For the Record: Infidelity, Illegitimacy, and Sound in Modernist Poetry and Popular Song

“For the Record” tracks the interwoven genealogies of modernist literature and phonographic recording in Britain and the United States, exploring aesthetic concerns common to writing and sound recording media in the half century from 1920 to 1970. Central to these concerns is the mediated voice. Recent studies (Brown, Denning, Feaster, Gracyk, Katz) observe that records represent more than they reproduce sound. Like a parody, a record reproduces the living voice with one ironic critical difference: its lifelessness. Similarly, high modernist representations of the poetic voice imagine writing as a barrier between speaker and audience, incapable of fidelity to the voice’s putatively legitimate source. Phonography, as a mimetic practice developing in the modernist period, uniquely parallels the efforts of poets like Yeats, Eliot, and Pound to portray the living voice. Moreover, and perhaps more surprisingly, this dissertation reveals that the jazz, blues, and country records produced in the 1920s have more in common with literary modernism than has till now been appreciated. By treating the phonograph’s temporal dislocation of the voice as a theoretical basis for comparing canonical works of high modernism and vernacular records of the period, this dissertation contributes to conversations about sound, authenticity, and fraud in modernist literature, as well as its relationship to popular culture, a subject of ongoing scholarly interest. Chapter One explores the phonographic medium’s usurpation of the voice in recorded murder ballads and in the later plays of Yeats, uncovering in his skepticism towards writing a prescient theory of sound recording. Pairing Eliot’s The Waste Land with Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, Chapter Two argues that modernist poetry and recorded song comprise a coherent tradition of mimetic techniques. Chapter Three examines Bob Dylan’s “Desolation Row” as a text, record, and parody of The Waste Land, defining vernacular phonography as a mode of literary modernism. Ultimately, this dissertation reveals that these seemingly disparate representational fields are closely aligned: the phonograph enacts what the high modernists understood to be writing’s subversive infidelity to the voice, resulting in a shared set of approaches to the artwork, whether record or text, and its ontological legitimacy.

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