Germany in the Loud Twentieth Century - An Introduction

Zusatztext This interdisciplinary investigation of auditory experiences in contemporary Germany reads easily and equips the reader with theoretical tools to explore multiple connections between soundscapes and nation. Essential reading for scholars interested in hearing cultural history and its silences! Informationen zum Autor Florence Feiereisen is Assistant Professor of German at Middlebury College, where she teaches classes on German literature, pop culture, national identity, gender, and sound. Her areas of research include investigating the relationship of selected German contemporary literary texts with other media such as photography and sound. Alexandra Merley Hill is Assistant Professor of German at the University of Portland, where she teaches all levels of German language, literature, and culture. Her research areas include twentieth-century German art, feminism, motherhood, and contemporary German literature, with a focus on author Julia Franck. Klappentext This book introduces German Sound Studies using a transdisciplinary approach. It invites readers to auralize space by describing characteristically German soundscapes in the long twentieth century, including the noisy city of the early 1900s, the sounds of East and West Germany, and hip-hop soundscapes of the millennium. Zusammenfassung Germany in the Loud Twentieth Century seeks to understand recent German history and contemporary German culture through its sounds and musics, noises and silences, using the means and modes of the emerging field of Sound Studies. German soundscapes present a particularly fertile field for investigation and understanding, Feiereisen and Hill argue, due to such unique factors in Germany's history as its early and especially cacophonous industrialization, the sheer loudness of its wars, and the possibilities of shared noises in its division and reunification. Organized largely but not strictly chronologically, chapters use the unique contours of the German aural experience to examine how these soundscapes - the sonic environments, the ever-present arrays of noises with which everyone lives - ultimately reveal the possibility of "national" sounds. Together the chapters consider the acoustic national identity of Germany, or the cultural significance of sounds and silence, since the development and rise of sound-recording and sound-disseminating technologies in the early 1900s Chapters draw examples from a remarkably broad range of contexts and historical periods, from the noisy urban spaces at the turn of the twentieth century to battlefields and concert halls to radio and television broadcasting to the hip hop soundscapes of today. As a whole, the book makes a compelling case for the scholarly utility of listening to them. An online "Bonus Track" of teaching materials offers instructors practical tips for classroom use. Inhaltsverzeichnis Introduction to the Study of German Sounds: Tuning in to the Aural Ether, Florence Feiereisen and Alexandra Merley Hill Section I: New Sounds in the 20th Century: Sounds, Noise, Silence Chapter 1: Escaping the Urban Din: A Comparative Study of Theodor Lessing's Antilärmverein (1908) and Maximilian Negwer's Ohropax (1907/8), John Goodyear Chapter 2: When Only the Ears are Awake: Gÿnter Eich and the Acoustical Unconscious, Robert Ryder Section II: Defining Space Through Sound: Battlefields and Concert Halls Chapter 3: The Sonic Mindedness of the Great War: Viewing History through Auditory Lenses, Yaron Jean Chapter 4: From Seat Cushions to Formulae: Understanding Spatial Acoustics in Physics and Architecture, Sabine von Fischer Section III: East and West: Sounds in the Shadow of the Wall Chapter 5: From the Boiler Room to the Hotel Room: Sound and Space in Wolfgang Hilbig's Das Provisorium (2000), Curtis Swope Chapter 6: Berlin Sounds: Audible Cartography of a Formerly Divided City, Nicole Dietrich Se...

Product details

• Authors: Florence Feiereisen, Florence (EDT)/ Hill Feiereisen
• Assisted by: Florence Feiereisen (Editor), Alexandra Merley Hill (Editor), Alexendra Merley Hill (Editor)
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 30.11.2011
• EAN: 9780199759385
• ISBN: 978-0-19-975938-5
• No. of pages: 224
• Subject: Humanities, art, music > Music > Music theory