$51.49
Author: Elliott Richard
Brand: Bloomsbury Academic
Edition: Paperback
Number Of Pages: 152
Details: Product Description
In The Sound of Nonsense, Richard Elliott highlights the importance of sound in understanding the ‘nonsense’ of writers such as Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, James Joyce and Mervyn Peake, before connecting this noisy writing to works which engage more directly with sound, including sound poetry, experimental music and pop. By emphasising sonic factors, Elliott makes new and fascinating connections between a wide range of artistic examples to ultimately build a case for the importance of sound in creating, maintaining and disrupting meaning.
Review
Elliott’s Sound of Nonsenseis a deliciously noisy book, a lively sonic romp that enjoins its readers to be enjoyed aloud. It chants and enchants us through realms of utterance shaped by astonishingly diverse artists including Lewis Carroll and Hugo Ball, James Joyce and Bob Dylan, Velimir Khlebnikov and Jaap Blonk. Their often only just speakable tones and textures of proto-lexical sounds lure us into that zaum wonderland Paul Schmidt calls “beyonsense”. Elliott’s masterful, thoroughly useful scholarship is offset by his contagious delight in his subject. Echoes of poetry freed from semantic shackles, of scat, beatbox, and doowop, bounce off the page to activate our readership via the “mixing desk of the ear”. This invigorating Sound of Nonsense makes sound sense.
Sally Jane Norman, Director of the New Zealand School of Music/Te Koki – Victoria University Wellington, Aotearoa/New Zealand
Taking a literary and musical path – Lear and Carroll, literary modernism, translation, sonic art and pop records – Richard Elliott provides a sensible view of the nonsensical. Formed of much wordy noise, copious theory lightly handled, and palpable fondness in the writing, The Sound of Nonsense is a quietly provocative manifesto on nonsense’s behalf.
Dai Griffiths, Senior Lecturer in Music, Oxford Brookes University, UK
There’s no sense like nonsense, and here’s a no-nonsense survey of it, from the simply silly to the profoundly pointed-a guide to the art of nonsense across cultural levels, at once scholarly and entertaining, original and enlightening.
Paul Dutton, Writer and Oral Sound Artist, Canada
About the Author
Richard Elliott is Senior Lecturer in Music at Newcastle University, UK. His current research focuses on the representations of time, age and experience in popular music as well as the relationship between music and materiality. He is the author of the books Fado and the Place of Longing (2010), Nina Simone (2013) and The Late Voice (2015).
Michael Bull is Professor of Sound Studies at the University of Sussex, UK. He is co-founder and editor of the journal Senses and Society, founding editor of Sound Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, andseries editor for the book series The Study of Sound (Bloomsbury). He is author of Sirens (Bloomsbury 2020) and co-editor (with Marcel Cobussen) of The Bloomsbury Handbook of Sonic Methodologies (Bloomsbury 2020). He is also co-editor of The Auditory Culture Reader (Bloomsbury 2003, 2016) and editor of The Routledge Companion to Sound Studies (2018).
Release Date: 28-12-2017
Package Dimensions: 14x214x220
