Talking and Listening in the Age of Modernity

Essays on the history of sound

Joy Damousi, Desley Deacon, Joy Damousi, Desley Deacon

• Publisher: ANU Press
• Year: 2007
• eBook ISBN: 9781921313486
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Australian & Oceanian History
• Index: History

Historians have, until recently, been silent about sound. This collection of essays on talking and listening in the age of modernity brings together major Australian scholars who have followed Alain Corbin's injunction that historians 'can no longer afford to neglect materials pertaining to auditory perception'.

Ranging from the sound of gunfire on the Australian gold-fields to Alfred Deakin's virile oratory, these essays argue for the influence of the auditory in forming individual and collective subjectivities; the place of speech in understanding individual and collective endeavours; the centrality of speech in marking and negating difference and in struggles for power; and the significance of the technologies of radio and film in forming modern cultural identities.

Table of contents

• Talking and Listening in the Age of Modernity: Essays on the history of sound
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1. A ‘Roaring Decade’: Listening to the Australian gold-fields
• 2. A Complex Kind of Training: Cities, technologies and sound in jazz-age Europe
• 3. Speech, Children and the Federation Movement
• 4. Sounds of History: Oratory and the fantasy of male power
• 5. Hunting the Wild Reciter: Elocution and the Art of Recitation
• 6. World English? How an Australian Invented ‘Good American Speech’
• 7. ‘The Australian Has a Lazy Way of Talking’: Australian character and accent, 1920s–1940s
• 8. Towards a History of the Australian Accent
• 9. Voice, Power and Modernity
• 10. Modernity, Intimacy and Early Australian Commercial Radio
• 11. Talking Salvation for the Silent Majority: Projecting new possibilities of modernity in the Australian cinema, 1929–1933
• Authors
• Index