Search results for ""author jason camlot""

Phonopoetics tells the neglected story of early "talking records" and their significance for literature, from the 1877 invention of the phonograph to some of the first recorded performances of modernist works. The book challenges assumptions of much contemporary criticism by taking the recorded, oral performance as its primary object of analysis and by exploring the historically specific convergences between audio recording technologies, media formats, generic forms, and the institutions and practices surrounding the literary. Opening with an argument that the earliest spoken recordings were a mediated extension of Victorian reading and elocutionary culture, Jason Camlot explains the literary significance of these pre-tape era voice artifacts by analyzing early promotional fantasies about the phonograph as a new kind of speaker and detailing initiatives to deploy it as a pedagogical tool to heighten literary experience. Through historically-grounded interpretations of Dickens impersonators to recitations of Tennyson to T.S. Eliot's experimental readings of "The Waste Land" and of a great variety of voices and media in between, this first critical history of the earliest literary sound recordings offers an unusual perspective on the transition from the Victorian to modern periods and sheds new light on our own digitally mediated relationship to the past.

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Unpacking the Personal Library: The Public and Private Life of Books is an edited collection of essays that ponders the cultural meaning and significance of private book collections in relation to public libraries. Contributors explore libraries at particular moments in their history across a wide range of cases, and includes Alberto Manguel’s account of the Library of Alexandria as well as chapters on library collecting in the middle ages, the libraries of prime ministers and foreign embassies, protest libraries and the slow transformation of university libraries, and the stories of the personal libraries of Virginia Woolf, Robert Duncan, Sheila Watson, Al Purdy and others. The book shows how the history of the library is really a history of collection, consolidation, migration, dispersal, and integration, where each story negotiates private and public spaces.Unpacking the Personal Library builds on and interrogates theories and approaches from library and archive studies, the history of the book, reading, authorship and publishing. Collectively, the chapters articulate a critical poetics of the personal library within its extended social, aesthetic and cultural contexts.

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The materials we turn to for the construction of our literary pasts - the texts, performances, and discussions selected for storage and cataloguing in archives - shape what we know and teach about literature today. The ways in which archival materials have been structured into forms of preservation, in turn, impact their transference and transformation into new forms of presentation and re-presentation. Exploring the production of culture through and outside of the archives that preserve and produce CanLit as an entity, CanLit Across Media asserts that CanLit arises from acts of archival, critical, and creative analysis. Each chapter investigates, challenges, and provokes this premise by examining methods of "unarchiving" Canadian and Indigenous literary texts and events from the 1950s to the present. Engaging with a remediated archive, or "unarchiving," allows the authors and editors to uncover how the materials that document past acts of literary production are transformed into new forms and experiences in the present. The chapters consider literature and literary events that occurred before live audiences or were broadcast, and that are now recorded in print publications and documents, drawings, photographs, flat disc records, magnetic tape, film, videotape, and digitized files. Showcasing the range of methods and theories researchers use to engage with these materials, CanLit Across Media reanimates archives of cultural meaning and literary performance. Contributors include Jordan Abel (University of Alberta), Andrea Beverley (Mount Allison University), Clint Burnham (Simon Fraser University), Jason Camlot (Concordia University), Joel Deshaye (Memorial University of Newfoundland), Deanna Fong (Simon Fraser University), Catherine Hobbs (Library and Archives Canada), Dean Irvine (Agile Humanities), Karl Jirgens (University of Windsor), Marcelle Kosman (University of Alberta), Jessi MacEachern (Concordia University), Katherine McLeod (Concordia University), Linda Morra (Bishop's University), Karis Shearer (University of British Columbia, Okanagan), Felicity Tayler (University of Ottawa), and Darren Wershler (Concordia University).

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