Patricia Nash, Research Area 4: "Literary Currencies"

Doctoral Research Project

In Germany and the United States, it is increasingly common to find scholarship that contends not only with a poet's written output, but her reading or performance style in audio recordings. Turning to what Charles Bernstein calls the "material and materializing" components of sound, this scholarship confronts abstractions of voice with actual voices, unsettling the print's media dominion over literary studies. Such work is often undergirded by certain assumptions: that the recording offers an authentic extension of a poet’s body of work; that it can be used as heuristic tool for literary interpretations; and/or that attention to the spoken word represents a historical fulfillment of poetry at its "purest" state. In this thinking, the poetry recording – a modern, technical refiguration of the oral bard – thus recovers a historical condition, one led astray by mass print.

Such assumptions are certainly up for closer study. And yet, for the most part, they remain ignorant of the conditions in which many such recordings came to exist in the first place. Until the mid-1960s, sound recording technology was cost-prohibitive; many recordings labeled "poetry" available prior to the cassette era (and even after it) were produced not by poets and artists themselves, but by organizations with distinct motivations for recording and safekeeping the voices of poets and sounds of poems. In both Germany and the United States, these organizations include ostensibly commercial enterprises, such as literary audiobook publishers, subject both to market and ideological pressures; they include mass-media venues, such as radio (or "Rundfunk"), which broadcast poetry as an instrument of public edification. Importantly, institutions charged with recording poetry are also responsible for immediately archiving it, as well – this includes national libraries and archives, like the Library of Congress, and literary institutions: university-affiliated (in the U.S.), state-funded (in Germany), and financed by philanthropy (in both countries).

This dissertation will study various ways that audio poetry recordings have been produced, published, and archived by institutions in Germany and the United States. Informed by Jerome McGann's call to attend to a work's "textual condition", which refers to its conditions of production, and Jason Camlot's move to attend to the philologies of literary audiotexts, as well, the project aims at shedding light on how a recording's perceived value, utility, and epistemic status are determined not only by poet/performer and readers/listeners, but by the institution that defines, produces, and circulates (or doesn't circulate) the audio poetry recording to audiences. These processes are described as institutionalizations of sound – when sound is not only conceptually defined, but readied for consumption – often in archives, sometimes in records, sometimes online. In deciding how, what, and who is recorded, the recordings not only "capture" poetic sound, but create it in the first place.