Robert Ryder talk on The Acoustical Unconscious and Kracauer’s Materiality of Sound
March 19, 2015
3:30 PM - 4:30 PM
The Acoustical Unconscious and Kracauer’s Materiality of Sound
Dr. Rob Ryder
In Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (1960), Siegfried Kracauer devotes a whole chapter to “Sound and Dialogue,” which one critic has claimed gestures toward “something like an ‘acoustic unconscious’.” In this talk, I will explore this claim by comparing Kracauer’s theory of sound and language in film, in which he emphasizes materiality over meaning, with my own forthcoming book dedicated to exploring how to think the acoustical unconscious in radio, film and early twentieth-century theories of language.
Dr. Rob Ryder is Visiting Lecturer and current Director of the Basic Language Program in German at UIC. He received his Ph.D. from Northwestern University under the direction of Samuel Weber. He was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the International Graduate Center for the Study of Culture (GCSC) in Giessen, Germany, and has been a Visiting Professor of German at the University of Chicago. His most recent publications involve topics from “innervation” to “affective hospitality,” and writers from Walter Benjamin and Rudolf Arnheim to Gunter Eich. His book, Hearing Otherwise: The Acoustical Unconscious from Walter Benjamin to Alexander Kluge is forthcoming with Northwestern University Press.
Date posted
Jun 9, 2020
Date updated
Jun 9, 2020