This panel welcomes papers that explore representations and conceptions of sound, hearing, and listening in the German literature of the long eighteenth century. Participants are invited to reflect critically on how the field of sound studies and the “acoustic turn” in literary and cultural studies can contribute to the existing scholarly discourse on Goethe and his age, which in the last few decades has profited from the flourishing of a concern with visuality.     

Topics may include, but are not limited to:

• Literary depictions of hearing, listening, and acoustic performance
• Music and declamation in theater and salon culture
• Sound and experimental poetics: critical and poetological reflections on the sound of poetry
• Literary responses to early acoustic theory (e.g., Chladni’s Die Akustik) and scientific and technical innovations in the acoustic dimension
• Listening as “zarte Empirie”: figuring the acoustic dimension in reflections on phenomenology, epistemology, and scientific method by Goethe and others

Please email proposals (300 words) to Mary Helen Dupree (mhd33@georgetown.edu) by March 1, 2016.