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GCSC Keynote Series// Sound Studies Today: Auditory Experience, Media Technologies, and Literary Textuality

When

Jul 08, 2025 from 06:00 to 08:00 (Europe/Berlin / UTC200)

Where

Konferenzraum- 001, EG, Otto-Behaghel.Str. 12

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As an interdisciplinary and intercultural field of inquiry, current sound studies explores, among many other directions, the interplay among the human subject’s auditory experiences, media-technological sound (re-)production, and music, visual arts, or literature in diverse historical/cultural contexts. My talk will address theoretical and methodological concerns of current North-American and German sound studies. Critical attention will be given to recent forays into sonic materialism’s focus on bodily-affective resonance, idiosyncratically subjective sound experiences, and factors of race, gender, and social class. Selective examples will be taken from Friedrich Hölderlin (for the classical-romantic period), Virginia Woolf (for high modernism), Yukio Mishima (for Japanese late modernism) and Don DeLillo (American postmodernism). These excerpts reveal the power of the literary imagination to provide self-reflexive interrogations into the (non-)representability of sound, addressing philosophical assumptions, cognitive interests, and ideological biases that sometimes remain partly hidden under pragmatic research projects into sonic realities. 
 
 
//Rolf J. Goebel, Ph.D., is Distinguished Professor of German, Emeritus, University of Alabama in Huntsville, USA and Distinguished Research Fellow, International Graduate Center for the Study of Culture, Justus-Liebig-Universität, Gießen. His book publications include: Benjamin heute: Großstadtdiskurs, Postkolonialität und Flanerie zwischen den Kulturen (2001) and Klang im Zeitalter technischer Medien: Eine Einführung (2017). He is co-author of A Franz Kafka Encyclopedia (with Richard T. Gray, Ruth V. Gross und Clayton Koelb, 2005) and has edited A Companion to the Works of Walter Benjamin (2009), as well as A Companion to Sound in German-Speaking Cultures (2023).