vaudeville, circus, carnival and other diffuse kinds of attractions and spectacles. In fact one can make out, in the difference between the smooth aerial flights of a Fred Astaire and the earthier moves of a Bill ‘Bojangles’ Robinson, a rhythmic struggle between the technical sophistication of the cinema in its developed form, and its lowlier, more vulgarly corporeal origins and appetites. This chapter examines the contrast between the clog-dancing rustic (black or Irish) and the sophisticated man-about-town. To do so testifies to a class ambivalence that is never quite resolved in tap dance, which always retains the traces of its ostentatiously corporeal origins, a kind of comic awkwardness that resists being lifted up into the condition of high art. Cutting athwart its slick syncopations, tap dance always acts like a kind decomposition of cinema to its elements of sound and movement, most importantly in its play with the mechanization of human bodies. Tap dance therefore provides an elementary form of cinema’s transaction between body and image, gravity and light.

Listening to the Late Cantos

This chapter explores the sonic possibilities of the Chinese characters in Ezra Pound’s late cantos. Specifically it examines how Pound understood Chinese sound in his late career, and traces what he did with this new understanding in the late cantos. Despite Pound’s enthusiasm for Chinese sound, critics have tended to approach the characters as silent, static material forms, unable to be sounded by the reader, which are antithetical to the lyrical elements of the late cantos and obstruct the poem’s prosodic flow. Arguing against the understanding of the ideograms as merely ‘silent’ objects, this chapter traces how the characters both communicate with and shape the poem’s rhythm and prosody, and what this, in turn, means for Pound’s reader. In doing so, it examines the unstable but productive interchange between graphic and phonetic signification in the late cantos, between image and sound, and explores what a fuller understanding of Pound’s late rehabilitation of Chinese sound might mean for our understanding of the problematic final stages of Pound’s epic.

Body and Soul: Modernism, Metaphysics, Rhyme

This chapter approaches the problem of rhyme in modernist poetry by considering a longer history of ideas about rhyme, in which sound and sense are mapped against body and soul. This dualism encourages the suspicion which has so often been directed at rhyme as a poetic technique. Sketched out through analyses of classical verse and popular song, the metaphysics of rhyme is then tested through close readings of poems by W. B. Yeats and D. H. Lawrence, written and published in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The chapter concludes that modernism resists inherited dualisms when its rhyming practice suggests a kind of song. For modernism, the soul in song, and of song, is not disembodied but embodied, not individual but collective.

Partial to Opera: Sounding Willa Cather’s Empty Rooms

According to Walter Pater the absorbing qualities of music’s formal perfection mean that ‘all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.’ In her remarkable not-quite-kunstlerroman, The Song of the Lark (1915), Willa Cather responds to the notion that opera might be an ‘absolute art form’ by formulating a notion of the omnipresence of partial (rather than utter) absorption. Wherever her characters turn, their experiences are always composites. In articulating that alternative way of understanding art’s teleology, Cather also rethought the virtues and dangers of opera as a platonic artform, and posed a series of fascinating questions about prose’s relationship to the formal claim lodged by both live and recorded music. Cather’s early novels are a significant site to explore the ways in which the complex modernist textual experiments of the 1910s are shaped by live opera’s afterglow—a European cultural telos Cather both reveres and distrusts. But the chapter also proposes that Cather is making sense of a new sonic universe in which recorded music, in grooves or over the airwaves, comes to demarcate a kind of reproduction that serves both as type and antitype of the novel’s own formal aspirations.

Bottled Bands: Automatic Music and American Media Publics

Although mostly forgotten today, nickel-in-the-slot phonographs were a popular and telling symptom of acoustic modernity around 1890. At the rate of a minute or two of recorded sound per nickel deposited, these machines paved the way for the widespread private ownership of phonographs by pioneering their use a public venue where the uncanny experience of listening to absent voices was standardized by the logics of exchange and exhibition. The sound of money falling into the slots was answered automatically by the siren’s call of a voice with no speaker, calling for more money to be deposited. Because they flickered briefly at a conjunction of publics and markets, automatic phonographs provide a way to parse some of the conflicts attending the money economy during the 1890s, that crucial decade in the establishment of modernity as a technological way of life. Canning popular music, and privatizing its audition in serial acts of consumption, these devices were instrumental in the progressive abstraction of public space. Considering both the design and contexts of use of the devices helps to illuminate the conflicted subjectivities of markets and publics in the fin de siècle.

Elliptical Sound: Audibility and the Space of Reading1

This chapter takes up the central categories of narrative theory to ask how they can be “sonified” through an attention to racial signifiers in text. The chapter argues that, in eliding the experience of sound in reading, Gérard Genette and other literary theorists often presume a racially neutral reader and narrative space. Though narrative voices cannot be physically heard, racially marked voices nonetheless borrow from writer’s and reader’s implicit hypotheses and memories of listening. A reading of Jean Toomer, Ralph Ellison, and Ernest Hemingway addresses how these hypotheses of listening closely collaborate with the invisible bodies of narrators and characters to produce a sense of “race.” Traditionally, an ellipsis is a quality of narrative temporality (a gap or elision in chronology). The chapter instead turns to typographical ellipses in text to show how reading itself generates an elliptical space between a text’s inaudible voices and invisible bodies. The chapter reveals the elliptical narrative acoustics that indirectly mediate and reinforce the sounds of racially marked speech.

How to Listen to Joyce: Gramophones, Voice and the Limits of Mediation

Writing in 1932, Christina Stead described the disappointing experience of listening to ‘a gramophone record of James Joyce the English litterateur, reading from his own works, a rare thing costing 200 francs’. The recording Stead was listening to was Joyce’s reading of the ending of the Anna Livia Plurabelle section of Finnegans Wake, a double-sided 12-inch gramophone disc made at C. K. Ogden’s Orthological Institute in 1929. T. S. Eliot, in contrast to Stead, responded positively to the recording expressing the hope that recordings of authors’ voices would soon supplant printed editions of their work. That Eliot’s hope was never realised suggests that many shared Stead’s disappointment. Hearing rather than reading Finnegans Wake only intensified its unsettling affects for Stead, and exposed the technical limitations of the gramophone as a means of enhancing literary experience. This chapter considers Stead’s dilemma as a listener to and reader of Joyce as an exemplary instance of the way early gramophone recordings of modernist texts only served to heighten the experience of modernism’s inaccessibility to the readers that Eliot had hoped it would engage.

The Rhythm of the Rails: Sound and Locomotion

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw a fascination with the concept of ‘rhythm’ in a range of disciplinary and transdisciplinary contexts, a preoccupation which would later be developed in movements such as Henri Lefebvre’s ‘Rhythmanalysis.’ The experimental psychologists of the turn of the nineteenth century explored rhythm in relation to both the auditory and the visual, and showed a particular concern with the relationship between measures which were externally imposed and endogenous rhythms. This chapter looks at the ways in which locomotion––and in particular the locomotive railway––is used as an exemplum in rhythm studies, and then explores its auditory renditions in nineteenth and early twentieth-century literature and, as ‘implied sound,’ in silent film, in which the question of rhythm as auditory and/or visual becomes particularly charged.

Introduction: Sounding Modernism 1890–1950

This chapter considers what it means to attend to the dynamics and aesthetics of sonic mediation in modern writing, acoustic, and cinematic forms produced from the 1890s through to the mid-twentieth century. Tracking the various transformations of the rhythmic or metrical patterning of sound across a range of forms opens up a space for new ways of understanding both the specific sonorous qualities that different modern media are capable of registering, and how sonic transpositions and transferences across media affect the techniques with which human subjects respond to modern soundscapes. We begin with some methodological groundwork for the analysis of literature’s historically complex relationship to extra-literary sounds, and by identifying parallels and divergences with other media, such as the phonograph, radio and cinema. The challenges facing any correlation between modernist technique and the specific soundscapes of modernity are particularly demanding, not least because entirely new storage devices emerged simultaneously to do what literature could not, namely, record them. And yet, it was precisely this challenge that drove writers to engage as never before with what the symbolic apparatus of written language had never yet properly grasped: the vocal textures, rhythmic mechanizations, and stochastic accidents of real, socially embodied sound.

Sounding Region, Writing Accent: A. G. Street and the BBC

This chapter uses the case of Wiltshire farmer-author A. G. Street, whose successful 1932 memoir Farmer’s Glory launched him into broadcasting, to examine the way that accent and dialect passing between media unsettled and reinscribed the BBC’s hierarchies of sound. Street’s broadcasts were larded with references to and choice quotations from ‘the generic, and usually anonymous Wiltshire labourer’ to whom he looks, he says, as ‘guide, philosopher and friend.’ On the pages of the Listener these quotations are rendered in written dialect, standing out from the smooth expanse of Street’s standard English prose. Street’s interaction with the dialect form refers us back to the original circumstances of broadcast, to the fact that that Street himself ‘does’ all the voices, dropping in and out of a broad Wiltshire that was never his own. Yet the orthography of the rendered speech presents it as an authentic ‘artifact,’ a nugget of regionality served up for appreciation. Throughout the 1930s such typifying and nostalgic versions of dialect—a version of what Elizabeth Outka termed the commodified authentic—effectively displaced ‘real’ regional voice in the journal’s pages.