ENGL 569 A1: Ethical Listening

M. O'Driscoll

This graduate seminar will focus on the ethics of listening as the theoretical province of literary, cultural, sound, and philosophical studies while also attending to the operations of listening in contemporary culture and in the seminar room. We’ll explore a pedagogy of attunement through innovative listening exercises and exploratory field work, and we’ll listen in on various creative works (literary performance, theoretical argument, and otherwise) that enact, produce, and thematize listening practices. In her book “The Other Side of Language,” philosopher Gemma Corradi Fiumara remarks that genuine listening “creates ever new spaces in the very ‘place’ it is carried out,” while for philosopher Lisbeth Lipari, an “ethics of attunement” is an “essential form of constitutive communicative action” with “potential for social, personal, and political transformation.” Certain practices of listening, these arguments contend, can be a site for the emergence of something radically new—new forms of care, new ways of relating to our environments, and new ways of relating to each other. Listening, one might say, has a powerful potential to be a revolutionary activity. At the same time, cautionary notes abound: for example, outstanding contributions to the field of Sound Studies, such as Jennifer Lynn Stoever’s The Sonic Color Line and Dylan Robinson’s Hungry Listening, have foregrounded the exclusionary and extractive politics of listening. How, as Stoever asks, have visually-driven epistemologies rendered unhearable, particularly in regards to race, sound “as a repository of apprehension, oppression, and confrontation”? How, we might ask, do our listening practices efface the colonizing dynamic between what Robinson calls “the listener and the listened to”? After all, as Clint Burham has reminded us, listening is not necessarily an unalloyed “good” thing in that it constitutes the structural position occupied by the “master”: listening is, after all, the traumatic economy of judges, priests, analysts… and even literary scholars.