The Ancient Phonograph
- ISBN-10
- 1935408925
- ISBN-13
- 9781935408925
- Category
- History
- Pages
- 288
- Language
- English
- Published
- 2016-04-22
- Publisher
- MIT Press
- Author
- Shane Butler
Description
A search for traces of the voice before the phonograph, reconstructing a series of ancient soundscapes from Aristotle to Augustine. Long before the invention of musical notation, and long before that of the phonograph, the written word was unrivaled as a medium of the human voice. In The Ancient Phonograph, Shane Butler searches for traces of voices before Edison, reconstructing a series of ancient soundscapes from Aristotle to Augustine. Here the real voices of tragic actors, ambitious orators, and singing emperors blend with the imagined voices of lovesick nymphs, tormented heroes, and angry gods. The resonant world we encounter in ancient sources is at first unfamiliar, populated by texts that speak and sing, often with no clear difference between the two. But Butler discovers a commonality that invites a deeper understanding of why voices mattered then and why they have mattered since. With later examples that range from Mozart to Jimi Hendrix, Butler offers an ambitious attempt to rethink the voice—as an anatomical presence, a conceptual category, and a source of pleasure and wonder. He carefully and critically assesses the strengths and limits of recent theoretical approaches to the voice by Adriana Cavarero and Mladen Dolar and makes a rich and provocative range of ancient material available for the first time. The Ancient Phonograph will appeal not only to classicists and to voice theorists but to anyone with an interest in the verbal arts—literature, oratory, song—and the nature of aesthetic experience.
Get the book
Similar books
-
Recorded Music in American Life: The Phonograph and Popular Memory, 1890-1945
By William Howland KenneyThroughout the book, Kenney argues that the phonograph and the recording industry served neither to impose a preference for high culture nor a degraded popular taste, but rather expressed a diverse set of sensibilities in which various ...
-
Synaesthesia and the Ancient Senses
By Shane Butler, Alex PurvesIt offers both a fresh look at society in the ancient world and an opportunity to deepen the reading of classical literature. The book will appeal to readers in classical society and literature, philosophy and cultural history.
-
Inventing the Recording: The Phonograph and National Culture in Spain, 1877-1914
By Eva Moreda RodríguezFinally, the book covers the development of an indigenous recording industry dominated by the so-called gabinetes fonográficos, small businesses that sold imported phonographs, produced their own recordings, and shaped early discourses ...
-
Sound and the Ancient Senses
By Shane Butler, Sarah NooterThis volume looks at theories and practices of hearing and producing sounds in ritual contexts, medicine, mourning, music, poetry, drama, erotics, philosophy, rhetoric, linguistics, vocality, and on the page, and shows how ancient ideas of ...
-
Voice and Voices in Antiquity: Orality and Literacy in the Ancient World, Vol. 11
By Niall SlaterVoice and Voices in Antiquity surveys the changing concept of voice and voices in oral traditions and subsequent literary genres of antiquity, both fictional (authorial and characterized) and historical, and from Greece and the Near East to ...
-
The Cambridge History of Japanese Literature
By Haruo Shirane, Tomi SuzukiThe book is arranged topically in a series of short, accessible chapters for easy access and reference, giving insight into both canonical texts and many lesser known, popular genres, from centuries-old folk literature to the detective ...
-
The Mortal Voice in the Tragedies of Aeschylus
By Sarah NooterWhat we have of Aristophanes forays in this field are instructive as to how voice in its least linguistic form was evoked on the stage in fifth-century Athens. One suggestive example comes from his Birds, when the hoopoe, ...
-
Sexing the World: Grammatical Gender and Biological Sex in Ancient Rome
By Anthony CorbeillGrammatical Gender and Biological Sex in Ancient Rome Anthony Corbeill ... Throughout the subsequent centuries, public demonstrations on grammar by a professional teacher continue to be of interest—and even in demand—on what may strike ...
-
Thomas Edison
By Elizabeth MacLeodLearn about Thomas Edison's life and achievements even from as young as twelve years old.
-
The Untold Story of the Talking Book
By Matthew RuberyA detailed account of this tradition is given by Sheila Deane, Bardic Style in the Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, W. B. Yeats and Dylan Thomas (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1989). Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass, read by Ed Begley, ...