The Hear and Now: Sound and Technology in the Avant-Garde Poetics of Gertrude Stein, John Cage, and Caroline Bergvall

Abstract

This thesis examines avant-garde poetry's engagement with sound and sound technology over the last eighty years. Focusing on the work of Gertrude Stein, John Cage, and Caroline Bergvall, I investigate the ways in which these figures use and experiment with new forms of audio and media technology. In the process, I show how avant-garde poetic responses to sound and sound technology can help us understand wider social and cultural changes in sound and sound media. By tracing the changes in the perception of voice and sound in poetry over the course of the last eighty years, I show how these three artists have been affected by changing sound media environments and how their work both anticipates and shapes these developments. This thesis also proposes a new way of analyzing the operations of sound in avant-garde poetics. Drawing on Reuven Tsur's concept of “interpretive uncertainty,” I investigate the ways in which we engage with sound in language before it becomes categorically understood. Particularly relevant to the study of avant-garde poetics-where the emphasis falls on the expansion or rejection of preconceived boundaries-I consider how Stein, Cage, and Bergvall use sound and sound technology to generate interpretive uncertainty. Finally, by examining the connections and juxtapositions between the writers' various uses of sound and sound technology over time, I look to highlight the interplay between the sonic affectivity of language and the changing sound media environment.