This chapter applies the MOUDD theory of phenomenal consciousness to our experience of sounds, pains, smells, and tastes.

This chapter explores material language practices and their interaction with language ideologies. It investigates how oral, literal, and digital forms co-constitute discourses of normativity and prestige. Through observations of literacy practices, teaching, media, and participants’ reflections, the chapter studies materialisations of language and their ideological implications. The dominance of English writing in formal and institutional contexts contrasts with the variable use of oral Kriol, which resists standardisation. Efforts by the National Kriol Council to create a standardised orthography reveal tensions between fostering linguistic legitimacy and maintaining the anti-standard nature of Kriol. Digital communication amplifies these dynamics, bringing to the fore non-standardised writing that reflects local linguistic realities. Kriol’s oral and multimodal characteristics, perceived as spontaneous, creative, and resistant to disciplinary norms, challenge Western-centric ideologies that prioritise fixed standards. This shows that material language practices are culturally specific. A consideration of the role of materiality in language ideologies challenges universalised epistemologies.

Drill YouTube music videos are contradictory – nihilistic and collective, empty and humanizing, negatively assessing marginalization and societal nihilism, performing those scripts as a placebo for pain and humiliation, and also shaping popular culture in that image. This chapter explores drill YouTube music videos as cultural form, for what they tell us about the historical transformation of black diasporic sound culture, contemporary popular culture and its alternative cultural politics. Through an analysis of drill music videos, it identifies a shift away from sound culture towards video-music, and therein a shift to the networked and platformed moving image, and to narrative. This requires a reevaluation of the role of sound in alternative cultural politics and in black diasporic popular culture, and asks that drill video-music be evaluated on its contingent cultural terms, not on the terms of other cultural and musical moments.

The conclusion highlights the book’s main theoretical contributions and briefly sketches avenues for further research. It develops the monograph’s contribution to existing constructivist scholarship, which consists in demonstrating how international relations’ macro-concepts originate from ordinary and extraordinary interactions. The book’s primary focus is on the visual gaze. Yet representants can target other senses, and more research is necessary to direct attention to other sensory stimuli. Second, the Conclusion stresses the book’s contributions to the booming literature on recognition and misrecognition. The monograph can provide new perspectives for studying processes of colonization and decolonization as moments of misrecognition and recognition. It can also guide the analysis of struggles of recognition over sovereignty claims in the contemporary era. Concerns about recognition are crucial for questions about the future of the liberal international order. The chapter directs attention to representants for interpreting the efforts of major players from the periphery and the semi-periphery to acquire something akin to great power status. Other, hitherto more marginalized international actors, such as indigenous communities, and some terrorist networks are equally seeking changes in representants. The Conclusion also opens questions about how changes in communication technologies might trigger changes in representants that can have broader systemic effects.

This chapter considers Percy Shelley’s concern with ancient Greek literature through a close reading of ‘With a Guitar. To Jane’. The second half of the poem unfolds a description of the guitar modelled on the representation of the lyre in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes. In the course of this account, Shelley presents an instrument which is akin to its ancient counterpart in its bewitching power, but which derives qualities from its environment in a manner quite different from anything envisaged in the hymn. When refashioned through Shelley’s imagination, the guitar acts as a figure both for poetry’s capacity to animate as well as to reflect perception, and for the power of creative appropriations to change the terms on which we relate to ancient literature.

This chapter attends to the regular presence of grass in poetry of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. From Walt Whitman and English war poetry to recent work by Oswald and Burnett, the poetry of grass works to articulate, obscure, and heal the marks of contemporary trauma. Grass also shapes the soundscapes and visual form of poetry to the extent that, as this chapter suggests, grass can be said to constitute the contemporary practice of composition itself. Like poetry, the green field works in and through trauma to find again new life after war and conquest, after personal loss. In its seemingly perpetual growing, grass finds in the poet new ways of making and responding.

This chapter argues that, throughout the 1870s, literary understandings of voice were transformed by, and also helped to shape, acoustic technologies and sciences. Developments in physics and physiology, and the invention of the telephone and the phonograph at the decade’s end, offered new ways of describing how the human voice was formed, transmitted, and heard. However, these developments also reimagined voice as something not exclusively human, continuous with a wide spectrum of inarticulate and non-human sounds. This dehumanisation threatened to undermine established definitions of literary voice, but literary and scientific writers also identified similarities between their respective theorisations of speech and sound, and ‘voice’ became a keyword that was frequently used to examine the wider relations between science and literature. After discussing George Eliot’s views on the possible implications of new vocal technologies for prose fiction, the chapter turns to the sonnets of Emily Pfeiffer, which examine how scientific models of voice might complicate and reimagine poetry’s conventional status as the most essentially vocal of literary forms.

Chapter 6 examines the reconstruction of Rwanda’s music scene after the genocide. It considers how it opened up new possibilities for young urban Rwandans to transform their hearts and imagine new visions for themselves. Although young artists seemed to share an understanding that song could communicate ‘messages’ (abatumwa) not available in other modes of speech, they also understood there were limits to this. Far from being a space of ‘freedom’ or the ‘unofficial’, the local music scene was shot through with politics. Young artists were keenly aware that the power dynamics that shaped wider post-genocide social life equally shaped the kinds of music they were and were not allowed to make.

The Conclusion returns to the case of Kizito Mihigo and his tragic death in February 2020. It considers how his music reveals a certain politics of humanity, and the ways in which the RPF state tries to define who is and is not to be considered human. Returning to the theme of sound, noise, and silence, it sugggests the importance of taking sound seriously in Rwanda. Thinking more closely about sound – not only its discursive properities but its material ones as well – opens up new avenues for scholarship.

Chapter 2 contests deeply entrenched assumptions about pastoral, arguing that the Eclogues do not evince nostalgia for a lost, idealized nature but nonetheless are deeply concerned with the nonhuman environment. The chapter shows that the local places so central to the Eclogues are networks and assemblages of human and nonhuman beings, and that the local dwelling valorized by the collection is dwelling as a part of a more-than-human community. The poetry figures this ecological dwelling through the trope of pastoral sympathy and through its focus on environmental sound. Ultimately, the chapter argues that Vergilian pastoral is best understood not as a representation of herdsmen’s songs but of entire bucolic soundscapes. The second part of the chapter considers the implications of this more-than-human acoustic world for our understanding of Vergil’s own poetry. It argues that nonhuman sound contributes to the sonic texture of Vergil’s language, identifying an acoustic ecopoetics in the Eclogues as Vergil manipulates his language to transmit and recreate nonhuman sound.

J. Blake Couey, in “Isaiah as Poetry,” begins with the basic fact that nearly all of the book is written as poetry and encourages readers to approach it as such. He surveys its erudite vocabulary, its creative use of sound, and its parallelism and larger strophic structures. He closes with an extended appreciation of the “imaginative worlds” evoked in the book through the use of imagery and metaphors. He observes of its poetic vision that “its scope is nearly boundless.”

This chapter examines Clare’s place among the poets in his own lifetime and more recently. The first section considers his appeal to recent and contemporary poets such as Heaney and Paulin. It argues that they have been inspired by Clare’s commitment to the local and provincial, especially his use of local vernacular, and also by his aesthetic of the uncouth and rebarbative, which also influenced Thomas. It goes on to explore how Clare’s close sensory attention to the natural world influenced Thomas, Longley, Oswald, and Jamie.  The second section argues that Clare’s poetry developed in conversation with his wide reading. It focuses on a number of examples, including Collins, Cowper, and Thomson. Reading these poets alongside and through Clare we see new features of their writing emerge, giving us a richer, more dynamic sense of eighteenth-century verse, and of Clare’s poetry.

This chapter outlines a novel, rigorous method for studying literary recordings, which can support a paradigm shift in the study of literature as performance. The method incorporates leading-edge, open-source digital tools for analyzing speech patterns in recordings, and an ethically grounded approach to analysis, with attention to the neuroscience of speech perception, implicit bias in listening, and relevant theories of sound studies and voice studies. It also includes an overview of our own work on poetry recordings and of related developments in digital voice studies, and speculates about future directions for this research.

This chapter examines the aesthetic and imaginative significance of sound play, taking for its case study the poems of George Oppen. The chapter proposes that poetic sound play offers poets a way to explore value, whether it be a single vowel's sound value, a poet's preoccupation with certain subject matters, or that poet's particular political commitments. Through close readings of poems from across Oppen's career, and especially of Oppen's assonance and alliteration, the chapter argues that sound play becomes a social allegory, registering political possibilities which, on occasion, go beyond the poems’ explicit representations of social life. The chapter also shows how, as each sonic value is born afresh in each new usage, this sound play extends beyond the single poem to multiple poems. In the case of Oppen, sound play's continual production of the new through recombination promises, even as it cannot achieve, a future beyond capitalist reproduction.

Touching down in a few of the many geographies of Black sound, this chapter pauses to listen in between the lines and forms of Black literary creation. Inclusive of readings of Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Paul Beatty, Jesmyn Ward, and others, this chapter examines the penetrating collusions of the sonic and/as the literary in order to briefly mark their interreliance and to consider the conditions and futures of blackness as improvisational practice.

This chapter considers the influence of emerging technologies of audio reproduction on literature. The phonograph, also called the gramophone, was invented in 1877 by Thomas Edison; in the form of Edison cylinders and the flat discs introduced by Emile Berliner in the 1890s, sound recording was rapidly popularized in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Camlot traces the twofold nature of the literary engagements with sound recording: On the one hand, they “suggested a direct, unmediated experience of events from the past”; on the other, in drawing attention to the material limitations of this new technology, which “worked to shape the real-time sonic events it recorded,” these engagements “revealed how indebted our sense of reality is to mediating factors.”

The wordless, often unwritable sound of the vox confusa is usually contrasted with the verbal, writeable sound of the vox articulata. The former was held to be irrational and meaningless; the latter, rational and significant. This chapter will examine the role which the vox confusa played in Augustine’s thought. It will argue that, in his later works, we encounter a wild(er) Augustine who appears to be more willing than his earlier self to recognise and exploit the vox confusa in a theological context.