Communication Studies The University of Iowa College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Search

36M:349
The Voice in Culture and History

Spring Semester 2004, University of Iowa

Prof. John Durham Peters
Office: 125 BCSB, Phone: 353-2258 (voice mail)
e-mail: jdpeters@blue.weeg.uiowa.edu
Office Hours: Tuesday, 12:30 to 3:30 p.m., and by appointment.  Right before class is not good. 

Download full syllabus and schedule (PDF file)

Overview

The study of the voice spans the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, and fine arts.   Voices sing, shout, speak, sigh, whisper, stutter, hum, remain silent.  Since the late nineteenth century, human and non-human voices have been amplified, recorded, distorted, enhanced, synthesized, and measured for purposes of art, science, and politics.  The voice is a key but conflicted site for defining what it means to be a human being as well as a complex organ whose function depends on lungs, brain, vocal tract, emotion, training, and culture.  The voice involves physics and music, communication and culture, anatomy and art.  It raises questions about beauty, personal identity, power, enfranchisement, religion, art, literature, poetry, style, culture, race, gender, and age.  Animals and machines have voices; so may the stars. 

This seminar has a media focus, that is, it studies voices not as an immediate utterance of a soul, but rather as complex physiological, personal, physical, cultural, and artistic achievements.  The voice is, to use an ugly but sometimes useful word, an apparatus.  Our focus on the media of the voice, which include the phonograph, the telephone, microphone, radio, and cinema, as well as body, music, language, and text, do not close off questions about the wonders, beauty, or spell of the voice, but rather open them up in fresh and poignant ways.  Though focusing on voice media, we will explore questions about power, beauty, time, representation, expression, democracy, revelation, yearning, presence, embodiment, and mortality. 

Requirements

  1. A substantial seminar paper around 25 pp. or so.  I have attached a list brainstorming some topics, but you should think out your topic freshly from the ground up.  Choosing a good topic is hard and takes time.  It involves a negotiation with the work of other scholars and your original vision.  Life is way too short to work on a topic you don’t passionately care about; good topics haunt, possess, stalk, inspire, and thrill the mind and heart.  I am looking for papers that are (1) theoretically grounded and conceptually fresh (2) open some new terrain of fact or imagination (3) show some adventure in the craft of writing.  A sense for the larger historical context of your object and the intellectual stakes of your argument is crucial.  In a class on the voice, your papers should have a voice or take up the invitation to play with voicing.  I'm happy to look at drafts and otherwise help you develop your papers.  I'd encourage you to work on your topic throughout the semester and bring up your discoveries, as relevant, in class discussion.
     
  2. A statement of your proposed topic, due by 24 February.  Please start brainstorming at once and I’d welcome discussion before this date.  Please feel free to chat with me about your potential ideas and to keep an open mind before you commit to something.  I welcome multiple topics for discussion. 
     
  3. Oral presentation of your paper in the final two or three weeks of class: 15 minutes max for the talk plus 10 minutes for discussion.
     
  4. Five short documents for our voice archive.  These are to be original artifacts—advertising, newspaper articles, brief notices, announcements of inventions, film or concert reviews, short stories, films, popular songs, whatever—and they may be in any language that you can read.  At least two of them should be before 1990.  I want us to fan out into the library and discover quirky facts and strange cases and develop an archive of original documents.  These should not be scholarly articles about the voice, but rather primary documents that raise questions about the voice. 
     
  5. Active participation in discussion.  This is a seminar--a genre that signals lots of class participation.  We are engaged in collective invention and discovery. 

Readings

The following books have been ordered at Iowa Book and Supply (8 South Clinton, in the basement). 

Havelock, The Muse Learns to Write

Helmholtz, On the Sensations of Tone

Herder & Rousseau, On the Origin of Language

By popular demand, we may order more books, but most of the reading will be available in photocopy and in the reserve room of the main library.  This will be more an article class than a book class.