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Literature and Sound (and Soundscapes) is an upper-division elective literature course carrying a general education designation. The development of this course was supported by the Literature Department Teaching Fellowship 2022-23. The Department regards these Teaching Fellowships as an opportunity to expand its offerings and / or approaches to material. I believe it was among the first sound studies courses offered at UCSC's Literature Department.
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Image of the Voyager Golden Record.
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Course Description
General Education designation: Perspective on Technology
This course approaches U.S. American speculative / science fiction (and science facts) with an open ear. The future is often imagined visually. Images of domed cities back-lit with purple skies and multiple suns or moons proliferate, yet future and other worlds are equally constructed and imagined through sound or the auditory. This class explores how Americans have imagined new or other worlds and their relationship to them through sound or sound practices. The course broadly moves from earthbound to extra-terrestrial sounds and back.
The course provides an introduction to sound study as a critical approach to genre and literary study more broadly. It is organized around keywords in sound, such as voice, radio, acousmatics, music, synthesized sound, space, transduction, and noise. It teaches strategies for identifying, analyzing, and writing about sounds that students can carry with them as tools for future work across genres and disciplines. From another perspective it surveys sound's relationship to Afrofuturism, 1950s science fiction cinema, and sound in American space exploration.
This course primarily asks participants to consider
This course approaches U.S. American speculative / science fiction (and science facts) with an open ear. The future is often imagined visually. Images of domed cities back-lit with purple skies and multiple suns or moons proliferate, yet future and other worlds are equally constructed and imagined through sound or the auditory. This class explores how Americans have imagined new or other worlds and their relationship to them through sound or sound practices. The course broadly moves from earthbound to extra-terrestrial sounds and back.
The course provides an introduction to sound study as a critical approach to genre and literary study more broadly. It is organized around keywords in sound, such as voice, radio, acousmatics, music, synthesized sound, space, transduction, and noise. It teaches strategies for identifying, analyzing, and writing about sounds that students can carry with them as tools for future work across genres and disciplines. From another perspective it surveys sound's relationship to Afrofuturism, 1950s science fiction cinema, and sound in American space exploration.
This course primarily asks participants to consider
- How do we read / listen to the future or other worlds as sonically charged?
- What have future and other worlds sounded like in American literature and why?
- What do sounds do or make possible in imagined futures or worlds?
- What do sounds of imagined futures and worlds have to do with historical events?
- Who and what gets represented through sounds and how do they make meaning?