Connected by the Ear

Cloth Text – $80.00
ISBN 978-0-8101-2964-1Paper Text – $39.95
ISBN 978-0-8101-2933-7Connected by the Ear
“Connected by the Ear achieves the feat of marrying the two most important and most antagonistic postwar German thinkers on communication: Jürgen Habermas and Friedrich Kittler. Sean Franzel’s archaeology illuminates both the bourgeois public sphere and discourse network 1800 by showing the romantic lecture to be the key cultural form in a pivotal moment of German intellectual history, a history long obsessed with the mediation of oral discourse and written text. Franzel lucidly lays bare the cultural genome of a mode which continues in our day of MOOCs and TED talks. The next time you hear a pedagogue (or president) call the class, public, or nation to converse, you will note that the romantic lecture is alive and well.”—John Durham Peters, author of Speaking into the Air
"Sean Franzel’s Connected by the Ear: The Media, Pedagogy, and Politics of the Romantic Lecture reminded me why my teaching philosophy has long been of the guide-at-the-side type. Franzel takes us back to the birth of 'staging of the sage' as lecture model in German Romanticism." —The Chronicle of Higher Education