Tag Archives: Podcast criticism

4 – Ella Waldmann “This must be fiction: Examining the Implications of S-Town’s Novelistic Turn”

This paper explores what happens when a hit podcast like S-Town (2017) reclaims a traditional, written form as its model of production, construction and distribution.

Ella Waldmann is an alumna of the Ecole Normale Supérieure and of Sciences Po Paris. As part of her MA Program in English she was a visiting student at Columbia University in the City of New York. She is currently a PhD candidate at Université de Paris, Laboratoire de Recherche sur les Cultures Anglophones (LARCA), where she is working on a thesis on podcasts as literary objects, with a focus on the podcast S-Town.

Cities of Sound is an official Panel of the 2021 Pacific Ancient Modern Language Association

Citation:

Waldmann, Ella  4 – Ella Waldmann “This must be fiction: Examining the Implications of S-Town’s Novelistic Turn”” Mp3. Cities of Sound: Podcasting as Public Texts, Media and Performances. 2021 Pacific Ancient Modern Language Association Conference 

Works Cited:

Bottomley, Andrew. Sound Streams: A Cultural History of Radio-Internet Convergence. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2020. 

DeMair, Jillian. ‘Sounds Authentic: The Acoustic Construction of Serial’s Storyworld’. In The Serial Podcast and Storytelling in the Digital Age, edited by Ellen McCracken. Routledge Focus on Digital Media and Culture 1. New York ; London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2017.

Grierson, John. ‘First Principles of Documentary’. In Nonfiction Film Theory and Criticism, edited by Richard Meran Barsam. New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1976.

Hess, Amanda. ‘‘S-Town’ Attains Podcasting Blockbuster Status’. The New York Times, December 22, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/05/arts/s-town-podcast-blockbuster-status.html.

Lindgren, Mia. ‘Personal Narrative Journalism and Podcasting’. Radio Journal: International Studies in Broadcast & Audio Media 14 (1 April 2016): 23–41.

McHugh, Siobhan. ‘The Narrative Podcast as Digital Literary Journalism: Conceptualizing S-Town’. To be published in Literary Journalism Studies, Vol. 13, Nos. 1 – 2, December 2021.

O’Neill, Connor Towne. ‘Residents of So-Called ‘Shit Town’ Are Conflicted Over S-Town’. Vulture. April 25, 2017. https://www.vulture.com/2017/04/s-town-podcast-visiting-woodstock-alabama.html.

Ora, Rebecca. ‘Invisible Evidence: Serial and the New Unknowability of Documentary: New Aural Cultures and Digital Media’ in Podcasting: New Aural Cultures and Digital Media, 107‑22, 2018.

Peabody, Awards. ‘The Peabody Awards – News, Radio/Podcast, & Public Service Winners Named’. peabodyawards.com, 2017. http://peabodyawards.com/stories/story/news-radio-podcast-and-public-service-winners-named.