Waves of Sound: Telepoetics Symposium Launches at Nottingham Research Nexus Crossed Lines

No matter where you are, don't miss Telepoetics, a tele-symposium across the pond that launched yesterday at Crossed Lines, and features—much like an ordinary conference—talks and conversations galore, "variously 'interrupted' by a range of creative and critical calls." Up now, for instance, is Vahni Capildeo's "'Rinse and Wring the Ear': Reflections on being in long-distance conversation" and Asiya Wadud's "'Our distress calls like urgent plovers': On Syncope." From the larger description:

From the ‘waves of sound, transmitted o’er the line’ in Jones Very’s ‘The Telephone’ (1877) to the ‘thin voice speak[ing] / from a drowning world’ in Imtiaz Dharker’s ‘Six Rings’ (2018), telephones have been calling in and across literary texts for almost one hundred and fifty years. But although considerable research on the smartphone has been undertaken in recent media and cultural studies, the relationship between telephony and literature remains largely neglected. In fact, as Nicholas Royle points out in Telepathy and Literature (1991), ‘really we have no idea what a telephone is, or what a voice is, or when or how. Least of all when it is linked up with the question of literature’. Taking the ‘question of literature’ as its starting point, this AHRC-funded symposium addresses the telephone’s propensity to facilitate and mediate but also to interrupt communication on a local and global scale, as well the ways in which it taps into some of the most urgent concerns of the modern and contemporary age, including surveillance, mobility, resistance, power and warfare. Exploring its complex, multiple and mutating functions in literary texts from the nineteenth century to the present day, we consider both historical and recent manifestations of the telephone, and its capacity to call across languages and cultures.

Register to participate here, and check out the full program. The symposium is open for discussion until June 5, 2020.