In Dissonant Records: Close Listening to Literary Archives, Tanya Clement both argues for and illustrates how audio archives are of value in literary scholarship. Working with audio media digitized from reel-to-reel tapes, audiocassettes, and sound discs, Clement interestingly focuses on audio recordings that are perhaps not obviously literary, such as recordings of performances and readings, and considers how audio recordings can be both subject to literary analysis and intertwined with creative processes. These recordings include, for example, oral histories of the Tulsa Race Massacre in Oklahoma; folklore recordings created, co-created, and participated in by Zora Neale Hurston; conference proceedings from a 1953 Harvard Summer School Conference on the Contemporary Novel; recordings of Anne Sexton’s therapy sessions; and recordings of tarot and palm readings given and received by Gloria Anzaldúa. Organized into five chapters, each focusing on a particular author, and framed within audio-technology concepts including amplification, distortion, interference, compression, and reception, Clement’s book demonstrates the importance of audio recordings to literary scholarship. As Clement explains, the chapters are organized under audio-technology terms because these “can help conceptualize opportunities for exploring meaning making in the archive because, by and large, the technological means by which I accessed the recordings for this book have shaped what I have heard and what I write about what I’ve heard (or misheard)” (p. 3). Chapters include “Amplify: Close Listening to Silencing and the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre” (chapter 1); “Distortion: Authority, Authenticity, and Agency in Recordings of Zora Neale Hurston’s Black Folk” (chapter 2); “Interference: Silence and the Ideal Listener in Ralph Ellison’s American Novel” (chapter 3); “Compression: The Entelechy of Records in Anne Sexton’s Poem ‘For the Year of the Insane’” (chapter 4); and “Reception: Conocimiento in Gloria Anzaldúa’s Spirituality Tapes” (chapter 5). In Dissonant Records, Clement applies a methodology of close listening, a counterpoint to the distant listening employed in her previous research projects, such as High Performance Sound Technologies for Access and Scholarship. Whereas distant listening applies computing to large sets of audio recordings, close listening, a parallel to close reading, brings nuanced and focused attention to audio recordings: Quoting Charles Bernstein, Clement notes, “To listen closely to audio recordings for meaning in literary study is to listen to ‘sound as material, where sound is neither arbitrary nor secondary but constitutive’ of meaning” (p. 43). As a methodology, close listening is challenging for scholars: firstly, audio recordings can be difficult to find and access through cultural- heritage organizations, and secondly, once scholars discover and access recordings, close listening can be slow and may require “meticulous and repeated listening sessions” (p. 46). Clement has selected audio recordings from or relating to four American authors: ethnographer, novelist, and dramatist Zora Neale Hurston (William Duncan Strong Papers, National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution); writer, literary critic, and scholar Ralph Ellison (Harvard Summer School Conference on the Contemporary Novel, Houghton Library, Harvard University), poet Anne Sexton (Audiotapes and Papers of Anne Sexton, Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University); and activist and scholar of Chicana feminism and queer and cultural theory Gloria Anzaldúa (Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa Papers, Nettie Lee Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas at Austin). She has also included oral histories recorded by researcher Ruth Sigler Avery (Ruth Sigler Avery Collection, Special Collections and Archives, Oklahoma State University Tulsa Library), which provide an alternative perspective for understanding media and literature written about the Tulsa Race Massacre, including the popular Watchmen series. In each of these case studies, Clement illustrates convincingly the critical insights such materials bring to understanding literature and literary production. In …
