Mosaic, vol. 42, no 1 (mars 2009) - Sound, part 1

Founded in 1967, the year of Canada's centennial, Mosaic is an interdisciplinary journal devoted to publishing the very best critical work in literature and theory. The journal brings insights from a wide variety of disciplines to bear on literary texts, cultural climates, topical issues, divergent art forms and modes of creative activity. Mosaic combines rigorous scholarship with cutting-edge exploration of theory and literary criticism. It publishes contributions from scholars around the world and it distributes to 34 countries. In North America, Mosaic is read by subscribers in almost every state and province. It can be found in over 500 of the world's major university and college libraries.

Vol. 42, no 1 (mars 2009) - Sound, part 1

David Cecchetto

Sounding the Hyperlink: Skewed Remote Musical Performance and the Virtual Subject

This essay uses the sound-art practice Skewed Remote Musical Performance as a probe for considering the implications of sonic ontology. Understanding sound as radically relational, the essay argues that subjectivity is a technological extension that, in the acoustic reality of our virtual age, has rendered the human always-already posthuman.

Cory Stockwell

Kant and the Sublime Murmur of the We

This essay examines the workings of voice, attunement, and unboundeness in Kant's Critique of Judgment. Through an analysis of the soundings of this text, the essay attempts to arrive at a Kantian theory of community, one that is marked by an irreducible openness to the outside.

Clark Lunberry

Soliloquies of Silence: James Turrell's Theatre of Installation

The artist James Turrell's installations appear, at first glance, the ideal setting for what Turrell himself describes as a “wordless experience.” The light or darkness encountered within them is often so sensual, or severe, as to leave one silenced and speechless. Yet sounds (and words), sounds that speak of language's enduring narrations, nonetheless often arise within such installations.

Robert Bennett

Songs of Freedom: The Politics and Geopolitics of Modern Jazz

Our conventional understanding of the 1950s as a silent, conformist generation has largely been shaped by visual images from television sitcoms. Listening to the alternative sounds of fifties jazz and rock and roll reveals a broader sense of the period's multiple cultural and political voices.

Colin Hugh Moore

The Talkie Cure: Psychoanalysis and the Art of Noise

Lacan's “mirror stage” simultaneously introduces the child to two distinct information channels—in other words, to multimedia. The mirror stage thus anticipates an encounter with the multimedia apparatus of the sound film. This essay views psychoanalysis in relation to sound cinema to uncover its multimedial basis.

Umberto Rossi

Acousmatic Presences: From DJs to Talk-Radio Hosts in American Fiction, Cinema, and Drama

DJs and talk-show hosts are undoubtedly cultural icons in the American mediascape, and as such they appear in several novels, films and in the play Talk Radio, by Eric Bogosian. This essay analyzes the socio-political implications of how DJs and talk-show hosts are depicted by taking them back to their historical background.

Linda Marie Zaerr

When Silence Plays Vielle: The Metaperformance Scenes of Le Roman de Silence in Performance

Performance-based exploration of the thirteenth-century Le Roman de Silence can extend discussions of ambiguity by clarifying the experience of the sound of the poem. Homonymic terminology breaks down the boundary between performer and text, while metaperformance elements impose identities of characters on performer and audience.

Robert P. McParland

The Sounds of the Audience

A variety of audience sounds can be heard in the literature of the early twentieth century. Authors depict social frames at the opera, concert hall, or theatre, where audience sounds intervene: coughing, rustling of programs, whispering, fictional audiences speaking through sound and gesture. This essay asks how modernist writers connect verbal, musical, and visual art to incorporate the new sounds of their modern environment in their stories.

Katherine McLeod

“Oui, let's scat”: Listening to Multi-Vocality in George Elliott Clarke's Jazz Opera Québécité

Set on the apple-blossomed streets of Quebec City, Québécité sings the story of two multicultural couples—Laxmi Bharati and Ovide Rimbaud, and Malcolm States and Colette Chan—whose loves are thwarted and recovered as they encounter familial and personal prejudices towards cultural difference. Listening to the two female characters, who have sparked extensive critical debate on the issue of performing cultural identity, this essay asks how Québécité calls for a rethinking of critical approaches to sound as a medium for improvising multiculturalisms.

Kevin McNeilly

friend/ to any/ word: Steve Lacy Scores Tom Raworth

Combining techniques of close listening and close reading, this paper interrogates the intersections of sound and text in Tom Raworth's poetry and in Steve Lacy's music, particularly in their score for (and performances of) “Out of a Sudden,” an elegy for the Swiss poet Franco Beltrametti. Maurice Blanchot's work on friendship and absence provides a conceptual template for their collaboration.

Jessica Lewis Luck

Sound Mind: Josephine Dickinson's Deaf Poetics

Using theories of deaf cognition, this essay explores the compelling soundscape of the poetry of Josephine Dickinson. Her Deaf poetics expands traditional notions of poetic sound, shifting the locus of sound experience from the voice and ear to other organs of sound-processing, such as the mind's inner voice, the mouth, the lips, and the resonating spaces of the proprioceptive body.

Kate Eichhorn

Past Performance, Present Dilemma: A Poetics of Archiving Sound

This essay explores the possibility of archiving sound, specifically poetry in performance. Our deep attachment to the familiar oppositions that govern the ideas of the archive and the repertoire, including the opposition between orality and writing, is identified as the primary obstacle to realizing the sound archive's full potential.

Tamas Dobozy

The Morrison Songbook: Proliferation in Jazz

This essay examines Toni Morrison's novel through the theories of Michel de Certeau to suggest a utopian vision founded upon "doing" rather than "discourse." The essay suggests that jazz is not only a cultural practice but a radical way of envisioning community.