Technologies of Sound: Telephone/Gramophone

doi:10.1017/9781009182881.006

Chapter 4 - Technologies of Sound: Telephone/Gramophone

from Part I - Genealogies

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 January 2023

Christopher Morash

Edited by

Margaret Kelleher and

James O'Sullivan

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Margaret Kelleher: Affiliation:
University College Dublin
James O'Sullivan: Affiliation:
University College Cork

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Summary

The Irish Literary Revival at the turn of the twentieth century was heavily invested in the value of orature, characteristically associated with peasant culture as the living remnant of pre-modern society, which is typically seen as being on the verge of its final disappearance. Focusing on Augusta Gregory and W. B. Yeats, this essay resituates the relationship between orature and modernity in Irish culture in the context of technology, noting that the Revival coincides exactly with the period – from the late 1880s to the early 1920s – that saw the emergence of key technologies of sound: the telephone, the gramophone/phonograph, and later radio. A key concept here is the idea of over-lapping histories of technology; running alongside histories of technological innovation, political economy, and social change is a hidden history of technologies of sound as the ghost of oral culture, imbricated in some of the same literary narratives that memorialise the pre-modern.

Keywords

Telephone gramophone phonograph radio W. B. Yeats Augusta Gregory orature sound technology recording Martin Heidegger

Type: Chapter
Information: Technology in Irish Literature and Culture , pp. 65 - 80

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009182881.006 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2023

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