Inhaltszusammenfassung

New media technologies of the nineteenth century such as the phonograph offered a way to reconceptualise one’s relation to time and space in the shrinking globe of modernity. Far from being instruments that neutrally carried voices, electricity and sound, the “speaking machines” were mediators that, in their very alteration of how one conceived one’s own voice, seemed to suggest the potential of bridging not just two persons on either end of a continent but of joining those in other realms as...New media technologies of the nineteenth century such as the phonograph offered a way to reconceptualise one’s relation to time and space in the shrinking globe of modernity. Far from being instruments that neutrally carried voices, electricity and sound, the “speaking machines” were mediators that, in their very alteration of how one conceived one’s own voice, seemed to suggest the potential of bridging not just two persons on either end of a continent but of joining those in other realms as well. Through a reading of Emily Dickinson’s poem “I heard a Fly buzz—when I died—” as a figuration of the rupture of ordinary time and space, this article suggests that Dickinson, though scarcely published in print form in her time, was someone deeply attuned to the potentialities of media that could store voices and sounds and release them at a later time, detached from their authorising bodies. Although Dickinson composed her work before the commercial rise of Edison’s phonograph, this article will suggest that certain of her poems about death and dying inscribe a phonographic logic. Sound takes on phonographic traits, becoming something which momentarily ruptures ordinary experience and produces an excess which alters the way in which history, memory and understanding might organise the relations between past, present and future.» weiterlesen» einklappen

Autoren

Klassifikation

DFG Fachgebiet:
Literaturwissenschaft

DDC Sachgruppe:
Literatur, Rhetorik, Literaturwissenschaft