UCLA

In the eighteenth and nineteenth century United States, the art of oratory and rhetoric was held in high esteem as a powerful force of culture, politics, and nation building. But to what extent did the impact of the spoken word in this period depend on the listening subject? To what degree were there common listening practices or cultural investments in listening? Earwitnesses in America recovers “listening literatures,” a term this dissertation uses to refer to a body of U.S. literature that engages significantly with listening as a behavior and contains rich depictions of aural experience. By analyzing the writings of William Apess, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and Charles Brockden Brown, this dissertation shows that authors often invoked listening in their writings to imagine forms of knowledge and attentions that could enable social reform. For these writers, the power of eloquence and the spoken words was inherently conditional and dependent on access to a listening audience. What really mattered was the right to be heard.