American Literature Association: “Music and the American Literary Imagination” Symposium

January 28-30, 2027 in Nashville, Tennessee

CFP: “Sounding the Subject in the Nineteenth Century” 

While scholarship has long recognized sound’s significance to social and literary movements, American literary scholarship often approaches sound in relation to the technologies of sound production and capture. Throughout the long nineteenth century,  sound reproduction facilitated an extraordinary proliferation of newly commodifiable voices, bodies, and their products. Scholars have traced, for example, how instruments like the Aeolian harp signify human relationships with the world around them in Romantic and Naturalist movements, and countless pages have been dedicated to the ways sound technologies (e.g. records, phonographs, speakers, etc.) and music genres (i.e. jazz, blues, opera, hip-hop) shift sound’s social dynamics in the world and in literature. However, what has received comparatively less attention in literary study is how bodies themselves become social instruments or sound subjects in nineteenth-century discourse. Writers wrestled with a society informed by sound by bearing witness to how performers, audiences, and publics defined themselves in relation to the musics they encountered and produced. This panel explores the dynamic tension between American literary configurations of bodies as sound subjects that unsettle assumptions of liberal agency and constructions of music that sound the very depths of selfhood. 

We invite scholars to explore subjecthood, volition, and political life through sound and music in American literature.  How might understanding bodies in the context of the nineteenth-century instrument reframe Fred Moten’s “resistance of the object”?  What other nodes resonate in American literature? How might the profound yet intuitive sensation of musicking––whether losing oneself in a groove, harmonizing, rehearsing, fighting to find words to name that sound, humming on the job––open onto the all-too live questions of Black humanity, regulation of sexual life, and class antagonism? What has American literature contributed to thinking about communal sound-craft, a practice far older than print itself? 

We welcome papers on topics such as, but not limited to:

• Musicality of prose in relation to the author’s voice and possible source material
• Lexical representations of the aural, musical, instrumental, or vocal
• Music education as a method of disciplining the individual or communal body
• Theorizations of the body as an instrument and instruments as bodies
• Distinctions between hearing and listening as heuristics
• Sounding as measurement, evaluation, discernment
• Sheet music in relation to print culture and literacy
• Musical communities in literature or to which authors belonged
• Sound reproduction and/as social reproduction
• Literary engagement with receptivity, sentiment, or reader response as aural affects

Please send an abstract of 200-300 words to Jorden Sanders (jes486@english.rutgers.edu) and William-Claire Younts (wyounts@vols.utk.edu) by Friday, October 16, 2026. 

For more information about the symposium, see ALA’s website here.