The Soul of the Phonograph: Media-Technologies, Auditory Experience, and Literary Modernism in the Age of COVID-19 †

Abstract

The unpredictable duration of the COVID-19 pandemic necessitates renewed reflection on our collective reliance on video platforms such as Zoom and YouTube for telecommunication and music listening purposes, which have virtually filled the gap left by widely cancelled live performances. The affectively close relationship we forge with these services today echoes a recurrent theme in literary modernism: the tendency to endow early mechanical sound reproduction machines such as the phonograph and the record player with quasi-human subjectivity, emotions, and agency. This historical topos, in turn, anticipates posthumanism’s fascination with the seamless interface between machine-intelligence and its human users. Thinking about these cultural continuities may help the Humanities articulate the crucial role of media technologies and literary discourses under exceptional circumstances.