Open Access Dissertation

It took some time to sort out the author rights and for the embargo to run out, but I’m happy to share that my 2015 dissertation is freely available through UVA’s LibraETD repository. The abstract and link to materials are both pasted below. DH folks might be especially interested in two components from it. The Virginia Woolf chapter incorporates text analysis and machine learning components (further discussions of that material can be found here on the blog). And the chapter on James Joyce features a fairly lengthy discussion of https://librivox.org/ and the kinds of sound recording communities made possible online. A much revised version of this same chapter was published in James Joyce Quarterly with this citation:

Walsh, Brandon. “The Joycean Record: Listening Patterns and Sound Coteries.” James Joyce Quarterly, vol. 53 no. 3, 2016, p. 235-250. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/jjq.2018.0006.

Many thanks to Sherry Lake and Brandon Butler of the UVA Library for helping me sort out copyright and licensing issues and to Sean Latham and Carol Kealiher of James Joyce Quarterly for agreeing to re-release the material that formed the basis of that article.

AudioTextual: Modernism, Sound Recordings, and Networks of Reception

This project examines how Anglo-American modernists engaged with new devices for sound recording and the threats and opportunities these media offered for community, the page, and the embodied voice. The project at once shows the still unrecognized extent of the modernist encounter with new technologies of sound and listens closely to audio recordings of modernist works as they form a network of modernist distribution and reception that transcends accounts limited by genre and nation. By rereading classic audible moments from modernist works in light of these sound recordings, the project argues for greater dialogue between literary modernism and its audiotextual incarnations that unfold over the course of decades and that consistently re-evaluate the terms and provocations of the original print works.

Committee: Michael Levenson, Jahan Ramazani, Rita Felski, Michael Puri