Penn Arts & Sciences Logo
 

Podcasting

ENGL 0765.301
instructor(s):
Wednesday 5:15-8:14pm

 

Podcasting has become one of the most popular ways of disseminating the voice, supplanting radio. It has even been a primary driver of the growth of music streaming services like Spotify. This creative-critical seminar situates the podcast historically, analyzes current instantiations of the genre, and teaches hands-on skills to create your own podcasts. The course will examine antecedents to the podcast, including early twentieth-century radio plays (The War of the Worlds), avant-garde audio productions (Antonin Artaud’s To Have Done with the Judgment of God, Luigi Russolo’s Art of Noise), staged poetic works (Louise Bennett’s tragicomic dialect monologues), interview/documentary radio (Studs Terkel), and oral histories. Alongside this historical arc, we will listen to and analyze a range of podcasts, including serialized narrative works, analytical podcasts, and interview-based series. You will also learn audio production techniques to make your own podcasts and you will have the opportunity to produce different genres. No prior experience with audio editing is necessary, only an interest in experimenting with sound.

* attend audio-editing workshop and create a recording of a story, augmented by music and sound effects

* Record a group discussion of a literary work and edit into a podcast episode (modeled on Penn's PoemTalk podcast)

* Final project - completed in segments over the latter-half of the term, design and record your own podcast. You will write a proposal with a description, create its artwork, record and edit one episode, come up with a plan for promoting it. Work will be presented during the final class.

 

 

fulfills requirements
Sector 1: Theory and Poetics of the Standard Major
Sector 6: 20th Century Literature of the Standard Major