Critical Inquiry Critical Inquiry

Tanya Clement. Dissonant Records: Close Listening to Literary Archives. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2024. 240 pp.

Review by Matthew Kilbane

21 March 2025

In 1998, Charles Bernstein urged a program of “close listening” to literary audio recordings.[1]  Since then, the work of many hands has turned that provocation and others like it into fully theorized practices, ways of producing knowledge with audio collections ever more robustly digitized and disposed to study. Tanya Clement’s Dissonant Records is an incisive culmination of these developments in literary sound studies—a stock-taking synthesis and pragmatic kick in the pants for a field that is no longer emerging but verifiably here.

Dissonant Records collects five intensely researched case studies, each of which revolves around a recorded artifact hitherto silenced by evidentiary norms: oral histories of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, folk songs and stories gathered in the field by Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison’s participation at a 1953 Harvard conference, Anne Sexton’s personal therapy sessions, and Gloria Anzaldúa’s tarot readings. Clement doesn’t hammer these diverse figures into one historical narrative. What unifies the book, instead, is the force of its method: a flexible mode of self-reflexive, processual analysis that she assembles by coordinating the listening practices of her subjects—Ellison’s hearkening to “lower frequencies,” Sexton’s immersion in the welter of potential selfhood, and the spiritual receptivity that Anzaldúa calls conocimiento. Clement frames what we learn from these figures with insights from media history and cultural studies, and from her own long hours in hard-pressed archives, where even through “broken headphones” and on lossy, mislabeled CDs, the meanings of the past evade and overflow textual transcription (p. xii).

The book’s suite of concepts is designed to travel beyond its pages. Intermedia is what Clement terms her objects of study, including the notebooks, interviews, novels, poems, TV shows, and essays with which sonic artifacts remain imbricated in the cultural record. Resonance is what Clement listens for, and the relational valence of the word names a good listener’s consciousness that one’s “epistemological practices” are always situated in a dense, determinative network of media protocols and institutions (p. 7). Dissonance is the book’s key to navigating archives structured in dominance. To maintain a dialogic relation with dissonance—to let misheard phrases, awkward pauses, and inaudible words teach us something about history—is to hear agency in absence, resistance in silence.

The book’s reparative attention to dissonance accounts it a “form of advocacy for the continued, responsible use of historical audio artifacts” that will disappear without the use that merits stewardship (p. xi). Digital humanists know that Clement’s advocacy extends to the design of tools for machine reading, but as the book’s coda narrates, these efforts have lately shifted toward smaller-scale annotation platforms like AVAnnotate. In an online appendix, Clement leverages the latter to showcase Hurston herself singing into the ethnographic record, and the “agential interferences” distinguishing Ellison’s interaction with white audiences at Harvard (p. 70). In this way, the book invites readers to sound out the critical pedagogy toward which its silent pages strain so responsibly and movingly. Listen in.

[1] See Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word, ed. Charles Bernstein (New York, 1998).