Just Vibrations: The Purpose of Sounding Good (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780472073252)

Modern academic criticism bursts with what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick once termed paranoid readings--interpretative feats that aim to prove a point, persuade an audience, and subtly denigrate anyone who disagrees. Driven by strategies of negation and suspicion, such rhetoric tends to drown out softer-spoken reparative efforts, which forego forceful argument in favor of ruminations on pleasure, love, sentiment, reform, care, and accessibility.

Just Vibrations: The Purpose of Sounding Good calls for a time-out in our serious games of critical exchange. Charting the divergent paths of paranoid and reparative affects through illness narratives, academic work, queer life, noise pollution, sonic torture, and other touchy subjects, William Cheng exposes a host of stubborn norms in our daily orientations toward scholarship, self, and sound. How we choose to think about the perpetration and tolerance of critical and acoustic offenses may ultimately lead us down avenues of ethical ruin--or, if we choose, repair. With recourse to experimental rhetoric, interdisciplinary discretion, and the playful wisdoms of childhood, Cheng contends that reparative attitudes toward music and musicology can serve as barometers of better worlds.

Author: William Cheng
ISBN-10: 0472073257
ISBN-13: 9780472073252
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Language: English
Published: 07/27/2016
Pages: 180
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 0.90lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.10w x 0.70d

Review Citation(s):
Choice 02/01/2017

About the Author
William Cheng teaches music, media, and ethics at Dartmouth College and is the author of Sound Play: Video Games and the Musical Imagination.