The Indefensible Ear

Music and Letters, 2012

Music and Letters, 93/2 (May 2012), 276-280

While critics discuss the link between female speech and sexual looseness, and silence and chastity, many have overlooked the prerequisite for obedience-hearing and its agent, the ear. The link between the ear and vagina is often ignored because of the proneness to perceive ears as passive orifices (Kilgour 131; Woodbridge 256). However, ears are vulnerable holes subject to penetration by external tongues. Reina Green shows that "in the early modern period, ears, like mouths and vaginas, were regarded not only as passive openings through which the body could be penetrated, but also as sites through which desire could be expressed" (Green 54). Bryan Crockett argues that in early modern Protestant culture, there was a "cult of the ear" (47-65). As Bloom has ably pointed out, the Protestant preacher Robert Wilkinson, in his sermon A Jewell for the Eare (1605), reveals that God touches the human soul through the ears: "God never cometh so neere a manssoule as when he entreth in by the doore of the eare, therefore the eare is a most precious member if men knewe how to use it" (original italics) (Bloom 118). As the act of listening is an organ of salvation, the agency is located in the hearer rather than the speaker, for the transfer of speech shifts authority from the narrator to the listener. Bloom argues that "[i]t is the act of audition, not vocalization, that attests to one's position in relation to God and one's potential for salvation" (114). In their discussion of the speaker-listener dynamic in Shakespeare's plays, Laury Magnus and Walter Cannon suggest that "[t] he resistance to hearing or downright refusal to hear indicates some harsh rigidity on the part of the recalcitrant hearers that compromise their essential humanity" (xii).

Current Musicology, 2008

Peter Szendy's first translation into English has appeared on the shelves not merely by chance. It arrives in the wake of two recent trends in the academic world: an intense interest in all things having to do with the history and culture of the senses, and the sudden accession of Jean-Luc Nancy as the Academy's philosophe du jour. Of course, these two trends are not unrelated, for few philosophers have questioned the senses, especially the sense of touch, in the way that Nancy has over the past two decades. Nancy's foreword to Szendy's book is guaranteed to draw attention to the new release, especially coming immediately on the heels ofFordham's translation of Nancy's short volume, Listening. Its "positioning" couldn't be better. However, unlike the terse, Heideggerian-inflected prose of Nancy, Szendy's work appears far more sober. At first glance, it is little more than a piecemeal work, centered around three topics: a sketchy history of m...

Plagiarism and the obligation of truth 16. )) 1757: Music and notes (at the foot of the page) 18. )) 1835: A great change in our customs 22. )) 1853: A listener in court 25. )) 1841: O ur portrait in a cartoon 31. Chapter 2 Writing Our Listenings: Arrangement, Translation, Criticism 35

Tuning the Ear, 2018

This thesis sets out to propose a new attention towards the term hearing by exploring the technologies which historically have been used to diagnose, normalize and even optimize the ear. By attending to both the discursive frames and the operative means of selected audiological instruments, it exposes how technology tunes the ear, that is how technology lets us hear and how technology frames conceptions of hearing. The research project departs from the construction of three sound works that stage an obsolete audiometer, a row of imaginary sound therapy instruments and a set of reconstructed hearing horns within an aesthetic setting. These sound works propose an alternative methodology for reaching conceptualizations of hearing, where the act of doing, of entering into a practical dialogue with a specific material, forms a way of thinking. As this approach has strong ties to the phenomenological research methodology of Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, but also to contemporary research methodologies such as media archaeology and object-oriented ontology, the research project evolves as a tuning between manifold methodologies and theoretical positions, which creates different entrances for exploring the history, the epistemic claims and the auditory attention connected to the act of hearing. The kaleidoscopic perspective on the audiological instruments enables for a presentation of hearing beyond the passive position it has partaken within especially the field of sound studies and the field of audiology, and it propose hearing as a varied, malleable and indeed complex perceptual auditory state.

Aural surgery is a branch of nineteenth-century medicine and surgery providing specialized treatment for ear diseases. During the 1830s, faced with a “popular prejudice” against the curability of deafness as well as intraprofessional rivalries and continuous accusations of quackery, aurists found their surgical authority questioned and their field’s value threatened. In an attempt to bolster aural surgery’s reputation, in 1841, the aurist John Harrison Curtis (1778–1856) introduced his new diagnostic instrument, the cephaloscope, which could not only improve diagnosis but also provide approaches for regulating aural knowledge, thus strengthening aural surgery’s authority. This article examines the motives underlying Curtis’s introduction of the cephaloscope and the meanings it held for the occupational group at large.

Hearing, Balance and Communication, 2020

Purpose: To discover the widest collection of anatomo-pathological findings published in the XVII century, Theophile Bonet's Sepulchretum sive Anatomia Practica (1679), the forerunner of Morgagni's De Sedibus et Causis Morborum (1761). Particular attention has been paid to the paragraphs relating to otology and audiology. Method: Section 19 of Book I of the Sepulchretum (entitled De Aurium Affectibus) contains the description of all the ears pathologies found during autopsies performed at that time. Results: The annotations in this section provide an idea of the concepts and the knowledge that physicians had of otological and audiological syndromes in the XVII century. Conclusion: The Sepulchretum was fundamental in the development of modern medicine, as demonstrated by the similar treaties that followed Bonet's work.

Journal of Bioethical Inquiry, 2016

This essay examines constructions of deafness in medieval culture, exploring how deaf experience disrupts authoritative discourses in three textual genres: medical treatise, literary fiction, and autobiographical writing. Medical manuals often present deafness as a physical defect, yet they also suggest how social conditions for deaf people can be transformed in lieu of treatment protocols. Fictional narratives tend to associate deafness with sin or social stigma, but they can also imagine deaf experience with a remarkable degree of sympathy and nuance. Autobiographical writing by deaf authors most vividly challenges diagnostic models of disability, exploring generative forms of perception that deafness can foster. In tracing the disruptive force that deaf experience exerts on perceived notions of textual authority, this essay reveals how medieval culture critiqued the diagnostic power of medical practitioners. Deafness does not simply function as a symptom of an individual problem or a metaphor for a spiritual or social condition; rather, deafness is a transformative capacity affording new modes of knowing self and other.