Our next meeting is on Tuesday, March 5, from 5-7pm in the Whitney Humanities Center room B-02 (note the slight change from our usual room).
We’ll be reading chapters 2 and 3 of Karin Bijsterveld’s new book, Sonic Skills. The open access book is available for free at this link.
We’ll have plenty of food and drink, and all are welcome to join even if you haven’t finished the reading!
NOTE as of 2/12: This meeting has been postponed due to inclement weather. We will now meet next week, Tuesday, February 19 at 5pm in 313 Stoeckel hall.
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Our first meeting of Spring 2019 will be on Tuesday, February 12, at 5pm in Stoeckel hall room 313. We’ll be reading Peter Szendy’s All Ears: the aesthetics of espionage, focusing on the first half (ending with the section on Kafka’s “The Burrow,” which we looked at for the last meeting).
Note that the entire book is quite short, so we encourage reading the whole thing!
For our final meeting of the semester—a holiday edition of sorts—we’ll read Franz Kafka’s short story, “The Burrow,” which has served as a locus for thinking through sound-related problems in the work of many scholars in sound studies, philosophy, and other disciplines.
In addition to the story, we’ll focus on a few notable secondary texts by Peter Szendy, Mladen Dolar, and our own Brian Kane. Some optional readings are also suggested, including pieces by Deleuze and Guattari, Kata Gellen, and J. M. Coetzee.
As always, feel free to join us even if you haven’t finished the reading (and note that some of the supplemental readings are extremely short!). Refreshments will be provided!
Peter Szendy, “Underground Passage,” from All Ears
Mladen Dolar, “The Burrow of Sound”
Brian Kane, “Kafka and the Ontology of Acousmatic Sound,” from Sound Unseen
Optional:
Deleuze and Guattari, “Content and Expression,” from Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature
Kata Gellen, “Noises Off: Cinematic Sound in Kafka’s ‘The Burrow’”
J.M. Coetzee, “Time, Tense and Aspect in Kafka’s ‘The Burrow'”
Our third meeting of the semester is on Tuesday, November 6 at 5:30pm, in room B-04 of the Whitney Humanities Center.
Ashon Crawley (ISM Fellow and assistant professor of religious studies and African American and African Studies at the University of Virginia) will present his paper “The Blue Note, the Red Chord: Hammond Gospel Organ.”
Note that there are no pre-circulated readings for this meeting—please join us for food, drink, and conversation!
All are invited to the second SSWG meeting of the semester on Tuesday, October 9 at 5:30pm, at the Whitney Humanities Center, room B-04.
John Durham Peters (Professor of English and of Film & Media Studies) will join us for a discussion of his work-in-progress essay (please do not circulate or cite):
John Durham Peters, “John Lilly, Dophin Vocals, and the Tape Medium”
For further (optional!) reading, we suggest the second chapter of Peters’s recent book, The Marvelous Clouds (Chicago, 2015):
John Durham Peters, “Of Cetaceans and Ships; or, The Moorings of Our Being”
