“What Kind of Evidence is a Poetry Sound Archive?”— a talk by David Nowell Smith

Dear friends and colleagues,

As a follow-up to the LISTEN seminar and to celebrate the publication of Archives sonores de poésie 2. À l’écoute, please join us on Tuesday 29 September for a talk by Prof. David Nowell Smith at 5:30 pm (CET).

 

What Kind of Evidence is a Poetry Sound Archive?

In the talk I’ll ask why it is that scholarship in modern poetry has been so slow to respond to the increased availability of poetry sound archives, assess various challenges that sound archives pose for the standard methods and research questions of literary criticism, and sketch out the new kinds of evidence which sound archives might furnish for literary scholars—and the new kinds of thinking that they demand.

David Nowell Smith is Professor of Criticism at the University of East Anglia. After completing a dissertation on Heidegger, he published On Voice in Poetry: The Work of Animation (Palgrave, 2015), as well as W. S. Graham: The Poem as Art Object (Oxford University Press, 2022). He is currently writing a history of cultural broadcasting, supported by a fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust and provisionally entitled ‘The Birth of Public Broadcasting and the Rebirth of the Public Poet’.

Colleagues interested in participating in a European network for the study of poetry sound archives are invited to get in touch with us for an informal consortium building meeting on Sept 30th (morning or lunch) or Oct 1st.

The talk on Sept 29th is both an in-person and online event:

  • Université Paris Cité, Bâtiment Olympe de Gouges, Place Paul Ricoeur, 8è étage, salle 830. How to get there

Contact: Abigail.Lang@u-pariscite.fr; D.Nowell-Smith@uea.ac.uk

The talk is sponsored by the Leverhulme Trust, University of East Anglia and Université Paris Cité (ECHELLES).