Matt Rubery on the Book after Edison's Phonograph

Monday, February 27th at 5:15 pm

Matthew Rubery

“Canned Literature: The Book after Edison’s Phonograph”

This talk is co-sponsored with the University of Pennsylvania’s Workshop on the History of Material Texts, thus the unusual time (Monday at 5:15) and place (Penn’s Van Pelt Library’s Martin and Margy Meyerson Conference Center, which is located on the second floor of Van Pelt Library, diagonally across from the elevator bank).

There is no pre-circulated paper for this event.

Matthew Rubery is Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature at Queen Mary, University of London. He is the author of The Novelty of Newspapers: Victorian Fiction after the Invention of the News (Oxford, 2009) and editor of Audiobooks, Literature, and Sound Studies (Routledge, 2011). His current project is titled The Untold Story of the Talking Book.

Matt describes his talk:

Thomas Edison announced his plans to mechanically reproduce the human voice in a letter to Scientific American published on November 17, 1877. The inaugural recordings consisted of nursery rhymes and snippets of verse, but the advent of phonograph technology nevertheless made it possible to conceive of a recorded book fifty years in advance of its actual completion. Between the phonograph’s debut and the earliest literary recordings of note, a public debate arose over the status of the printed book in the wake of sound-recording technology. The debate centered on the question: “Are we to have a new kind of book?” This talk excavates the debate over the book’s future from American and British newspapers, magazines, trade journals, and memoirs in order to reconstruct how the phonograph altered conceptions of the book in the closing decades of the nineteenth century.