Toward a History of Literary Listening

Abstract

I am outlining a new project, a history of literary listening. It will be a different kind of disciplinary history of literary studies than others I have read and enjoyed, like Gerald Graff’s Professing Literature (1987/2007), John Guillory’s Cultural Capital (1993) and Professing Criticism (2022), Paul Eggert’s The Work and the Reader in Literary Studies (2021), for example. One of my opening questions is: Does literary studies as a discipline have discernible audile techniques? The answer is a resounding yes. It must be, right? And then, on second thought, we are inclined to ask, What do you mean by literary studies “as a discipline”? Because, if we are to consider the application of audile techniques within a discipline, we must first understand the defining qualities of the discipline itself, even if there are, as in the case of literary studies, various sub-fields, many of them explicitly interdisciplinary in their orientations, within it. What qualifies an audile technique, a method of listening, as constitutive of a literary method of analysis or interpretation? Insofar as such methods of listening “work to operationalize distinctions” (Siegert 14)1 and function as “concrete set[s] of Toward a History of Literary Listening