Modernist invention : media technology and American poetry / Edward Allen.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Allen, Edward, 1985- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

American poetry--20th century--History and criticism.

American poetry.

Literature and technology.

Technology in literature.

Mass media and literature.

Mass media in literature.

Oral interpretation of poetry.

Genre:

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Physical Description:

xi, 281 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, United Kingdom ; New York, NY : Cambridge University Press, 2020.

Summary:

"The media ecology of North America has long fascinated historians and literary scholars, but what does verse have to tell us about the way sound has evolved? What did it mean for modernist poets to make the mechanics of sound their business? And in what sense did their contriving ways to intervene in the culture of recording and transmission enable the articulation of a more or less 'authentic' voice than the kind earlier generations of poets had cultivated? For the writers considered in this study - Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, and Langston Hughes - such questions were not always easy to resolve, but rather called for a kind of creative troubleshooting, a will to think laterally about the ways a lyric poem might accommodate or become entangled in the most ordinary of technological effects and processes, from telephony to radio waves, phonography to movie-going"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Machine generated contents note: Scientific Revolution

Back to the Future: 1987

The Soundways of Lyric

1. Robert Frost on the Telephone

Tapping Wires

When Nature Turns Outlaw

Emergency Calls

More Than You Can Sing

2. Wallace Stevens and the Radio

Unbroken Sound

Home Truths

Half-Listening

Ideas of Preservation

3. Marianne Moore and the Phonograph

A Record of It All

Rehearsal Notes

High Fidelity

Liberty at Last

4. Langston Hughes at the Cinema

Movies Echo Dramas

Transitioning in the Thirties

Montage Referred

Cullud Movie Actors

Coda: Synchronicity

Appendices

A. A Note on Editions

B. Tracking `The Plumet Basilisk'

C. `Selection from Virginia Britannia'.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781108496322

1108496326

OCLC:

1153450195