Listening to Literature, Hearing History | National Humanities Center

Humanities in Class: Webinar Series

Listening to Literature, Hearing History

Sound Studies; Storytelling; American Literature

Mary Caton Lingold (Associate Professor of English, Virginia Commonwealth University)

February 20, 2018

Is literature a form of sound recording? If so, how can we listen to it? This webinar presents approaches for bringing the study of sound into the literature and history classroom. We will explore specifically how interpreting sounds in historical literature like slave narratives and colonial travel writing opens up new ways of understanding the American past, and specifically early African American experiences. The webinar also introduces a growing digital resource, The Sonic Dictionary, that is being created by university students to enhance the vocabulary of sonic experience.


Subjects

Literature / History / Education Studies / Sound Studies / Storytelling / American Literature /