Sean Pue, Associate Professor of Hindi Language and South Asian Literature and Culture, Michigan State University
February 8, 2019
12:00-2:00pm
JRL 122
Outside of the region, “South Asia” has become a naturalized academic framework for humanistic inquiry, driving studies of visual art and religious practice, for instance. Nevertheless, the vast majority of literary research remains confined to the printed texts of single languages, few of which have secure representative status in any one nation in the region, much less across the region itself. This monolingual, and therefore always partial nature of literary research has hampered the building of robust scholarship on the vernacular literatures in South Asia, particularly in the modern period.
This paper addresses this situation by asking how literary studies of poetic performance can extend beyond single literary and language communities, using the mutual aural intelligibility of Hindi and Urdu as its initial case. It asks: What acoustic features shape poetic performance, and how can they be isolated and compared? How do patterns of sound function, and what do those patterns point to in the rituals of poetic performance? This paper discusses the pilot stages in a project investigating how computational techniques can illuminate sonic aspects of poetic meaning with the aim of working across linguistic and national boundaries. These techniques, drawn from digital humanities, computational linguistics, and data science, allow for the examination of sound alongside text, and the interpretation of the acoustic traces of poetic recitation. Particular attention will be paid to the benefits of visualization and analysis of sonic features of poetry.
A. Sean Pue (@seanpue) is associate professor of Hindi Language and South Asian Literature and Culture at Michigan State University. His I Too Have Some Dreams: N. M. Rashed and Modernism in Urdu Poetry was published by the University of California Press in 2014. He has served as the Director of the Digital Humanities program at Michigan State University and recently received an Andrew W. Mellon New Directions Fellowship that allowed him to study linguistics and computer/data science for his current research on poetic sound in South Asian poetry. He holds a Ph.D. in Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures and Comparative Literature and Society from Columbia University.
If you need any additional accommodations to participate in the Forum, please contact Carmen Caswell (caswellc@uchicago.edu).