English 198v. Art of Listening: How Sound Works in Literature (Undergraduate/Graduate Seminar)

Instructor: Valeria Luiselli
TBD | Location: TBD

This is a course for anyone who is interested in the politics and aesthetics of sound. We will work on developing listening literacy as writers, thinking of it as a source of narrative craft. We will likewise explore listening as a collective practice that allows for creative resistance, both environmental and political. Some of our explorations will include: acoustemology, soundscaping, sound and gender, noise vs sound, archives and voices from the past, aural phenomenology, or the geophony-biophony-anthropophony triad. We will be engaging with a wide range of work from different fields, including the works of Anne Carson, Alice Oswald, Svetlana Alexievich, Layli Long Soldier, Roland Barthes, and the Ultra-red International Sound Collective

Note: This course is a limited-enrollment seminar open to both undergraduate and graduate students, including PhD students in English (please contact me for enrolment details). Students in Harvard Masters' programs welcome.

This course satisfies the “1900-Present Guided Elective" requirement for English concentrators and Secondary Field students.