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What kinds of intellectual practices are influential in the making and remaking of nations? How do literary texts shape nation-making? When are intellectuals most and least relevant to developing the nation? How do liberal, socialist, and nationalist intellectuals shape national ideologies? One of the principal debates in the study of nations concerns the relative significance of elites, specifically intellectuals, in inventing the nation. Intellectuals and the Articulation of the Nation delimits the capacities of intellectuals for shaping nations, as well as the ways in which the development of nations shapes intellectual practices. The introductory chapter presents the principal debates around nation-making and the identity and practices of intellectuals. Contributors from anthropology, history, literature, political science and sociology then explore the capacities and limits of intellectuals in the formation and restructuring of national identities in general, and in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union in particular. Each essay is followed by a brief intellectual autobiography in which the author's own relationship to nations is explored. The editors conclude the volume by developing a general theory of national intellectual practice. The principal focus of this book--the mutual articulation of intellectuals and nations--is a key subject for students and scholars of history, cultural studies, political science, anthropology, and sociology. Ronald Grigor Suny is Professor of Political Science, University of Chicago. Michael D. Kennedy is Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Michigan.

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.