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January 2, 2013  

Sound at MLA 2013

It is that time of year again: the winter holidays, the new year, and, yes, the Modern Language Association Annual Convention–which finally returns to the East Coast after two years on the West Coast. It will be held in Boston, Massachusetts, from January 3rd to January 6th, 2013. MLA is one of the most present academic conferences on social media, with the active twitter hashtag #MLA13, the individual hashtags for each session (#s–followed by the session number), convention-wide free wifi, and an attentive twitter account (@MLAConvention), so it is easy to get overwhelmed by the commotion even if you are physically away from the conference. However, we’re hoping to make this year’s program (795 official panels in all!) a little easier to digest by bringing you the round-up of the panels with presentations related to sound studies.

“Northeastern University, Boston, MA” by Flickr user ksparrow11 under Creative Commons 2.0 License

This year’s MLA will be preceded by several preconference workshops as well asTHATCamp MLA (on January 2nd, 2013, at Northeastern University). Our editor-in-chief, Jennifer Stoever-Ackerman, will be attending and sharing Sounding Out! as one of the examples at “Evaluating Digital Work for Tenure and Promotion: A Workshop for Evaluators and Candidates,” while I will be at “Getting Started in Digital Humanities with Help from DH Commons” (off-site, at Northeastern University, which explains why it’s not in the program). The editorial staff at Sounding Out! has been thinking for a while about digital humanities and how our work here could be classified as such. (Digital humanities has been defined both in terms of its tools as well as its practices.) Jennifer and I are eager to engage with other DH scholars, ask questions, and think of different ways that sound studies intersects digital humanities.

 

The digital humanities are becoming more and more prominent at MLA; Jennifer posited last year that the number of DH panels could be related to last year’s location, Seattle. On the other hand, Mark Sample points out that this year there are more panels on digital humanities subjects than the last two years (if you are interested, he has a comprehensive round-up of the digital humanities panels at this year’s MLA). It’s fitting then, that some of the sound-related posts in our round-up come from the digital humanities angle. We have also included some session that look at digital humanities methods and practices (like session #639,  Two Tools for Student- Generated Digital Projects: WordPress and Omeka in the Classroom) and that may be of interest to sound-studies scholars.

 

However, the DH panels are not the only panels for sound studies enthusiasts. In addition to several presentations addressing aural phenomena in literature, there are several panels on disability studies that include presentations on deafness. Some of these panels focus on literary representations of disability, but others focus on the disabilities themselves. For example, session 236, titled “Representations of Cultural Resistance: Deafness and Power”  includes a presentation by Rebecca Garden called “Reproducing Deafness: Visual Culture and Pathology.” These panels fit into the Presidential Theme of the conference, “Avenues of Access.”

 
Lastly, Jennifer, regular contributor Osvaldo Oyola, and I will be presenting at this year’s MLA. Jennifer is participating in a roundtable Saturday at 3:30; look out for session #588, “Race and Poetics: On Aesthetic Practice in Ethnic Studies,” which considers cultural difference as seen in different genres and media. Osvaldo is presenting on Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao in session #97, “American Linguistic Plurality.” I will be presenting at a non-sound-studies panel on Friday at noon titled “How Did I Get Here? Our ‘Altac’ Jobs” (s#270). My topic will be how I moved from an adjuncting job to an alternative academic position and how this moved changed my ideas of a career in academia.

If you are not present at MLA, please follow along via Twitter! You can check out the #MLA13 hashtag, but if you’re interested in a particular session from the ones below, you can also search on Twitter for the session number during its scheduled time. You can also check out the conference action by following the official Sounding Out! twitter account (commandeered by our Editor-in-Chief) or following my personal account, @literarychica, for our live-tweets from MLA 2013.

Please comment to let us know what you think–both before and after MLA 2012.  If I somehow missed you or your panel in this round up, please let me know!: lms@soundingoutblog.com

–
Liana M. Silva is co-founder and Managing Editor of Sounding Out!.

Jump to THURSDAY, January 3
Jump to FRIDAY, January 4
Jump to SATURDAY, January 5
Jump to SUNDAY, January 6.

“A Chilly Night in Boston” by Flickr user Stuck in Customs under a Creative Commons 2.0 License

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THURSDAY, January 3

Thursday, January 3

 

8:30–11:30 a.m.

.3.  Evaluating Digital Work for Tenure and Promotion: A Workshop for Evaluators and Candidates

Republic A, Sheraton

Program arranged by the MLA Office of Programs. Presiding: Alison Byerly, Middlebury Coll.; Kathleen Fitzpatrick, MLA; Katherine A. Rowe, Bryn Mawr Coll.

Facilitated discussion about evaluating work in digital media (e.g., scholarly
editions, databases, digital mapping projects, born- digital creative or scholarly
work). Designed for both creators of digital materials and administrators
or colleagues who evaluate those materials, the workshop will propose
strategies for documenting, presenting, and evaluating such work.

Preregistration required.

 

12:00-1:15

 

22. Expanding Access: Building Bridges within Digital Humanities

205, Hynes

A special session.

Presiding: Trent M. Kays, Univ. of Minnesota, Twin Cities; Lee Skallerup Bessette, Morehead State Univ.

Marc Fortin, Queen’s Univ.

Alexander Gil, Univ. of Virginia

Brian Larson, Univ. of Minnesota, Twin Cities

Sophie Marcotte, Concordia Univ.

Ernesto Priego, London, England

 

36. Languages of the Occupy Movement

307, Hynes

Program arranged by the Division on Language and Society. Presiding: Frank Farmer, Univ. of Kansas

Corinne Seals, Georgetown Univ., “Examining the Linguistic Landscape of Occupy”

Corey J. Frost, New Jersey City Univ.,  “Occupy and Rhetorics of Amplification”

Keith Spencer, Carnegie Mellon Univ., “Class, Race, and the ‘Common Man’: Interviews with Occupy Pittsburgh”

Respondent: Frank Farmer

 

40. Hearing and Seeing Anew: Ralph Ellison’s Aural and Visual ;8Registers

Beacon A, Sheraton

A special session. Presiding: Horace Porter, Univ. of Iowa

Shanna Greene Benjamin, Grinnell Coll. “Listening inside a Glass Box: Mary Rambo’s Lessons for Invisible Man”

Herman Beavers, Univ. of Pennsylvania, “The Noisy Lostness: Oppositionality and Acousmatic Subjectivity in Invisible Man”

Lena Michelle Hill, Univ. of Iowa, ”Silent Sights of Fatherhood in Three Days before the Shooting…”

Respondent: Kenneth W. Warren, Univ. of Chicago

 

3:30–4:45 p.m

 

94. Modernism and the Senses

Beacon D, Sheraton

A special session. Presiding: Alex Niven, Univ. of Oxford; Stephen Ross, Univ. of Oxford, Saint John’s Coll.

Jonathan Day, Univ. of Oxford, Saint John’s Coll. “Cognitive Realism and the Problem of Qualia”

Matt Langione, Univ. of California, Berkeley, “Modernizing Modernism: Intentionality, Neuroscience, and the Sense of Modernist Poetry”

 

97. American Linguistic Plurality

203, Hynes

Program arranged by the Discussion Group on Literature of the United States in Languages Other Than English. Presiding: Heidi Kathleen Kim,Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Audrey Wu Clark,United States Naval Acad., “Dialects of Regionalist Modernism in Sui Sin Far’s Mrs. Spring Fragrance”

Benjamin A. Railton, Fitchburg State Univ., “Vocal Color: Recovering an Alternative, Multilingual American Literary Realism”

Osvaldo Oyola, Binghamton Univ., State Univ. of New York, “Traduciendo de el Dork: Cultural and Lingual Syncretism in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,”

Melissa Dennihy, Graduate Center, City Univ. of New York “Hybrid Tongues: Linguistic Innovations and Inventions in Contemporary Multiethnic United States Literature”

 

102. Digital Diasporas

Public Garden, Sheraton

Program arranged by the Division on Black American Literature and Culture. Presiding: Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Stanford Univ.

Corrie Claiborne, Morehouse Coll., “Living Word”

Adam Banks, Univ. of Kentucky, “Digital Griots”

Marcyliena Morgan, Harvard Univ., “Hip- Hop Archives”

 

107. The Linguistic Construction of Narrative Space

313, Hynes

Program arranged by the Division on Linguistic Approaches to Literature. Presiding: Monika Fludernik, Univ. of Freiburg

Robert Troyer, Western Oregon Univ., “Locating Action in the Postapocalyptic Text World of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road”

Birgitta Svensson, Stockholm Univ., “Acting, Being, Sensing, and Saying: Analyzing Characters with a Functional Language Approach,”

Pauline Bleuse, Grand Valley State Univ., “Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange; or, The Use of an Unfamiliar Language to Relate Controversy”

 

5:15–6:30 p.m.

 

125. Translating for (and from) the Italian Screen: Dubbing and Subtitles

201, Hynes

Program arranged by the American Association for Italian Studies. Presiding: Philip Balma, Univ. of Connecticut, Storrs

Anna Belladelli, Univ. of Verona, “Misrepresentations and Re- representations of Otherness in the Italian Dubbing of United States TV Series,”

Giulia Centineo, Univ. of California, Santa Cruz “Dubbing Hollywood and Difference,”

Daniele Fioretti, Miami Univ., Oxford, “Qualunquista Equals Socialist? Political Issues in the Subtitling of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s La ricotta,”

 

129. Teaching in the Shallows: Reading, Writing, and Teaching in the Digital Age
Berkeley, Sheraton

A special session. Presiding: Robert R. Bleil, Coll. of Coastal Georgia; Jennifer Gray, Coll. of Coastal Georgia.

Speakers: Susan Cook, Southern New Hampshire Univ.; Christopher Dickman, Saint Louis Univ.; T. Geiger, Syracuse Univ.; Jennifer Gray; Matthew Parfitt, Boston Univ.; James Sanchez, Texas Christian Univ.

Respondent: Robert R. Bleil

Nicholas Carr’s 2008 article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” and his 2010 book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains argue that the paradigms of our digital lives have shifted significantly in two decades of living life online. This roundtable unites teachers of composition and literature to explore cultural, psychological, and developmental changes for students and teachers.

 

140. Illness and Disability in Asian American Literature

Hampton, Sheraton

Program arranged by the Division on Asian American Literature. Presiding: Anita Mannur, Miami Univ., Oxford

Cynthia Wu, Univ. at Buffalo, State Univ. of New York, “Daniel K. Inouye’s Journey to Washington: Disability and the Hidden Privileges of Local Japanese Ascendancy in Hawai‘i,”

Ellen Samuels, Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison, “Multilinguality and ‘Deaf Speech’ in Betty Quan’s Mother Tongue,”

Rick H. Lee, Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, “SIN, HIV, SFO: AIDS, the Body, and Justin Chin’s Corpus,”

James Kyung-Jin Lee, Univ. of California, Irvine, “Against Asian American Health: Vibrant Secularities and Medical Narratives of Illness”

 

142. What’s Place Got to Do with It? Voices and Vision in Midwestern Literature

Beacon G, Sheraton

Program arranged by the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature. Presiding: Marilyn Judith Atlas, Ohio Univ., Athens

Andy Oler, Indiana Univ., Bloomington, “‘High and Fervently They Were Singing’: Voice, Space, and Midwestern Modernity in Langston Hughes’s 1930 Novel Not without Laughter”

Alexander Engebretson, Graduate Center, City Univ. of New York, “The Midwest Seen New Englandly: Regional Tensions in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead”

James Alfred Lewin, Shepherd Univ., “Sara Paretsky’s ‘Other’ Chicago”

 

7:00–8:15 p.m.

 

152. Political Trauma and Literary Alchemy: Testimonios and the Regenerative Power of Language

202, Hynes

A special session. Presiding: Jennifer Browdy De Hernandez, Bard Coll. at Simon’s Rock

Speakers: Nicole Caso, Bard Coll.; Martha Helena Montoya Velez, Universidad Autónoma de la Ciudad de México; Alicia Partnoy, Loyola Marymount Univ.; Maria del Carmen Sillato, Univ. of Waterloo; Y. L. Mariela Wong, Coll. of Mount Saint Vincent

To mark the fortieth anniversary of the Pinochet coup in Chile and nearly forty years since the military takeover in Argentina, this session features three Southern Cone testimonialists, who will read passages from their works, and three respondents, who will lead a discussion on the power of narrative to resist a legacy of violence and fear. For excerpts from the three testimonials, visit bethechange2012.wordpress.com/mla-2013-testimonios.

 

155. Movements, Incantations, and Parables of Queer Performance

201, Hynes

A special session. Presiding: Ann Pellegrini, New York Univ.

Sean Edgecomb, Univ. of Queensland, “Queer Movement: The Mystique of Alexander Guerra’s Traveling Rabbit”

Eng- Beng Lim, Brown Univ., “Incantatory Pinkness from Singapore to Utah”

Carrie J. Preston, Boston Univ., “Queer Christian Submission in Drag: Benjamin Britten and William Plomer’s Curlew River”

165. Beyond the PDF: Experiments in Open-Access Scholarly Publishing

Hampton, Sheraton

A special session

Speakers: Douglas M. Armato, Univ. of Minnesota Press; Jamie Skye Bianco, Univ. of Pittsburgh; Matthew K. Gold, New York City Coll. of Tech., City Univ. of New York; Jennifer Laherty, Indiana Univ., Bloomington; Monica McCormick, New York Univ.; Katie Rawson, Emory Univ.

As open- access scholarly publishing matures and movements such as the Elsevier boycott continue to grow, open- access publications have begun to move beyond the simple (but crucial) principle of openness toward an ideal of interactivity. This session will explore innovative examples of open-access scholarly publishing that showcase new types of social, interactive, mixed- media texts.

For abstracts and discussion, visit beyondthepdf.wordpress.com/ after 1 Nov.

 

167. Digital Humanities and Theory

Riverway, Sheraton

A special session. Presiding: Stefano Franchi, Texas A&M Univ., College Station

Geoffrey Rockwell, Univ. of Alberta, ”Theoretical Things for the Humanities”

Stefano Franchi, “From Artificial Intelligence to Artistic Practices: A New Theoretical Model for the Digital Humanities,”

David Washington, Loyola Univ., New Orleans, “Object- Oriented Ontology: Escaping the Title of the Book”

For abstracts, visit dhcommons.tamu.edu.

 

177. Hybridity and Multilingualism in Yiddish

308, Hynes

Program arranged by the Discussion Group on Yiddish Literature. Presiding: Sarah Ponichtera, Columbia Univ.

Ken Frieden, Syracuse Univ., “Mysticism and Its Discontents: Hasidic and Anti- Hasidic Narratives between Hebrew and Yiddish”

Nikki Halpern, Université Paris Diderot 7, “Memory Palace, Yiddish Ghetto (Isaac Bashevis Singer and That Vexatious Yiddish Identity)”

Saul Zaritt, Jewish Theological Seminary, “The Master from Krochmalna Street: Isaac Bashevis Singer and World Literature,”

“Boston Custom House Tower at Night” by Flickr user Manu_H under Creative Commons 2.0 License

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Friday, January 4

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FRIDAY, JANUARY 4
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8:30–9:45 a.m.

 

204. Theorizing Indigenous Literatures in Latin America

303, Hynes

A special session. Presiding: Kelly S. McDonough, Univ. of Texas, Austin

Ulises Juan Zevallos-Aguilar, Ohio State Univ., Columbus, “Diglossia and Linguistic Registers: Toward a Sociolinguistic Reading of Peruvian Quechua Literature/ Hacia una lectura sociolingüística de la literatura quechua peruana”

Susan Foote, Univ. of Concepción, Chile, “Mapuche Testimony and Poetry in Chile: Poetic and Prose Discourse over Time”

Adam Coon, Univ. of Texas, Austin, “Icnotlahtolli / Migrant Words: Indigenous Theoretical Approaches to Migration in Contemporary Nahua Literature”

Ramsey Tracy, Trinity Coll., CT, “Indigenous Narrative from Oral Performance to Text: Semantic and Structural Aesthetic Concerns as Applied to the Work of Literary Translation”

 

209. Humanities in the Twenty- First Century: Innovation in Research and Practice

Commonwealth, Sheraton

Program arranged by the Division on Teaching as a Profession. Presiding: Christine Henseler, Union Coll., NY

Lynn Pasquerella, Mount Holyoke Coll., “The Promise of Humanities Practice”

David Theo Goldberg, Univ. of California, Irvine, “Making the Humanities ‘Count’”

Jane Aikin, National Endowment for the Humanities, “The National Endowment for the Humanities”

Christine Henseler, “The Humanities in the Digital Age”

 

220. Image, Voice, Text: Canadian Literature

Beacon D, Sheraton

Program arranged by the Discussion Group on Canadian Literature in English. Presiding: Sophie McCall, Simon Fraser Univ., Burnaby

Sunny Chan, Univ. of British Columbia, “AvantGarde.ca: Toward a Canadian Alienethnic Poetics of the Internet”

Hannah McGregor, Univ. of Guelph, “Intermedial Witnessing in Karen Connelly’s Burmese Lessons”

Sarah Henzi, Univ. of Montreal, “Aboriginal New Media: Alternative Forms of Storytelling”

For abstracts, write to smccall@sfu.ca after 15 Nov.

 

10:15–11:30 a.m.

 

223. “Spanglish” and Identity within and outside the Classroom

206, Hynes

Program arranged by the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese. Presiding: Domnita Dumitrescu, California State Univ., Los Angeles

Robert Train, Sonoma State Univ., “Becoming Bilingual, Becoming Ourselves: Archival Memories of Spanglish in Early Californian Epistolary Texts”

Jorgelina Fidia Corbatta, Wayne State Univ., “Gloria Anzaldúa’s Discourse as a Mestiza and Queer Writer”

Ana Sánchez-Muñoz, California State Univ., Northridge, “‘Who soy yo?’: The Creative Use of Spanglish to Express a Hybrid Identity in Chicano/a Heritage Language Learners of Spanish”

Regan Postma, Albertson Coll. of Idaho, “‘¿Por qué leemos esto en la clase de español?’: The Politics of Teaching Literature in Spanglish”

 

236. Representations of Cultural Resistance: Deafness and Power

Hampton, Sheraton

A special session. Presiding: Rebecca Garden, Upstate Medical Univ., State Univ. of New York

Christopher Becker Krentz, Univ. of Virginia, “Deaf Literature, Medicine, and the Paradoxes of Identity”

Rebecca Garden, “Reproducing Deafness: Visual Culture and Pathology”

Lennard J. Davis, Univ. of Illinois, Chicago, “Cochlear Wars: Deaf Culture against Science?”

 

237. Access to What? A Roundtable on Public Scholarship, Community Engagement, and Diversity

Fairfax A, Sheraton

A special session. Presiding: Bruce Burgett, Univ. of Washington, Bothell

Speakers: Jodi Melamed, Marquette Univ.; Ifeoma C. K. Nwankwo, Vanderbilt Univ.; Imani Perry, Princeton Univ.; Chandan Reddy, Univ. of Washington, Seattle; Doris Sommer, Harvard Univ.

Respondent: Gregory S. Jay, Univ. of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

Questions of access in higher education most often focus on who gets in, who is left out, and how the sorting of life chances plays out across the larger institutional landscape. (is roundtable shifts that conversation by linking the question of “Access for whom?” to the equally pressing issue of “Access to what?”

 

239. Representing Race: Silence in the Digital Humanities

Gardner, Sheraton

A special session. Presiding: Adeline Koh, Richard Stockton Coll. of New Jersey

Speakers: Moya Bailey, Emory Univ.; Anne Cong-Huyen, Univ. of California, Santa Barbara; Hussein Keshani, Univ. of British Columbia; Maria Velazquez, Univ. of Maryland, College Park

Respondent: Alondra Nelson, Columbia Univ.

This panel examines the politics of race, ethnicity, and silence in the digital humanities. How has the digital humanities remained silent on issues of race and ethnicity? How does this silence reinforce unspoken assumptions and doxa? What is the function of racialized silences in digital archival projects?

For links and participant biographies, visit www.adelinekoh .org/ blog/2012/04/02/racend/.

 

12:00-1:15 pm

 

270. How Did I Get Here? Our “Altac” Jobs

Back Bay B, Sheraton

A special session. Presiding: Brenda Bethman, Univ. of Missouri, Kansas City

Speakers: Donna M. Bickford, Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Brian Croxall, Emory Univ.; Kathryn Linder, Suffolk Univ.; Liana Silva, Univ. of Kansas; Sarah Werner, Folger Shakespeare Library

Respondent: C. Shaun Longstreet, Marquette Univ.

This roundtable features “alternative academics” who will discuss the paths to their “altac” job, including opportunities and challenges that come with altac positions, strategies universities might employ to maximize and leverage PhD- prepared administrators, preparing graduate students for altac jobs, the role of mentoring, and differences between altac, adjunct, and tenure- track jobs.

For a longer description of the panel and panelists’ bios, see bit.ly/JqjHdj

 

1:30–3:30 p.m.

 

295. Getting Funded in the Humanities: An NEH Workshop

210, Hynes

Program arranged by the Office of the Executive Director. Presiding: Jason+C. Rhody, National Endowment for the Humanities

This workshop will highlight recent awards and outline current funding opportunities. In addition to emphasizing grant programs that support individual and collaborative research and education, the workshop will include information on the NEH’s Office of Digital Humanities. A question-and-answer period will follow.

 

1:45–3:30 p.m.

 

296. Tuning In to the Phoneme: Phonetic and Phonological Nuances in Second Language Acquisition

306, Hynes

A forum arranged by the Linguistic Society of America and the MLA. Presiding: Bryan Kirschen, Univ. of California, Los Angeles

Christine Shea, Univ. of Iowa, “Orthography Modulates Phonological Activation in a Second Language”

Jane Hacking, Univ. of Utah; Rachel Hayes- Harb, Univ. of Utah, “Orthographic and Auditory Contributions to Second- Language Word Learning: Native English Speakers Learning Russian Lexical Stress”

Polina Vasiliev, Univ. of California, Los Angeles, “Native English Speakers’ Perception of Spanish and Portuguese Vowels: The Initial State of L2 Acquisition”

Viola Miglio, Univ. of California, Santa Barbara; Eva Wheeler, Univ. of California, Santa Barbara, “Pronunciation of Basque as L2 by American English Native Speakers: Problems and L1 Interference”

The difficulties L2 learners have in perceiving and producing target- language sounds accurately manifest themselves in the perception and production of vowels, consonants, and suprasegmental features like intonation and stress, as well as in word recognition. Each presentation brings a different perspective on these issues, demonstrating a variety of means and methodologies available in exploring such themes.

For further details, visit www .linguisticsociety .org/meetings-institutes/ annual-meetings/2013.

 

3:30–4:45 p.m.

 

343. All Ears: Listening as a Way of Understanding Literature

Independence East, Sheraton

A special session. Presiding: Chiara Alfano, Univ. of Sussex

Speakers: David Ben- Merre, State Univ. of New York, Buffalo State Coll.; Paul Gordon, Univ. of Colorado, Boulder; May Peckham, Washington Univ. in St. Louis; Jessica Teague, Columbia Univ.

This roundtable seeks to start a discussion on the interface between accounts of listening to literature and listening as reading literature. Although the specific focus will be on literature and theory of the twentieth century, the roundtable will resonate with all who are interested in learning to read with their ears.

 

350. Puerto Rican Print Cultures

208, Hynes

Program arranged by the Discussion Group on Puerto Rican Literature and Culture. Presiding: Tomás Urayoán Noel, Univ. at Albany, State Univ. of New York

Kahlil Chaar-Pérez, Harvard Univ., “Letters of Bondage: Blackface and the Merengue Craze in El Ponceño, 1852– 54”

Anne Garland Mahler, Emory Univ., “The Linguistic Politics of Piri Thomas: African American Vernacular English and Racial Discourse in Down These Mean Streets”

Juan Rodriguez, Georgia Inst. of Tech., “Poesía, imagen y tecnología en Rizoma de Áurea María Sotomayor”

Respondent: Rubén Ríos Ávila, Univ. of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras

 

353. Avenues of Access: Digital Humanities and the Future of Scholarly Communication

Republic Ballroom, Sheraton

A linked session arranged in conjunction with The Presidential Forum: Avenues of Access (112).

Presiding: Michael Bérubé, Penn State Univ., University Park

Matthew Kirschenbaum, Univ. of Maryland, College Park, “The Mirror and the LAMP”

Cathy N. Davidson, Duke Univ., “Access Demands a Paradigm Shift”

Bethany Nowviskie, Univ. of Virginia, “Resistance in the Materials”

The news that digital humanities are the next big thing must come as a pleasant surprise to people who have been working in the field for decades. Yet only recently has the scholarly community at large realized that developments in new media have implications not only for the form but also for the content of scholarly communication. This session will explore some of those implications—for scholars, for libraries, for journals, and for the idea of intellectual property.

 

363. African Testimonial Literature

209, Hynes

Program arranged by the Division on African Literatures. Presiding: Joya F. Uraizee, Saint Louis Univ.

Kimberly Nance, Illinois State Univ., “‘Use Beginning, Middle, and End’: Testimonial Narrative as Reintegrative Therapy in Delia Jarrett- Macauley’s Moses, Citizen and Me”

Tamara Moellenberg, Univ. of Oxford, Brasenose Coll., “New Lacunae: Silence and the Child Soldier”

James D. B. McCorkle, Hobart and William Smith Colls., “In the Shadow of Rwanda: Boubacar Boris Diop, Tierno Monénembo, and Véronique Tadjo and the Literature of Testimony”

Jessica Roberts, Queen’s Univ., “Contested Testimonials: Child Soldier Memoirs”

 

5:15–6:30 p.m.

 

399. Term Limits: The Language of the Presidential Campaign

Commonwealth, Sheraton

Program arranged by the Division on Language and Society. Presiding: Bruce W. Robbins, Columbia Univ.

Speakers: David Bromwich, Yale Univ.; Donald E. Pease, Dartmouth Coll.; Hortense Jeanette Spillers, Vanderbilt Univ.

Three perspectives by distinguished scholars on the language used by the candidates in the 2012 presidential campaign.

“Boston Sunset” by Flickr user bettlebrox under Creative Commons 2.0 License

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SATURDAY, January 5

SATURDAY, January 5

 

8:30–9:45 a.m.

 

432. Aural Literature and Close Listening

Beacon H, Sheraton

A special session. Presiding: Michelle Nancy Levy, Simon Fraser Univ., Burnaby

Matthew Rubery, Univ. of London, Queen Mary Coll. “The Case against Audiobooks”

Cornelius Collins, Fordham Univ., Bronx, “Aural Literacy in a Visual Era: Is Anyone Listening?”

Justin St. Clair, Univ. of South Alabama, “Novel Sound Tracks and the Future of Hybridized Reading”

Lisa A. Hollenbach, Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison, “Poetry as MP3: PennSound, Poetry Recording, and the New Digital Archive”

For abstracts, write to mnl@sfu.ca

 

442. Reading Aloud to Revise: Exploring the Role of Intonation in Silent Written Language

Fairfax B, Sheraton

A special session. Presiding: Peter Elbow, Univ. of Massachusetts, Amherst

Reading aloud to revise is a celebrated practice, but it is too little taught as a concrete skill and too little analyzed from a linguistic point of view. In this workshop, participants will explore this valuable teaching technique. We will work on sample passages by reading them aloud with attention to rhythm and sound and will analyze the linguistics of intonation to show why the tongue is a reliable guide to strong clear prose.

For two chapters from Elbow’s recent book, write to elbow@english.umass.edu.

 

12:00 noon–1:15 p.m.

 

497. Redefining the “Fossilized” Language of the Twenty- First Century

201, Hynes

Program arranged by the Discussion Group on General Linguistics. Presiding: Marnie Jo Petray, California Polytechnic State Univ., San Luis Obispo

Bryan Kirschen, Univ. of California, Los Angeles, “Contemporary Linguistic Features of ‘Cervantine’ Judeo- Spanish”

Nassima Neggaz, Georgetown Univ., “Syria’s Arab Spring: Language Enrichment in the Midst of Revolution”

Covadonga Lamar Prieto, Univ. of California, Riverside, “Fossilized Features in 1:45–3:00 p.m.Contemporary California Spanish and Their Relation with Historical California Spanish”

 

1:45–3:00 p.m.

 

539. Gendered Blues Subjectivities and Racial Politics across Southern History

Beacon F, Sheraton

A special session. Presiding: Adam Gussow, Univ. of Mississippi

Adam Gussow, “Thee Devil’s Son-in- Law: Blues Masculinity, Interracial Sexuality, and the Infrapolitics of Jim Crow”

Courtney George, Columbus State Univ., “‘What Would the Music Be Like?’: Revolutionary Music in Alice Walker’s Meridian”

Nicholas Gorrell, Univ. of Mississippi, “‘If Your Heart Been Broken, Call on the Handy Man’: Female Sexuality and Revisionist Masculinities in Contemporary Southern Soul-Blues”

Respondent: R. A. Lawson, Dean Coll.

For abstracts, write to ngorrell@olemiss.edu after 15 Nov.

 

546. Taste, Touch, Hear: Race, Science, and the Senses in the Nineteenth Century

Beacon A, Sheraton

A special session. Presiding: Kyla Wazana Tompkins, Pomona Coll.

Uri McMillan, Univ. of California, Los Angeles, “An Echo across Centuries: Joice Heth’s Sonic of Dissent”

Kyla Schuller, Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, “Touching Time: Frances E.W. Harper’s Evolutionary Aesthetics”

Kyla Wazana Tompkins, “Lifestyle Eugenics: Joel Chandler Harris and the Birth of Victim Citizenship”

 

550. The Classroom as Interface

Hampton, Sheraton

A special session. Presiding: Kathi Inman Berens, Univ. of Southern California

Elizabeth Mathews Losh, Univ. of California, San Diego, “The Campus as Interface: Screening the University”

Jason Farman, Univ. of Maryland, College Park, “Being Distracted in the Digital Age”

Kathi Inman Berens, “Virtual Classroom Software: A Medium-Specific Analysis”

Leeann Hunter, Georgia Inst. of Tech., “The Multisensory Classroom”

 

566. Wonder and Marvel in Cross- Cultural Encounter

207, Hynes

Program arranged by the Discussion Group on Romance Literary Relations. Presiding: Lynn Ramey, Vanderbilt Univ.

Paula Park, Univ. of Texas, Austin, “The Utopian Impulse to Archive New Sounds in Alejo Carpentier’s The Lost Steps”

Laure M. Marcellesi, Dartmouth Coll., “Sexual Misunderstandings: First European Encounters with Tahiti”

Danielle Carlotti-Smith, Univ. of Virginia, “Le choc avec le réel: Intertextual Encounters in the French West Indies”

For abstracts, visit my.vanderbilt .edu/lynnramey/mla2013/.

 

569. One Hundred Years of The Rite of Spring

305, Hynes

Program arranged by the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages. Presiding: Rebecca Jane Stanton, Barnard Coll.

Francoise Rosset, Wheaton Coll., MA, ”The Rite of Spring: Roerich’s Pagan Past”

Marilyn Sizer, Seattle, WA, “The Rite of Spring: Stravinsky’s Mysterium”

Carol Rowntree Jones, Nottingham, England, “The Rite of Spring: Pina Bausch; Danger; and a Woman, Writing”

Respondent: Harlow L. Robinson, Northeastern Univ.

For abstracts, visit http://mlaslavic2013.blogspot.com/.

 

3:30–4:45 p.m.

 

577. Science and Technology in Afro-Modern Literature

Beacon D, Sheraton

A special session. Presiding: Marques Redd, Marquette Univ.

Marques Redd, “The Technology of the Ancient Egyptian Future: The Cosmic Poetry of Sun Ra”

Zakiyyah Jackson, Univ. of Virginia, “The Future Is a Parasite: Octavia Butler and Posthumanism”

Beth M. Coleman, Harvard Univ., “Race as Technology: Ideologies and Literatures of ‘ Post- Race’ Identity”

 

583. Intellectual and Cognitive Disability Studies

Beacon F, Sheraton

A special session. Presiding: John N. Allen, Milwaukee Area Technical Coll.

Sarah Pett, Univ. of York, “‘Aphasia’s Fingerprints’: Language Impairment, Autobiography, and Fiction in Paul West’s The Shadow Factory”

Michelle Jarman, Univ. of Wyoming, “The Savant and the Silent Subject: Challenging the Hierarchy of the Autism Spectrum”

John N. Allen, “The Reception of The Memory Keeper’s Daughter and the Discourse of Down Syndrome”

 

588. Race and Poetics: On Aesthetic Practice in Ethnic Studies

Beacon A, Sheraton

A special session. Presiding: Nathan Grant, Saint Louis Univ.

Speakers: John Alba Cutler, Northwestern Univ.; Samantha Pinto, Georgetown Univ.; Libbie Ri-in, Georgetown Univ.; Jennifer Stoever- Ackerman, Binghamton Univ., State Univ. of New York

Respondent: Kandice Chuh, Graduate Center, City Univ. of New York

This roundtable will consider cultural forms of difference across a range of genres, including the lyric, collaborative authorship, and radio. We will focus on how aesthetics shifts some of the major tenants of ethnic studies, looking at major as well as neglected authors across African American, Latino/a, Asian American, and anglophone postcolonial studies.

 

5:15-6:30 pm

 

616. Poetic Occupations: From the Great Depression to the “Great Recession”

Independence East, Sheraton

A special session. Presiding: Sarah Ehlers, Univ. of South Dakota

John Marsh, Penn State Univ., University Park, “Percentile Poetics and Distributive Justice”

Sarah Ehlers, “‘The Left Needs Rhythm’: Poetry Speaks the Depression”

Paula Rabinowitz, Univ. of Minnesota, Twin Cities, “Class Ventriloquism: Women’s Letters, Lectures, Lyrics”

 

621. Reading, Reading Machines, and Machine Reading

Gardner, Sheraton

Program arranged by the Discussion Group on Media and Literature. Presiding: Jessica Pressman, American Council of Learned Socs.

Matthew Rubery, Univ. of London, Queen Mary Coll., “Phonographic Reading Machines”

Katherine Wilson, Alelphi Univ., “Mechanical Mediations of Miniature Text: Reading Microform”

Mara Mills, New York Univ., “Between Human and Machine, a Printed Sheet: (e Early History of OCR (Optical Character Recognition)”

 

631. Literary Theory and American Sign Language Literature

Hampton, Sheraton

Program arranged by the MLA Committee on Disability Issues in the Profession. Presiding: Jill Marie Bradbury, Gallaudet Univ.

Rebecca Terese Sanchez, Fordham Univ., Bronx, “‘Human Bodies Are Words’: The Poetics of Deaf Voice”

“The Gaze: Film Studies and the Flying Words Project,” Pamela Kincheloe, Rochester Inst. of Tech.

“ASL Protest Poetry and Refashioning the Traditional Oral Epic,” Kristen%C. Harmon, Gallaudet Univ.

 

639. Two Tools for Student- Generated Digital Projects: WordPress and Omeka in the Classroom

Back Bay B, Sheraton

A special session. Presiding: Gabrielle Dean, Johns Hopkins Univ., MD

Speakers: Amanda L. French, George Mason Univ.; George Williams, Univ. of South Carolina, Spartanburg

This “master class” will focus on integrating two digital tools into the classroom to facilitate studentgenerated projects: Omeka, for the creation of archives and exhibits, and WordPress, for the creation of blogs and Web sites. We will discuss what kinds of assignments work with each tool, how to get started, and how to evaluate assignments. Bring a laptop (not a tablet) for hands- on work.

“060701boylston1″ by Flickr user Dan4th under Creative Commons 2.0 License. In the background is the Hynes Convention Center

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SUNDAY, January 6

Sunday, January 6

 

8:30–9:45 a.m.

 

692. Baroque Forces

303, Hynes

Program arranged by the Division on Colonial Latin American Literatures. Presiding: Anna H. More, Univ. of California, Los Angeles

Ivonne del Valle, Univ. of California, Berkeley, “Colonial Baroque: Violence as History”

Lisa Voigt, Ohio State Univ., Columbus, “Festive Forces in Potosí”

José Francisco Robles, El Colegio de México, “Sigüenza y Vico”

Rachel Spaulding, Univ. of New Mexico, Albuquerque, “The Baroque Voice: Syncretic Afro- Catholic Performance and Power in the Visions of Early Modern Brazil’s Rosa Maria Egipçiaca”

 

693. Theorizing Digital Practice, Practicing Digital Theory

Liberty A, Sheraton

Program arranged by the MLA Committee on Information Technology. Presiding: Victoria E. Szabo, Duke Univ.

Tanya E. Clement, Univ. of Texas, Austin, “What Text Mining and Visualizations Have to Do with Feminist Scholarly Inquiries”

Dana Solomon, Univ. of California, Santa Barbara, “Building the Infrastructural Layer: Reading Data Visualization in the Digital Humanities”

Stephanie Boluk, Vassar Coll., “What Should We Do with Our Games?”

Respondent: Victoria E. Szabo

For abstracts, visit people.duke.edu/~ves4/mla13/.

 

10:15–11:30 a.m.

 

698. Intonation and Poetic Convention

Dalton, Sheraton

A special session. Presiding: Natalie E. Gerber, State Univ. of New York, Fredonia; Benjamin Glaser, Skidmore Coll.

Benjamin Glaser, “Libraries of Rhythm”

Thomas Cable, Univ. of Texas, Austin, “When Free Verse Is Not Free Enough”

Steve Willard, Univ. of California, San Diego “Suffused Selves: Intertextual Poetics, Intonation, and Prosody,”

Respondent: Natalie E. Gerber

For abstracts, write to gerber@ fredonia.edu.

 

700. May 4 Voices: Teaching about the 1970 Kent State Shootings through Oral History and Drama

Back Bay A, Sheraton

A special session. Presiding: Robert Balla, Univ. of Akron

Speakers: Robert Balla; Kenneth Bindas, Kent State Univ., Kent; Katherine Burke, Theatre of the Oppressed, Inc.; David Hassler, Kent State Univ., Kent

Roundtable discussion of May 4 Voices, an oral history play about the Kent State student shootings of 1970. The session will explore the play’s usefulness in multiple pedagogical settings. Panelists will describe their experiences with May 4 Voices in diverse disciplines and elicit audience responses, along with ideas for incorporating the play into humanities curricula.

 

701. Trauma, Affect, and Genre in African American Culture

Riverway, Sheraton

A special session. Presiding: Cherise Smith, Univ. of Texas, Austin

Speakers: Stephanie Batiste, Univ. of California, Santa Barbara; Sonnet Retman, Univ. of Washington, Seattle; Christina Sharpe, Tufts Univ.; Cherise Smith; Lisa Thompson, Univ. of Austin

In this roundtable, we turn to a range of cultural media, from plays and photographs to novels and musicals, to explore the ways that various African American artists historicize and politicize racial trauma through the innovative use of genre and its affective possibilities.

 

702. South Asian- izing the Digital Humanities

209, Hynes

A special session. Presiding: Rahul Gairola, Univ. of Washington, Seattle

Suchismita Banerjee, Univ. of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, “Creating Alternate Voices: Exploring South Asian Cyberfeminism”

Waseem Anwar, Forman Christian Coll., “Digitizing Pakistani Literary Forms; or, E/Merging the Transcultural”

Rashmi Bhatnagar, Univ. of Pittsburgh“Reimagining Aesthetic Education: Digital Humanities in the Global South”

Respondent: Amritjit Singh, Ohio Univ., Athens

For abstracts, write to rgairola@uw.edu after 1 Dec 2012.

 

708. Victorian Oral Culture, circa 1861–1901

Public Garden, Sheraton

A special session. Presiding: Anne Zwierlein, Univ. of Regensburg

John Plunkett, Univ. of Exeter, “Ways with Words: Peepshows, Panoramas, and the Showman- Lecturer”

Janice Schroeder, Carleton Univ., “The Schooled Voice: Sound and Sense in the Reports of the School Inspectorate”

John M. Picker, Massachusetts Inst. of Tech., “Siri Love, circa 1900: Voice Engine Fictions in the Age of Synergy”

For abstracts, visit www.uni-regensburg.de/sprache-literatur-kultur/anglistik/staff/zwierlein/index.html

 

715. Philip Roth’s Music

Liberty B, Sheraton

A special session. Presiding: Aimee Lynn Pozorski, Central Connecticut State Univ.

Ira Nadel, Univ. of British Columbia, “Philip Roth and the Music of Seduction”

Aimee Lynn Pozorski, “Nationalism, Lyricism, and Self- Loathing in I Married a Communist and Indignation”

Matthew Shipe, Washington Univ. in St. Louis, “Dream a Little Dream: Music as Counternarrative in Philip Roth’s Late Fiction”

Respondent: B. Jane Statlander- Slote, Miami International Univ. of Art and Design

For abstracts, visit rothsociety.org after 15 Dec.

 

1:45–3:00 p.m.

 

793. Anthropomorphism

206, Hynes

Program arranged by the Division on Comparative Studies in Romanticism and the Nineteenth Century. Presiding: Sara Guyer, Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison

Helmut Heinz Müller- Sievers, Univ. of Colorado, Boulder, “Making the Gestell Sing: Romantic Music Theory, Virtuoso Performance, and the Aesthetics of Machines”

Jessica Kuskey, Syracuse Univ., “Industrial Anthropomorphism and the Victorian Factory Question”

Monique Allewaert, Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison, “Antimorphism”

 

795. Literature and Digital Pedagogies

Fairfax A, Sheraton

A special session. Presiding: Anaïs Saint- Jude, Stanford Univ.

“Teaching Modernism Traditionally and Digitally: What We May Learn from New Digital Tutoring Models by Khan Academy and Udacity,” Petra Dierkes- Thrun, Stanford Univ.

“Digital Resources and the Medieval- Literature Classroom,” Robin Wharton, Georgia Inst. of Tech.

“Toward a New Hybrid Pedagogy: Embodiment and Learning in the Classroom 2.0,” Pete Rorabaugh, Georgia State Univ.; Jesse Stommel, Marylhurst Univ.

For abstracts, visit litilluminations.wordpress.com/ after 1 Dec.

“after hours” by Flickr user haydnseek under Creative Commons License 2.0

July 16, 2012  

Listening to Tinnitus: Roles of Media When Hearing Breaks Down

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Editor’s Note: Welcome to the third installment in our month-long exploration of listening in observation of World Listening Day on July 18, 2012.  For the full introduction to the series click here.  To peep the previous posts, click here. Otherwise, prepare yourself to listen carefully as Mack Hagood contemplates how sound studies scholars can help tinnitus sufferers (and vice versa).  –JSA

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One January morning in 2006, Joel Styzens woke up and life sounded different. Superimposed over the quiet ambience of his Chicago apartment was a cluster of sounds: pure, high-pitched tones like those of a hearing test. Loud, steady, and constant, they weren’t going away.  He walked to the bathroom to wash his face. “As soon as I turned on the water on the faucet,” he told me in an interview, “the left ear was crackling… like, a speaker, you know, being overdriven.” Joel was 24 and a professional musician, someone who made his living through focused and detailed listening.

As days passed, he grew more fearful and depressed. For two months, he barely left the house. The air brakes of a city bus or a honking horn were painful and caused his heart to race. His sense of himself, his environment, and his identity as a musician were all undermined. This man who lived through his ears now faced the prospect of a life of tinnitus (ringing or other “phantom sounds”) and its frequent companion, hyperacusis (sound sensitivity sometimes accompanied by distortion). Joel could even identify the dominant pitch of his torment: it was A sharp.

We humanistic and qualitative sound scholars—particularly those of us focused on media and technology—can learn a lot from listening to tinnitus and the people who have it. Scholars of science and technology studies (STS) often utilize moments of technological breakdown to reveal the processes and mechanisms that constitute things we take for granted. Tinnitus and hyperacusis are, in the words of anthropologist Stefan Helmreich, “moments when hearing and listening break down” (629). Because sound scholars understand sound, hearing, and listening not only as the material effects of physics and physiology, but also as culturally and technologically emergent phenomena, we can potentially contribute much to the growing public conversation around tinnitus.

“Tinnitus” by Merrick Brown

And there is a lot at stake. Tinnitus affects 10-15% of adults and is the top service-related disability affecting U.S. veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. Tinnitus and hyperacusis are also fairly common among musicians who work in loud performance and media production environments. It is perhaps ironic, then, that mediated sound and music are audiologists’ primary tools in helping people recover from these conditions.

My own study of tinnitus centers on its articulation with audio-spatial media—devices such as bedside sound machines, white noise generators, and noise-canceling headphones, all used to fabricate a desired sense of space through sound. People with tinnitus are among the most avid users of these devices, carefully mediating their aural-spatial relations as tinnitus becomes more evident in quiet spaces and hyperacusis flares up in noisy ones. During my fieldwork in audiology clinics and conferences, tinnitus support groups, and online forums, I observed that audio media were being deployed as medicine and technologies of self-care. Gradually, I came to the realization that the experience, discourse, and treatment of tinnitus is always bound up in mediation. In fact, I believe that tinnitus signals the highly mediated nature of our most intimate perceptions of sound and self. Below, I sketch just a few of the places I think aural media scholarship could go in conversation with tinnitus and hyperacusis.

The sound of media aftermath

Hearing experts do not consider subjective tinnitus to be a disease, but rather a condition in which individuals experience the normal, random neuronal firing of their auditory system as sound. Although it may be tied to various diseases and disorders, tinnitus itself is benign and does not inherently signal progressive hearing loss nor any other malignant condition.

Image by Flickr User Phil Edmonds

Nevertheless, research shows a frequent association between tinnitus and reduced auditory input, comparable to a sound engineer turning up the volume on a weak signal and thus amplifying the mixing board’s inherent noise. This “automatic gain control” theory neatly explains a classic 1953 study, in which 94 percent of “normal hearing” people experienced tinnitus in the dead silence of an anechoic chamber. Unfortunately, it also helps confirm the fear that the ringing heard after a night of loud music is due to hearing loss, known clinically as “temporary threshold shift.”

As Joel’s case suggests, when repeated, such threshold shifts lead to permanent damage. Audiologists increasingly see media-induced hearing loss and tinnitus as an epidemic, with ubiquitous earbuds often positioned as the main culprits. I have heard clinicians express dismay at encountering more young people with “old ears” in their offices, and youth education programs are beginning to proliferate. These apparent relations between aural pleasure and self-harm are an intriguing and socially significant area for sound and media scholarship, but they should also be considered within the context of moral panics that have historically accompanied the emergence of new media.

Objectifying phantom sound

For both clinicians and sufferers, one of the most frustrating and confounding aspects of tinnitus is how hard it is to objectify, either as a subject of research and treatment or as a condition worthy of empathy and activism. For both clinicians and sufferers, media are the primary tools for converting tinnitus into a manageable object.

Media marketed to protect musicians against Tinnitus, Image by Flickr User Jochen Wolters

Although media scholars haven’t yet studied it as such, the audiologist’s clinic is a center of media production and consumer electronics retail. Having audio production experience, I felt a sense of recognition on seeing the mixer-like audiometer in the control room of Joel’s audiologist, Jill Meltzer, separated by a pane of glass from the soundproofed booth where her patients sit. It was a studio where Meltzer recorded hearing rather than sound, as she attempted the tricky work of matching the pitch, volume, and sensitivity levels of tinnitus and hyperacusis. Since medication and surgery are not effective treatment options, the remedies for sale are media prosthetics and palliatives such as wearable sound generators, “fractal tone” hearing aids, Neuromonics, and sound machines that help distract, calm, and habituate patients to the ringing. Meltzer and other clinicians consistently told me that they have only two tinnitus tools at their disposal—counseling and sound.

Audiometer and testing booth, Image by the author

The subjectivity of tinnitus is most frustrating for sufferers, however, who often encounter impatience and misunderstanding from family, friends, bosses, and even their doctors. Again, media serve to externalize and objectify the sound. Joel did this through music: “A Sharp,” Styzens’ first post-tinnitus composition, represents tinnitus with chordal dissonance and hyperacusis with a powerful change of dynamics on a guitar. He eventually recorded an entire album that explored his condition and raised awareness.

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Other individuals, in an attempt to communicate the aural experience that drives their sleeplessness, depression, anxiety, or lack of concentration, create YouTube videos designed to recreate the subjective experience of tinnitus.

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The American Tinnitus Association, an advocacy group, has used broadcast and social media to raise awareness and research funding, as we see in this PSA from 1985.

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However, such dramatic uses of media may be in some ways too powerful. In fact, “raising awareness of tinnitus” might be as bad as it literally sounds.

Communicable dis-ease

In the process of externalizing their experience for others to hear, people with tinnitus can make their own perception of the sound grow stronger. They may also generate anxiety in others, encouraging them to notice and problematize their own, previously benign tinnitus.

Neuroscientist Pawel Jastreboff’s groundbreaking and influential neurophysiological model of tinnitus postulates that tinnitus becomes bothersome only when the auditory cortex forms networks with other areas in the brain, resulting in a vicious circle of increasing perception and fear. The implication of this model, now substantiated by clinical research, is that the way people think about tinnitus is a much greater predictor of suffering than the perceived volume of the sound. As Jastreboff told me in an interview, “Incorrect information can induce bothersome tinnitus.” Information, of course, circulates through media. It may be productive, then, to think of tinnitus suffering as a communicable dis-ease, one strengthened in circulation through networks of neurons, discourse, and media.

I think there is both a need and an opportunity in tinnitus for an applied sound studies, one that intervenes in this mediated public discourse, works against moral panic and hyperawareness, and suggests the quieting possibilities that open up when we grasp the constructed nature of our aurality. Listening to tinnitus as a networked coproduction highlights the ways in which our most subjective aural perceptions are also social, cultural, and mediated—perhaps the fundamental insight of sound studies. My hope is that by listening to tinnitus we can speak to it as well.

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*Featured Image Credit: A representation of Tinnitus by Flickr User Jason Rogers, called “Day 642/365–Myself is against me”

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Mack Hagood is a doctoral candidate at Indiana University’s Department of Communication and Culture, where he does ethnographic research in digital media, sound studies, and popular music. He has taught courses on sound cultures, global media, ethnographic methods, and audio production. He and his students won the Indiana Society of Professional Journalists’ 2012 Best Radio Use of Sound award for their documentary series “I-69: Sounds and Stories in the Path of a Superhighway.” His publications include studies of indie rock in Taiwan (Folklore Forum) and the use of noise-canceling headphones in air travel (American Quarterly). He recently completed an article on combat Foley in Fight Club and is now finishing his dissertation, titled “Sonic Technologies of the Self: Mediating Sound, Space, Self, and Sociality.” He hears crickets even in the dead of winter.
February 27, 2012  

The Plasticity of Listening: Deafness and Sound Studies

"Listening Post" by Flickr User Theory
“Listening Post” by Flickr User Theory


Editor’s Note: Steph Ceraso‘s post wraps up Sounding Out!’s three-part February forum on the intersection of deafness, Deaf Studies, and sound studies.  However, SO! would like this series to open an ongoing conversation. If  you would like to respond to these posts and/or pursue your own avenue of inquiry, please direct your pitches to jsa@soundingoutblog.com. We’d love to hear from you.  By the way, if you missed (or want to re-read) Liana Silva‘s “Listen to the Word: Deafness and Participation in Spiritual Community” click here and C.L. Cardinale‘s “my mother’s voice, my father’s eye, and my other body: the sound of deaf photographs” click here.

There is no difference in being deaf or hearing—one will always appreciate the subtleties of sound because of the ability to feel things in greater depth to what the ear alone will allow us to hear. -Evelyn Glennie from Shirley Salmon’s Hearing—Feeling—Playing: Music and Movement with Hard-of-Hearing and Deaf Children

I am not deaf, nor am I someone who is affiliated with the scholarly field of disability studies. However, I am someone who is very interested in expanding notions about what it means to listen. For my dissertation research, I have been working on developing a theory of what I call “multimodal listening.” Rather than understanding listening as something that is dependent upon the ears, “multimodal” listening refers to the various ways in which sound is felt throughout the body (via vibration), and to the multiple senses in addition to the auditory sense that are employed during a listening event.

Photo by Flickr User jimmiehomeschoolmom

Because of my interest in moving beyond ear-centric models of listening, I really appreciated Liana M. Silva’s recent post on the Deaf International Community Church (DICC). I was especially struck by how her experience as a hearing individual attending a Deaf church service suddenly defamiliarized her own relationship to sound and voice. The visual nature of this service, which was conducted through the use of American Sign Language (ASL), prompted her to consider listening practices that do not rely on a fully functioning auditory system.

I wonder, though, if swapping the ears for the eyes is still too limiting—too dependent on a single mode. For instance, if a non-signing deaf person was attending a service similar to the one Silva described, visual listening (in a discursive sense) would not be a possibility. My use of “deaf” (with a small “d”) is a strategic choice here. The descriptor “Deaf” (with a capital “D”), as Silva uses it in her discussion of the church, is almost always employed to refer to the Deaf Community as a cultural and linguistic entity, whereas “deaf” refers to an audiological deficiency. Since the use of ASL is most often associated with individuals in the Deaf community, those who do not sign would most likely avoid churches like the DICC. However, depending on the acoustics and the material features of the church, a non-signing deaf person might be able to experience the sound of music through vibration in a more full-bodied kind of listening practice.

Photo by Flickr User curran.kelleher

Listening via vibration is something that Cara Cardinale Fidler writes about in her poetic account of growing up with deaf parents. She remembers,

In high school, I went to a dance at the Fremont School for the Deaf where my parents were chaperones. It was easy to find the dance; you could hear the throbbing bass from across campus.  It was so loud, it hurt. When I walked in, I wasn’t surprised to see a wall full of uncomfortably dressed teenagers holding balloons to feel the sound and bobbing their heads in tempo.

In this passage, Cardinale Fidler amplifies the tactile experience of sound—the ability of all bodies to listen-feel through the force of vibration. Sometimes we feel sound in our guts or throats or teeth, but this is not usually an aspect of listening that most people with a working auditory system meditate on, or try to refine in any way.

I think it is important to acknowledge, as Silva and Cardinale Fidler do by example, that the labels “deaf” and “hearing” are not as clear-cut as they may seem. There is a whole range of auditory function among people who are given these labels, or who fit somewhere between them. Sound scholars might think of deafness, then, not as a uniform lack, but as a range of listening practices in which sensory modes other than the ears are employed. Some people rely more on one mode than others, and some might develop synesthetic listening practices.

Evelyn Glennie, playing the marimba faster than the camera can cope with, Photo by Flickr User Bankside

For instance, in the documentary Touch the Sound, percussionist Evelyn Glennie uses the convergence of sound, sight, and touch in her own listening training. We need to start thinking about listening less in terms of binaries (e.g. you either have the capacity to listen or you do not), and more in terms of possibilities. The fact that bodies can be retrained to experience listening via multiple modes highlights the extremely flexible, plastic nature of listening habits and practices. In considering this diverse range of listening possibilities, I wonder how we might design more listening experiences that are truly multimodal—that require or at least present the possibility of listening with more than one sensory mode. How might we expand the listening capacities of all bodies?

Deaf space and architecture is one area that is beginning to take up such questions. Based on the concept of universal design, which emphasizes the production of products and environments that are accessible to both so-called “disabled” and “able-bodied” individuals, deaf architecture considers the ways in which deaf listening bodies move through and communicate within space. These spaces seem particularly well-designed for visual and tactile listening situations. For example, according to blogger Scott Rains, some key principles of deaf architecture include: the use of partial walls or open concept spaces, no sharp angles and curved corners to increase visual range, no sources of glaring light that might impede vision, and wooden floors for more pronounced vibration. Bodies, spatial and material configurations, and the senses were all taken into account in this kind of design. The visual and tactile elements in these spaces accommodate particular bodies and communication practices, but there would be no need for such spaces without the existence of those particular bodies and communication practices. The design of deaf architecture is based on the reciprocal relationship between cultural and physiological needs, which in turn broadens the listening possibilities of the inhabitants of deaf spaces.

The Myer Music bowl, where the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra accompanies Evelyn Glennie, photo by Flickr User learza.

Deaf studies and deaf scholars have much to contribute to sound studies. Expanding ideas about what it means to listen, coming up with new ways to extend the capacities of all listening bodies, and developing more dynamic and complex theories of listening will require sound studies scholars to think about listening not only in terms of the ears, but in terms of bodies, affects, behaviors, design, space, and aesthetics. In this sense, deafness may be one of the most significant and generative areas of research in the continuing development of sound and listening studies.

Conversely, sound studies can offer deaf studies fresh ways to think about how sound shapes/enhances/disrupts deaf cultural practices. As we have seen from the examples above, sound plays a powerful and sometimes complicated role in deaf contexts. Using sound studies approaches and methodologies, then, could help to augment the ways in which sound figures into deaf culture–a subject that has received very little attention thus far. Collaborations between these seemingly contradictory areas of study have the potential to enliven and enrich each other in mutually beneficial ways. Sound studies and deaf studies have a lot to say to each other. They just need to start listening.

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Steph Ceraso is a 4th year Ph.D. student in English (Cultural/ Critical Studies) at the University of Pittsburgh specializing in rhetoric and composition. Her primary research areas include sound and listening, digital media, and affect. Ceraso is currently writing a dissertation that attempts to revise and expand conventional notions of listening, which tend to emphasize the ears while ignoring the rest of the body. She is most interested in understanding how more fully embodied modes of listening might deepen our knowledge of multimodal engagement and production. Ceraso is also a 2011-12 HASTAC [Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory] Scholar and a DM@P[Digital Media at Pitt] Fellow. She regularly blogs for HASTAC.

February 20, 2012  

my mother’s voice, my father’s eye, and my other body: the sound of deaf photographs

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Editor’s Note: This post is the second in a three-part Sounding Out! series on deafness, Sound Studies, and Deaf  Studies during February 2012. Read last week’s post by Liana Silva here–JSA


dizzy snapshots

Lately, I’ve been halted by a particular photograph of my mother. Like Roland Barthes’ wonderland photo of his mother in Camera Lucida,

this picture “corresponded to a discomfort I had always suffered from: the uneasiness of being a subject torn between two languages, one expressive, the other critical” (8).

It began when my father reorganized his photographs.  Since retirement, he’s taken on archival projects with renewed fervor.  He began with 1974 (the year I was born), made it all the way to 1984 and from there slipped back.  My mother, a freckled farm girl in South Dakota, standing in front of a box house and snow, lots of snow.  The year, 1957 or so.  My father in a high chair in Sepulveda, California.  Perhaps 1948.  By then my grandparents knew he was deaf.

And every couple of weeks or so my dad calls me.  I finished another year, come see the pictures, he tells me via the Iphone, his slow, thoughtful typing shaped by many years of TTY-use (TTYs, or “Text Telephones,” are increasingly receding from every day use, replaced by chatting and text messaging).  I imagine him at home in my old room, surrounded by generations of Waldners, Cardinales, Jensons and Ewings.  Eagerly, he fills an old stereoscope viewer with 3d slides.  His favorite is of my brother and me at the Buschart Gardens in Victoria, Canada. My brother is six and I am eight; our  young faces are carefully tilted towards the pale cabbage roses.   My father fits more years into fewer albums, filing the stray photos in new Costco cardboard photo boxes. And yet, as he reduces by putting old pictures into new boxes, he continually finds older pictures, older boxes.

The last time he called me, he was in 1984.  These pictures depress my dad; he won’t spend much time here.  In the photos I’m always on the phone or covering my face.  Perhaps he remembers, as I do, the times he would attempt to enter my teenage world of sound.   He’d follow the knotted coil of the cord, pick up the phone and say “huh-lllll-ooo,” exaggerating his lips in a comical lip-synch, emitting a low, guttural voice while I danced for the phone. We’d both laugh as if we secretly agreed: hearing language is silly, ugly; my father rarely uses his voice.

But within 1984 was a stack of black and white 5×6 matte photographs bound by a rubber band.  They were a series of still television shots of my mother.  We lived in Berkeley then, and my mother would drive to San Francisco to record the DeafNews; I remember being sleepy, confused, and excited when my mother’s face appeared on the TV. These photographs frame my mother the way I saw her: her face elongated by the distorting concave screen surrounded by blackness; in the picture she seems still to be floating in TV space.  I wonder, who stood in front of the television, through several barriers and captured these stills of language?

For sign language is precisely that: a language of signs in the purest semiotic sense.  And yet, it’s precisely everything but that.  In all of them, the movement of sign language is snapped still—like words on a page; the particular one I’m fascinated with has her name imprinted at the bottom of the screen in all caps—the letters bend around the television I no longer see.  This one I’ve framed, and put on my desk.

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yearbook photo

In high school, I went to a dance at the Fremont School for the Deaf  where my parents were chaperones.  It was easy to find the dance; you could hear the throbbing bass from across campus.  It was so loud, it hurt. When I walked in, I wasn’t surprised to see a wall full of uncomfortably dressed teenagers holding balloons to feel the sound and bobbing their heads in tempo.  “Careless Whispers” played as it did at all high school dances and embraced couples locked bodies in a slow sway on the dance floor.  The music, the discomfort of boys in pressed shirts and Drakkar Noir, it was no different than the stiff dances at Ramona High school down the street. But it was Deaf more than any silence could be. When my friends found out my parents were deaf they nearly almost always gasped:  ”I bet your house must be so quiet!”; they nearly always got it wrong.  Here, in this cafeteria-turned “sea of love,” Deafness announced itself. Deafness was not mute.

These voices, this bass, was (to borrow the language of Josh Kun) a virtual audiotopia grounding our bodies on the parquet floor, making real Douglas Kahn’s artistic notion in Noise, Water, Meat, that
sound does not just enter the gateway of hearing; it can also be perceived through the sense of force” (77).

The song changed to M.C. Hammer, and the dancers on the floor continued slowly rocking.  A nervous looking redhead held his palm out with one hand and with the other shaped his hands to form legs; he put the two signs together and asked me to dance.

I was flattered, and acutely aware that I was the foreigner there.  As I took his hand, I was filled with adolescent shame forever demanding: “be quiet! People can hear.”

sonnet xvii

así te amo porque no sé amar de otra manera,/sino así de este modo en que no soy ni eres/tan cerca que tu mano sobre mi pecho es mía,/tan cerca que se cierran tus ojos con mi sueño–Pablo Neruda, 100 Love Sonnets Cien Sonetos de Amor

I am six, and eight, and thirteen.  The door is open, so I crawl into my parents’ bed, and the pull of the sheets awakens my mother.  She grasps my hand.  I whisper in sign language so my father won’t be disturbed by the light.  Then, I take her hand and listen, tracing the terrain of her fingers, following the curves to read her words. I fall asleep talking to my mother, her hand in mine, my father’s snoring vibrating the bed.

I am twenty-nine and I am watching her hands, her signing, and seeing my own.  Her name, signed with a sweep from a handshape “L” to a curved “C” down the shoulder to the wrist (my name, the same “C”)— “now I know your mother, you sign just like her.”  And my punctum—sting, speck, prick—the kind of subtle beyond—as if the image launched desire beyond what it permits us to see: not only toward ‘the rest’ of nakedness, not only toward the fantasy of a praxis, but toward the absolute excellence of a being, body and soul together. Barthes again.

Her hands—her hands and my hands, let me see your hands she tells me.  She too sees herself on my body; we are both always looking at the blurrr of her hands.

And looking, I return always to a short story by Julio Cortázar, “Axototl” from Blow-Up and Other Stories about a boy who spends hours at the aquarium watching the axolotls; he is transfixed, haunted, obsessed, and keeps returning to watch these fish, no not fish.  The boy consults a dictionary and discovers that they are the larval stage of a kind of Mexican salamander.  I find the boy and his axolotls among my books, and discover highlighted in purple:


I was, I am, struck by this passage.  These atavistic creatures capture, compress space and being.  Identity breaks down—I, we, they are no longer discrete.  What side are you on?  Mother, Father Deaf.

non-negotiable photos

When I was eleven our family bought a deluxe conversion Dodge Caravan complete with metallic bronze customized paint job, rust colored velour captain’s chairs, and a boomerang-shaped television antenna.  I went with my parents to the car dealer on a sticky August afternoon.  “We want a minivan,” my mother signed to me, I voiced to the short man with greasy black hair and uncomfortably freckled arms.  He immediately took us past rows of suburb-like cutouts of vans and led us to the Las Vegas model of minivans—all the deluxe features and without a deluxe price.  A special deal.  I signed this eagerly—I wanted my parents to understand as I did—we were lucky to see this car.  It’s a familiar scene: father adjusting the seats and falling in love with cruise control;  mother insisting it was more than they budgeted; the dealer crawling in the back and hollering out through the nifty sliding third door all of the fantastic features.

Inside the car.  Tell them the back seat can be removed for more room.  Tell them there’s an acoustical equalizer for the stereo.  Tell them there’s air conditioning.  Tell them there’s a threeyearthirtythousandmilewarranty.  Tell them we do financing right here in the lot.  Tell them.

Outside the car.  Is this the best price?  Does he have anything less expensive?  Does it come with a warranty?  Do you have special discounts?  Are you telling us everything?

“Yes, they like all the extras.”  No—best price.

We left the dealer and got back into our happy orange VW van.  My bare legs stuck to the vinyl seats and I cried.  My mother was upset: “What’s wrong?  Did you want that car?”.

The salesman knew my parents didn’t care about the equalizer or the TV monitor in the back seat; but he didn’t know they understood.  “How nice of you to help your mother go to the store and do the groceries” while my mother writes a check, looking at the cash register screen for the correct amount. I am the mute one. “What did the lady say?” my mother asks; “nothing,” is my silent reply.  Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

Yes, my mother has a college degree. Table 7 shows that the proportion of persons 18 years of age and over with under 12 years of education increases monotonically as the level of their hearing ability decreases.  A bachelor of library sciences.  No, she does not work in a library.  They were afraid of what would happen if she answered the phone.  They were afraid of hearing a deaf woman speak.  We moved several times when the rent for one reason or another had to go up; even being six you become familiar with friendly discomfort.  Interpreting for my mother when she caught my landlord in a contradictory lie—the distrust on both sides boomeranged off my nine-year old body.

In that parking lot, the traffic of misunderstanding and mistrust, all I wanted to do was to hide my lips, shield my transparent body so that neither side would see they were being betrayed.

talking pictures 

The stage is dark, but the theatre is  vibrating.  “Red hots . . .” lingers in the air.  My dad taps me on the shoulder.  What does the music sound like?

My father is sitting to my left, my husband to my right. It is between scenes at the DEAFWEST performance of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire.   I’m thrilled to watch the interpreters peering from the balcony above; their voices float above the Deaf actors who take center stage.  Sign language takes center stage. The interpreters are for the hearing. The dividing line of the stage is several feet ahead of us.  Blanche Dubois begins signing to Stella on the stage.  But unlike the other Deaf actors, Blanche speaks with her own voice; the interpreters above are silent.  Her signs are stiff, they struggle to keep up with her vocal cadence.  I nod as I watch, transfixed: everything has been reversed.

I quickly sign to my father: She is speaking. She’s hearing! Then I lean over and whisper to my husband:  her signing.  It’s not Deaf.  She’s hearing.

I am signing Deaf.  I am whispering Hearing.

Cara Cardinale gives sound to her narrative with her mother’s voice–”sounding out” against audist notions of sound that keep Deaf voices silent and perpetuate the idea that deafness is interchangeable with muteness. She would like to thank her mother for sharing her beautiful voice, which to a CODA is a distinctive and comforting sound but often carries a stigma outside the home. Cara uses her own signing body here, not as interpreter, but as primary narration of this intimate photograph.

From his jacket pocket, my father pulls out his hearing aid still marked with red dormitory tape from his years at the residential state school for the Deaf; the opaque embossed letters have slowly curled back on themselves. He adjusts the petrified, squealing earmold then smiles at me.

 photo emulsion

Her hands are strapped to the hospital bed.  More violent than the search for willing veins to take the sedatives, is the silencing.  I cover my mouth to keep from gagging.  In the darkness, I watch the television screen as it shows the tour of my mother’s internal body: my face looking back at me against the glass.

The doctor freezes the image and points out the polyps clinging to the intestinal walls.  But I see gestation, birth—I am looking from the inside out:

If there exists a border-line surface between such an inside and outside, this surface is painful on both sides.  When we experience this passage . . . intimate space loses its clarity, while exterior space loses its void–Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (218).

It was my body in her body and I found myself looking for the lost baby from years ago; perhaps it was there, inside of her body, my body.

The intimacy, the motion still in the blurrr of the photograph. I am fascinated with a delightful dread, horror.  Her name in captions, my name.  Her body, my body.  That picture says everything about my body. Everything about sitting between my father and my husband: lines drawn between us in the newly reupholstered seats, steel blue like everything new, between the actors and the audience, close enough to see the eyeliner drawn in for emphasis, between the Deaf actors on the stage and the hearing interpreters peering over them on the balcony.

I am transfixed. No transition and no surprise, I saw my face against the glass, I saw it on the outside of the tank, I saw it on the other side of the glass.  Then my face drew back and I understood.

Florescent lights saturate the room.  I lean forward;  take a breath; faint.

center of vision

Sometime within the last six months, my father’s left eye has had an aneurysm.  This led to a detached retina and a burst blood vessel.  The blood has been slowly moving towards the center of vision. During the day, my father sees shadows.  And my mother has been hearing things.  Last week she was startled by a high pitched noise; moments later the light in the kitchen flashed indicating that the phone was ringing. Lines are bleeding.  The darkness is terrifying for my father in the same way that sound has become disorienting for my mother.  And lately I’ve been on the verge of vertigo.  It seems as if it were the moving forwards and looking backwards at the same time that’s been disorienting me.

I go with my father to see a retinal specialist.  Once in the examining room, I am in the dark again.  I am signing in the dark, but my father cannot hold my hand.  He is across the room, peering at me with one eye, seeing my signs with the shadow of the pinlight.  It must be dark, they explain, his eye needs time to dilate, to open so we can see inside.  He will be injected with a kind of serum so that the shadow can be seen.

While we  wait for the dizzy eye to dilate, I describe my vertigo to my father.  He notes with interest and nods, yes, mother took me to doctors in Washington D.C.  He looks at me.  Your age.  Even the emergency room.  Nothing wrong.  Gone—he signs with a shrug.  Maybe gone—he points at me—soon.

The doctor returns and looks into my father’s eye.  The serum has worked, and the image is transparent.

I see his eye, enlarged, disembodied, projected on the screen behind him.  It is beautiful and dark, a moonscape clouded over by an eclipse.  Everything is transparent, and I think of the axolotls.

—

C.L. Cardinale has a PhD in English Literature from University of California, Riverside.  Currently she is editing her manuscript on what she calls “look-listening”—deafened gestures—in twentieth century narratives.  She also publicly reads Proust, edits for Lettered Press, and sings with her one and six year old in California’s east bay.


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