The Victorian Aura of the Recorded Voice
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4270672 |
|---|---|
| Authors | John M Picker (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2001 |
| Volume | 32 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 769-786 |
| Publication date | 2001-06-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | New Literary History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0028-6087 • E-ISSN: 1080-661X |
| Publisher | Project MUSE (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1353/nlh.2001.0040 |
| OpenAlex | W2009941181 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 10 |
| References cited | 6 |
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 Howells, "because it hasn't any ideas & it hasn't any gift for elaboration, or smartness of talk, or vigor of action, or felicity of expression, but is just matter-of-fact, compressive, unornamental, & as grave & unsmiling as the devil" (641). Within the novel itself, Twain blasted the supposed utility of the new invention when his hero Colonel Sellers proposes a "grand adaptation of the phonograph to marine service": "You store up profanity in it for use at sea . . . a ship can't afford a hundred mates; but she can afford a hundred Cursing Phonographs. . . . Imagine a big storm, and a hundred of my machines all cursing away at once--splendid spectacle, splendid!--you couldn't hear yourself think. Ship goes through that storm perfectly serene--she's just as safe as if she'd been on shore." 2
Art · Aura · Cybernetics and Technology in Society · Digital Humanities and Scholarship · Media, Communication, and Education · Psychology
| Unique citing works | 10 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,83 |
| Citation span | 2014 - 2022 (9) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 10 |