Books by John Mowitt

Examines drumming and beating as musical practice (musicological meaning), as the channelling of violence or shock (sociological meaning), and as a subjective, embodied agent (psychoanalytic meaning). This title contributes to the cultural studies, popular and critical musicology, the theorisation of the body, and the sociology of music.

In a wide-ranging, cross-cultural, and transhistorical assessment, John Mowitt examines radio's central place in the history of twentieth-century critical theory. A communication apparatus that was a founding technology of twentieth-century mass culture, radio drew the attention of theoretical and philosophical writers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Lacan, and Frantz Fanon, who used it as a means to disseminate their ideas. For others, such as Martin Heidegger, Theodor Adorno, and Raymond Williams, radio served as an object of urgent reflection. Mowitt considers how the radio came to matter, especially politically, to phenomenology, existentialism, Hegelian Marxism, anticolonialism, psychoanalysis, and cultural studies. The first systematic examination of the relationship between philosophy and radio, this provocative work also offers a fresh perspective on the role this technology plays today.

This is not a book about sound. It is a study of sounds that aims to write the resonance and response they call for. John Mowitt seeks to critique existing models in the expanding field of sound studies and draw attention to sound as an object of study that solicits a humanistic approach encompassing many types of sounds, not just readily classified examples such as speech, music, industrial sounds, or codified signals. Mowitt is particularly interested in the fact that beyond hearing and listening we "e;audit"e; sounds and do so by drawing on paradigms of thought not easily accommodated within the concept of "e;sound studies."e; To draw attention to the ways in which sounds often are not perceived for the social and political functions they serve, each chapter presents a culturally resonant sound-including a whistle, an echo, a gasp, and silence-to show how sounds enable critical social and political concepts such as dialogue, privacy, memory, social order, and art-making. Sounds: The Ambient Humanities significantly engages, provokes, and contributes to the dynamic field and inquiry of sound studies.

A sustained theoretical reevaluation of "film languages," both visual and verbal.