ENG 295-01 - Special Topic: Radio Days: New Media Writing and the Art of Sound

2 credits (Fall)

In its boom years, radio introduced a new orality to American culture, in which ancient ways of conveying stories mixed with modern broadcast technology to produce a remarkable stream of narratives, from The Shadow to CBS Mystery Theatre. Today, in the post-celluloid age of new media, the creative spirit of radio has been revived by programs like Joe Frank’s In The Dark, Prairie Home Companion, This American Life, and Radiolab. This series of workshops on sound art and writing focuses on radio essays, stories, and plays. We’ll discuss such sound artists (storytellers and dramatists) as David Sedaris, Sarah Vowell, David Rakoff, Orson Welles, Lucile Fletcher, Anthony Minghella, and Arthur Kopit, while working closely with electronic media and audio editing tools. Our aim is to learn how to record voiceovers, capture nonverbal sounds and music, and integrate these media with spoken texts. We’ll explore voice quite literally as an acoustic event by experimenting with three modes of radiophonic writing–narrative, essayistic, and dramatic.

Prerequisite: ENG 205 or ENG 206.
Note: Dates: September 6 to October 11. Short course deadlines apply. S/D/F
Instructor: Porter