Please join us for the German Studies Colloquium for a talk on

Friday, February 10th, 2 pm
3308 MLB

Drumming Literature into the Ground: Dada and the Materiality of Sound

Tyler Whitney
University of Michigan

Scholarship on early Dada has productively highlighted the movement’s innovative approach to visual practices of photomontage and the heterogeneous juxtaposition of found objects. Transferred to the acoustic register, scholars have focused on the group’s unique contributions to sound poetry, oral recitation, and the reconfiguration of acoustical relations between performers and audience members. These existing studies have, however, tended to analyze the movement’s take on sound art exclusively in terms of the voice, articulation, and the physiology of speech. What has remained absent is any consideration of the reception of sound, of listening and the ear. Drawing on my current book project exploring the interaction between acoustical modernity and literary modernism, this paper will analyze several literary works by the Dada writer and performer Richard Huelsenbeck as an articulation of what I term modernity’s tympanic regime, that is, a historically specific set of material and discursive practices predicated on processes of intermedial transduction and physical contact between vibrating surfaces. In doing so, I seek to write the ear back into the history of Dada, exposing the group’s strategic mobilization of noise in the service of sonic warfare, or, the modulation of mood and affect via percussive effects and their textual inscription.

For a copy of the paper, please contact Julia Hell (hell@umich.edu).

Free and open to the public - visit our website at www.lsa.umich.edu/german/events for updates and details.

For further information, also contact Julia Hell at hell@umich.edu