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2018
In The Sound of Nonsense, Richard Elliott highlights the importance of sound in understanding the 'nonsense' of writers such as Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, James Joyce and Mervyn Peake, before connecting this noisy writing to works which engage more directly with sound, including sound poetry, experimental music and pop. By emphasising sonic factors, Elliott makes new and fascinating connections between a wide range of artistic examples to ultimately build a case for the importance of sound in creating, maintaining and disrupting meaning.
A short feminist analysis of Nonsense literature
In a unique and innovative approach, the present book wishes to examine the rich, yet apparently peripheral tradition of nonsense language, by focusing on the sometimes marginal genre of nonsense verse. The object of the study is to discuss the possibility of translating such verse from English into another language by gradually tracing the mechanisms involved in the process of translation. The translation into French of an English nonsense poem representative of the Anglo-Saxon literary tradition, i.e. Lewis Carroll’s famous Jabberwocky, is chosen as the object of a succinct contrastive analysis. In a step by step approach, the study wishes to investigate the linguistic, aesthetic and literary conventions of nonsense verse, by aiming to verify the originally presented theoretical observations to the concrete case analysis of the final chapter. Based on Fernand de Saussure’s theory relating to the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign and Gérard Genette’s theory about the proposed motivation of the poetic language, it further builds on the realization that in poetry these theories must be aesthetically amended. The most salient features observed in the analysis of nonsense language are then discussed, indicating the reasons due to which ungrammaticality and foregrounding contribute to the aesthetic effect produced by nonsense verse. Subsequently, Etienne Souriau’s three categories of baragouin, charabia and lanternois are investigated, making it possible to verify the previously examined linguistic theories against a selection of examples from universal literature. This leads to the discovery of a specific pattern and set of criteria which can be applied in the translation of the Jabberwocky. It is demonstrated that the type of nonsense verse investigated seeks to imitate the natural language on four distinct levels, i.e. word, syntax, morphology and phonology, generating language-bound surface formations which abide by their corresponding language specific conventions. The Jabberwocky is hence identified as a case of linguistic substitution of the natural model of language. The translation of the poem into French is viewed in terms of the replacement of such surface formations in the source language with other surface formations in the target language. While the surface formations are language specific, the actual substitution is viewed as a universal operation which should be preserved in translation.
Strauss’s last opera, Capriccio, personifies an old argument: will the Countess choose to favour Olivier, a poet, or the composer Flamand? The dilemma of the relationship between words and music has exercised composers, writers and their patrons for many centuries: from the early Christian church with medieval Léonin and Pérotin; through the invention of opera at court with Monteverdi; in the Renaissance and the reforming Gluck in the Classic era, at the dawn of mass public entertainment, to Strauss himself. The radical composer of Salome (1905) and Electra (1909) - which may be said to have redefined opera, musical language and theatrical norms in the early twentieth century - premiered his final opera, Capriccio, in the depths of the Second World War, in Munich, 1942. In contrast to his earlier extremism, for two and a half hours (without an interval), the main protagonists discuss and demonstrate the relative virtues of singing, acting and dancing. In contemporary parlance, their conversation might be termed intermedial, cross-disciplinary and self-aware. At one point, the Count exclaims in a distinctly post-modern fashion that ‘Opera is an absurd thing’; towards the end of the opera, the Countess debates into a mirror which man she will love: ‘In choosing the one you will lose the other! Does one not always lose, when one wins?’ Her final words to the same mirror (before her butler calls for supper and ends the opera) are: ‘Can you advise me, can you help me to find the ending... the ending for their opera? Is there one that is not trivial?’ But for the war, the context in which the opera was first performed, these words might also seem trivial. My purpose is not to reassess Strauss’s last opera, neither to offer insight into his motivation, but to continue the conversation developed in his work; the subtitle to Capriccio is ‘A conversation piece about music’.
Pivot: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies & Thought, 2014
Steve McCaffery describes sound poetry as a “new way to blow out candles” and “what sound poets do.” In his brief survey of sound poetry, McCaffery describes the genealogy of sound poetry from its earliest formalized birth during Russian futurism (found in the experiments of Khlebnikov and Kruchenykh) and builds his survey until North America, 1978. This essay will consider the history of sound poetry, a history that has no history, but retains the avant-garde experimentalism of modernist poetics. By looking at sound poems by Raoul Hausmann and Kurt Schwitters; the sound-experiments of Diamanda Galás; performance in sound poetry; the influence of “primal therapy” (which emphasizes the therapeutic potential of the scream); and the theological tradition of glossolalia, I will demonstrate how the noisiness and non-sense of sound poetry offers a variety of forms of political engagement against hegemonic uses of sound and silence. Sound poetry is notable in that it is loud – originally being called Lautgedichte or literally “loud poems” – and this brash noise opens up a heterotopic space of acoustic potential: of potential sonic engagement outside of normative chirps, whistles, vocalizations, glottal stops, fricatives, and speech. This “sonic engagement” will be grounded in the new theoretical concept of what I call "arche-speech" or "arche-sound."
2018
Nonsense literature is often regarded as written for children only. If authors write in a nonsense genre, they are most likely to be labelled as children's writers with their books inevitably ending up in the Waterstones children's department. However, nonsense is not just a meaningless gibberish created for the mere entertainment of children, it has a far more contradictory and dark nature. By reading Peake alongside Lear, I will try to show that nonsense (at least in the case of these two writers) has, in fact, a disturbing and adult nature and that the adult writers, who once were claimed as children's, thus need to be re-categorised.
The percussive approach is a method for analyzing the meaning behind sound and dance in hip-hop music. Percussion, especially the drum, and percussiveness have been and still are significant parts of music-making and social organization throughout the African diaspora. Based on cultural theorist and percussionist John Mowitt’s percussive field, the percussive approach examines not only the musical side of percussion, but also the social, psychological and theological aspects of percussiveness. The percussive approach is divided into three sections: percussiveness in music and language, social percussiveness and percussiveness as a symbolic form of resistance. By drawing from the perspectives of the African diaspora and the spiritual system of shamanism, as well as from the texts of cultural theorists like John Mowitt, James W. Perkinson, Jon Spencer and Tricia Rose, this paper will explore the cultural significance behind the percussive practices in early hip-hop music.
Electronic British Library Journal, 2010
Organised Sound, 2010
Popular Music, 2002
Antarctica: Music, Sounds and Cultural Connections, 2015
Popular Music and Society, 2009
The Confidential Clerk – Volume 3, 2017
In Elżbieta Chrzanowska-Kluczewska and Grzegorz Szpila, eds. In Search of (Non)Sense. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009
PhD Thesis, University of Toronto , 2016