ABOUT THIS BOOK

Considers the avant-garde rethinking of poetic language in terms of physical speech production.

Avant-garde writers and artists of the twentieth century radically reconceived poetic language, appropriating scientific theories and techniques as they turned their attention to the physical process of spoken language. This modernist “sound writing” focused on the bodily production of speech, which it rendered in poetic, legible, graphic form.

Modernist sound writing aims to capture the acoustic phenomenon of vocal articulation by graphic means. Tobias Wilke considers sound writing from its inception in nineteenth-century disciplines like physiology and experimental phonetics, following its role in the aesthetic practices of the interwar avant-garde and through to its reemergence in the postwar period. These projects work with the possibility of crossing over from the audible to the visible, from speech to notation, from body to trace. Employing various techniques and concepts, this search for new possibilities played a central role in the transformation of poetry into a site of radical linguistic experimentation. Considering the works of writers and artists—including Raoul Hausmann, Kurt Schwitters, Viktor Shklovsky, Hugo Ball, Charles Olson, and Marshall McLuhan—Wilke offers a fresh look at the history of the twentieth-century avant-garde.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Tobias Wilke is a Heisenberg Researcher at the Leibniz-Center for Literary and Cultural Research in Berlin. He is the author and editor of several books in German.

REVIEWS

“This excellently researched and lucidly written study will make a substantive contribution to modern literary studies. Through wonderful formulations and analyses, Wilke illuminates fascinating technical innovations in sound writing and links them to poetic engagement and practices. This is in every respect a delightful and important contribution to modern literary and cultural studies.”

— Johanna Drucker, author of Inventing the Alphabet

“Sound Writing presents a new understanding of what is often called the ‘nonsense poetry’ of the early twentieth-century avant-garde and its intellectual background, as well as its echoes in later avant-gardes. In telling this story, Wilke draws on underexplored sources and draws out new causal lines. With Language Poetry, translingualism, collage, conceptual writing, and artificial intelligence on our minds, the topic of the book cannot be ignored, and Wilke’s contribution is sure to be widely read and discussed.”

— Haun Saussy, author of Are We Comparing Yet?

"Along with studying 'multiple avant-garde strategies for reducing poetry to its most elemental conditions in vocal sound production,' Wilke also carefully explores scientific approaches to the production of vocal sound in order to demonstrate how poets 'appropriat[ed] scientific-experimental concepts and techniques.'"

— Modern Philology

"A singular achievement for German studies and literary studies at large, Wilke’s important work also makes meaningful and original interventions in Media Studies, Art history, sound studies, linguistic anthropology, and history of science and technology."

— Germanic Review

"What broader lessons does Sound Writing hold? As I have said, Wilke counters
familiar stories about the disruptiveness of modernisms with an account of
continuity, showing how sound poets looked back to Romanticism, amongst other
things. But the passion of his study is perhaps to show that one needn’t choose between the two, because rupture and continuity are united by a dialectic."

— American Literary History

"The book is an important addition to other studies developed at the Leibniz-Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung that engage with science and literature and is of relevance to cultural studies, sound studies, modernist, and avant-garde studies alike."

— German Quarterly

"In Sound Writing, Wilke sets out to propose a poetics that stretches beyond the humanities. In his study, Wilke goes ‘definitively beyond the biographical, sociohistorical’ approaches to reading poetry that constitute the majority of responses to twentieth-century avant-garde poetry in order to reveal how sound writing, like that by Dadaists Raoul Haussman, Tristan Tazara, and Hugo Ball and the American poet Charles Olson, is entrenched in ‘a history of scientific and aesthetic experimental practices aimed at redefining the very "nature” of poetic language’ . . . Wilke establishes a persuasive line of influence from early scientific experiments in vocal gesture to twentieth-century experimental poetries through attention to a wide variety of texts, in the broadest definition of the word."

— This Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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