Of Crossings and Crowds: Re/Sounding Subject Formations

Abstract

This project provides rhetorical and sonic exploration of listening practices, musical song, crowded subject formations and multimodal composition pedagogy. Conceptually drawing from rhetorical studies, sound studies, queer and women of color (Q/WOC) feminisms, cultural studies, affect studies, and composition pedagogies, the project maintains commitments to multiply situated knowledge production. The project's sonic inquiries and cross-disciplinary interests offer scholarly interventions primarily aimed at improving rhetoric and composition studies analytical and affective responsiveness to sonority. Secondarily, the project is aimed at increasing sound studies rhetorical responsivity and attention to personified performance techniques. The project’s first chapter argues that disciplinary distancing between rhetorical, compositional and sonic arts can be lessened through the temporal principle of kairos. This chapter also overviews key methodological concepts, offers working definitions of key terms, and glosses the project's chapter progression. The second chapter is a multi-faceted literature review that surveys the ways listening is rhetorically emplaced and affectively confined within classical and contemporary discussions of Aristotelian epideixis. This chapter notes the limits of commonly accepted and received feminist rhetorical "recovery" projects that frequently place listening in service to logos; highlights the ways listening can act as a generative method of performative "respond-ability" through certain positions; and resonantly attunes listening to two audio-visual materials: timbral tonality and rhythmic temporality. Chapters three and four analytically train listening practices on two specific genres of musical sound: protest song and EDM-pop musical productions. The third chapter analyzes singer-songwriter-activist Nina Simone’s early 1960's protest song "Mississippi Goddam" while the fourth chapter focuses on contemporary singer-songwriter Sia's EDM-pop productions for "Chandelier." Treated as case studies, these songs and artists exemplify body-subject impressionability, political disaffection from historically dominant forms of whitened, hetero-patriarchal, liberalized ideology, and the performative possibilities of crossing and crowding subject-hood through persona crafting. Following these case studies, the project concludes by offering conceptual im/possibilities and pedagogical materials for rhetorically teaching composition as a sonic art. The fifth and final chapter conceptually intervenes in rhetoric and composition's pedagogical tendencies toward elevating and espousing notions of the minimally affected, individual, authorial, agentive rhetor/writer by developing a series of activities designed to give instructional supports for scaffolding student learning and composing specific to vocalic sound and the sorts of affects engendered in listening.