John M Picker
Biographic Data
| ID | 1593076 |
|---|---|
| NAME | John M Picker |
| GIVEN NAMES | John M |
| FAMILY NAME | Picker |
| SIGNATURE | PICKER J M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 11 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 73 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 11 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1999 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2015 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Sensing Chicago
Journal Article Sensing Chicago: Noisemakers, Strikebreakers, and Muckrakers. By Adam Mack Get access Sensing Chicago: Noisemakers, Strikebreakers, and Muckrakers. By Adam Mack (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2015. xi plus 161 pp. $25.00). John M. Picker John M. Picker Massachusetts Institute of Technology [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Social History, Volume 50, Issu…
Current Thinking
A few years ago, out of scholarly as well as pedagogical interest, I happened to be looking through two recent anthologies on the nebulous-sounding subject of “transatlantic literature.” I was teaching a new course on transatlanticism and was particularly curious to discover how these texts represented the period that is the focus of this journal and the one to which at least a few of its readers are attached. In both cases, I was struck by the d…
George Eliot and the Sequel Question
While from its first appearance in 1876, many Jewish and Christian readers alike have endorsed performing some kind of reductive surgery on George Eliot's Daniel Deronda (most famously, F. R. Leavis in The Great Tradition, who advocated excising the "Jewish part" and renaming the remainder Gwendolen Harleth), there is another related but largely forgotten line of response to the novel that cuts in somewhat different ways: the arrival, in the imme…
George Eliot's Ear
This chapter argues that George Eliot recognized the advent of an age defined by new emphases on and understandings of the capacity for listening. This argument suggests that Victorian science — especially the work of Hermann von Helmholtz and his followers — at first gave substance and form to sounds that had once seemed indefinite and immaterial, and Victorian technology then fundamentally destabilized aural communication. Coming at the end of …
The Recorded Voice From Victorian Aura to Modernist Echo
This chapter argues that while moderns used the gramophone to represent their concerns over the disintegration of artistic “aura” in an age of mechanical reproduction, Victorians used the phonograph in ways that spoke to their own concerns over issues ranging from the domestic to the imperial. It presents a cultural study attentive to the varied, often contradictory later Victorian manifestations of the phonograph, in the publicity-related activi…
Introduction
The Soundproof Study
This chapter argues that later 19th-century Londoners' deliberations over street music serve as a gauge of that urban community's explicit demands and entrenched biases. It shows how fights for silence repeatedly emerged as regional struggles against street music, insofar as they attempted not only to protect literal neighborhoods and city blocks from intrusive noises but also to defend more abstract regions of identity, those critical domains of…
“What the Waves Were Always Saying”
Charles Dickens's anguish about writing Dombey and Son, his own need to satisfy his increasingly stringent standards of expression in fiction, is reflected in the novel's preoccupation with the problem of expressing things clearly, of getting out the word. Dombey conceives of expression in many ways: as verbal communication, primarily, but also as interchange between different parties; the moving forth of people and goods, the passing of legacies…
Victorian Soundscapes
This book shows how, in more ways than one, Victorians were hearing things. The chapters cover the railway that tore with a shriek, roar, and rattle through an eminent novelist's city and countryside; the street music that drove a famous historian to a soundproof room and a popular illustrator to his premature death; the newly invented telephone that enchanted a queen; and the phonograph that preserved the gruff growl of a poet laureate. This boo…
The Victorian Aura of the Recorded Voice
After "filling four dozen cylinders," Mark Twain confessed to William Dean Howells in April 1891 that he had given up trying to dictate his latest novel The American Claimant into a phonograph that Howells had rented for him. 1 As a result of his experience, Twain, unlike those astounded early listeners who found the Victorian phonograph a "recording angel," concluded it was a corrupting demon. "You can't write literature with it," he wrote to Ho…
The Soundproof Study
Late in October 1864, during a dinner with family and friends, Charles Dickens received a telegram that read simply LEECH DEAD. Marcus Stone, a guest at the dinner, later recalled: [S]ilence fell upon us. [.. .] No one said a word. What was there to say? (qtd. in Kaplan, Dickens 450). In the following weeks, as Dickens struggled to complete another monthly installment of Our Mutual Friend (1864-65), he wrote to John Forster: have not done my numb…
Victorian Soundscapes
This book shows how, in more ways than one, Victorians were hearing things. The chapters cover the railway that tore with a shriek, roar, and rattle through an eminent novelist's city and countryside; the street music that drove a famous historian to a soundproof room and a popular illustrator to his premature death; the newly invented telephone that enchanted a queen; and the phonograph that preserved the gruff growl of a poet laureate. This boo…
The Victorian Aura of the Recorded Voice
After "filling four dozen cylinders," Mark Twain confessed to William Dean Howells in April 1891 that he had given up trying to dictate his latest novel The American Claimant into a phonograph that Howells had rented for him. 1 As a result of his experience, Twain, unlike those astounded early listeners who found the Victorian phonograph a "recording angel," concluded it was a corrupting demon. "You can't write literature with it," he wrote to Ho…
The Soundproof Study
Late in October 1864, during a dinner with family and friends, Charles Dickens received a telegram that read simply LEECH DEAD. Marcus Stone, a guest at the dinner, later recalled: [S]ilence fell upon us. [.. .] No one said a word. What was there to say? (qtd. in Kaplan, Dickens 450). In the following weeks, as Dickens struggled to complete another monthly installment of Our Mutual Friend (1864-65), he wrote to John Forster: have not done my numb…
Current Thinking
A few years ago, out of scholarly as well as pedagogical interest, I happened to be looking through two recent anthologies on the nebulous-sounding subject of “transatlantic literature.” I was teaching a new course on transatlanticism and was particularly curious to discover how these texts represented the period that is the focus of this journal and the one to which at least a few of its readers are attached. In both cases, I was struck by the d…
The Soundproof Study
Late in October 1864, during a dinner with family and friends, Charles Dickens received a telegram that read simply LEECH DEAD. Marcus Stone, a guest at the dinner, later recalled: [S]ilence fell upon us. [.. .] No one said a word. What was there to say? (qtd. in Kaplan, Dickens 450). In the following weeks, as Dickens struggled to complete another monthly installment of Our Mutual Friend (1864-65), he wrote to John Forster: have not done my numb…
The Victorian Aura of the Recorded Voice
After "filling four dozen cylinders," Mark Twain confessed to William Dean Howells in April 1891 that he had given up trying to dictate his latest novel The American Claimant into a phonograph that Howells had rented for him. 1 As a result of his experience, Twain, unlike those astounded early listeners who found the Victorian phonograph a "recording angel," concluded it was a corrupting demon. "You can't write literature with it," he wrote to Ho…
George Eliot's Ear
This chapter argues that George Eliot recognized the advent of an age defined by new emphases on and understandings of the capacity for listening. This argument suggests that Victorian science — especially the work of Hermann von Helmholtz and his followers — at first gave substance and form to sounds that had once seemed indefinite and immaterial, and Victorian technology then fundamentally destabilized aural communication. Coming at the end of …
The Recorded Voice From Victorian Aura to Modernist Echo
This chapter argues that while moderns used the gramophone to represent their concerns over the disintegration of artistic “aura” in an age of mechanical reproduction, Victorians used the phonograph in ways that spoke to their own concerns over issues ranging from the domestic to the imperial. It presents a cultural study attentive to the varied, often contradictory later Victorian manifestations of the phonograph, in the publicity-related activi…
Introduction
The Soundproof Study
This chapter argues that later 19th-century Londoners' deliberations over street music serve as a gauge of that urban community's explicit demands and entrenched biases. It shows how fights for silence repeatedly emerged as regional struggles against street music, insofar as they attempted not only to protect literal neighborhoods and city blocks from intrusive noises but also to defend more abstract regions of identity, those critical domains of…
“What the Waves Were Always Saying”
Charles Dickens's anguish about writing Dombey and Son, his own need to satisfy his increasingly stringent standards of expression in fiction, is reflected in the novel's preoccupation with the problem of expressing things clearly, of getting out the word. Dombey conceives of expression in many ways: as verbal communication, primarily, but also as interchange between different parties; the moving forth of people and goods, the passing of legacies…
Victorian Soundscapes
This book shows how, in more ways than one, Victorians were hearing things. The chapters cover the railway that tore with a shriek, roar, and rattle through an eminent novelist's city and countryside; the street music that drove a famous historian to a soundproof room and a popular illustrator to his premature death; the newly invented telephone that enchanted a queen; and the phonograph that preserved the gruff growl of a poet laureate. This boo…
George Eliot and the Sequel Question
While from its first appearance in 1876, many Jewish and Christian readers alike have endorsed performing some kind of reductive surgery on George Eliot's Daniel Deronda (most famously, F. R. Leavis in The Great Tradition, who advocated excising the "Jewish part" and renaming the remainder Gwendolen Harleth), there is another related but largely forgotten line of response to the novel that cuts in somewhat different ways: the arrival, in the imme…
Current Thinking
A few years ago, out of scholarly as well as pedagogical interest, I happened to be looking through two recent anthologies on the nebulous-sounding subject of “transatlantic literature.” I was teaching a new course on transatlanticism and was particularly curious to discover how these texts represented the period that is the focus of this journal and the one to which at least a few of its readers are attached. In both cases, I was struck by the d…
Sensing Chicago
Journal Article Sensing Chicago: Noisemakers, Strikebreakers, and Muckrakers. By Adam Mack Get access Sensing Chicago: Noisemakers, Strikebreakers, and Muckrakers. By Adam Mack (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2015. xi plus 161 pp. $25.00). John M. Picker John M. Picker Massachusetts Institute of Technology [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Social History, Volume 50, Issu…
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