For the Record: Infidelity, Illegitimacy, and Sound in Modernist Poetry and Popular Song
Bibliographic record
Abstract
“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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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.028 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".