Faculty Research and Scholarship Presentation Series
English Department – Fall 2016/Spring 2017
Professor Steve Evans starts off this year’s presentation series with his talk, “The Poetics of Phonotextuality: Timbre, Text, and Technology in Recorded Poetry”
While recordings of poetry have been made, disseminated, and archived in a variety of formats from Edison’s day to our own, it is only in the past two decades that the poetic phonotext—here conceived as a unique braid of timbre, text, and technology—has emerged as an object of scholarly attention and theoretical reflection in its own right. This presentation will survey recent developments in phonotextual studies—ranging in scale from individual acts of impressionistic “close listening” to computer-assisted analyses of vast troves of digitized audio—with a focus on the methodological questions that arise when scholars trained in literary hermeneutics, semiotics, and poetics interact with and attempt to make sense of the sonic archive associated with modern and contemporary poetry.
Refreshments will be provided courtesy of the Lloyd H. Elliott Fund.