English Research Seminar -- Dr Edward Allen Catch as Catch Can: Towards an Understanding of Literary-Sonic Pests

Dr Allen is Associate Professor in modern British and Irish Literature, and a Fellow of Christ's College, Cambridge. His primary focus is sound and media culture, particularly the contact points between literary studies and musicology, and phenomena that may be termed sonic curiosities (earworms, audiobooks, landlines, church bells). He is the author of Modernist Invention: Media Technology and American Poetry (CUP: 2020) and editor of multiple collections, on Dylan Thomas, sub-genres of lyric poetry, and literary fiction, disability, and the hearing sciences, among others. He is currently running a project at the University of Padova — ‘Radio Waves: Network Building and the Making of Modern Europe' — on the reconstruction of nations, blocs, and regional modes of identity after the Second World War.

Catch as Catch Can: Towards an Understanding of Literary-Sonic Pests

Getting something stuck in your ear or head — but which? — is by no means a new phenomenon; nor is the urge to expunge an infectious strain of music a modern occupation. Involuntary Musical Imagery has long perplexed lab technicians and clinical practitioners the world over, not just because the syndrome resists formal diagnosis, but because our means of witnessing and treating the notorious ‘cognitive itch' extend well beyond the parameters of physiological enquiry. The purpose of this paper is to begin to identify the changing forms and effects of this most notorious of acoustic phenomena by delving into a variety of American art forms (prose, poetry, song, and cinema). I will be lending an ear to Poe and Twain, to James and Stevens, and to a crooner — once beloved of T. S. Eliot — called Joey Nash.

In doing so, I'm going to take seriously the possibility that we might come to better understand the phenomenon if we find a way to combine the findings of neuroscience and the humanities. Rather than upholding the often crudely-perceived distinction between fact and fiction, statistic and hunch, my aim is to excavate the parallel histories of otology and the arts, to evaluate their intersections and points of resistance at certain moments in American history, and to gauge their present affinities. The process of description, I want to suggest, is crucial: earworms, earwigs, jingles, maggots, imps, crotchets, cognitive itchiness, sticky music, INMI. Whose vocabulary are we drawing on when we speak of neurotological tedium and trauma? What's lost, and what's gained, when we attempt to translate or naturalise the Ohrwurm — once an insect much feared by farmers, now a coil of pes