Tag Archives: Podcasts

5 – “Hanne Nijtmans – Podcasting Paranoia: Aesthetics, Politics, and Community in American Fictional Podcasts”

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Using Welcome to Night Vale as a case study, this paper investigates the aesthetic, social, and political functions of the paranoid style in podcasts. This provides new insights in how upcoming art forms respond to the political problems of the ‘age of conspiracy,’ and how that inspires virtual fan communities. Cities of Sound is an official Panel of the 2021 Pacific Ancient Modern Language Association Citation: Nitjtmans, Hanne, “Podcasting Paranoia: Aesthetics, Politics, and Community in American Fictional Podcasts” Mp3. Cities of Sound: Podcasting as Public Texts, Media and Performances. 2021 Pacific Ancient Modern Language Association Conference https://anchor.fm/citiesofsound/episodes/Hanne-Nijtmans—Podcasting-Paranoia-Aesthetics–Politics–and-Community-in-American-Fictional-Podcasts-e1a5i7n

Abstract

Using Welcome to Night Vale as a case study, this paper investigates the aesthetic, social, and political functions of the paranoid style in podcasts. This provides new insights in how upcoming art forms respond to the political problems of the ‘age of conspiracy,’ and how that inspires virtual fan communities.

Works Sited

Berlant, Lauren. Cruel Optimism. Duke University Press, 2011.

Berry, Richard. “Part of the Establishment: Reflecting on 10 Years of Podcasting as an Audio Medium.” Convergence, vol. 22, no. 6, 2016, pp. 661-671.

Bonini, Tiziano. “The ‘Second Age’ of Podcasting: Reframing Podcasting as a New Digital Mass Medium.” Quaderns del CAC, vol. 22, no. 2, 2015, pp. 170-178.

DeLillo, Don. Libra. Penguin, 2018 [1988].

—, Running Dog. Macmillan, 1992 [1978].

Hofstadter, Richard. The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays. Alfred A. Knopf, 1966.

Hancock, Danielle, and Leslie McMurty. “I Know What a Podcast Is’: Post-Serial Fiction and Podcast Media Identity.” Podcasting: New Aural Cultures and Digital Media, edited by Dario Llinares, Neil Fox and Richard Berry, Springer, 2018, pp. 81-106.

Hancock, Danielle. “Our Friendly Desert Town: Alternative Podcast Culture in Welcome to Night Vale.” Critical Approaches to Welcome to Night Vale, edited Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, Palgrave, MacMillan, 2018, pp. 35-50.

Jameson, Frederic. “Cognitive Mapping.” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, MacMillan, 1988, pp. 347-357.

—., The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System. Indiana University Press, 1992.

Knight, Peter. Conspiracy Culture: From Kennedy to The X Files. Routledge, 2000.

—., eds. Conspiracy Nation: The Politics of Paranoia in Postwar America, New York University Press, 2002.

Llinares, Dario, Neil Fox, and Richard Berry, eds. Podcasting: New Aural Cultures and Digital Media. Springer, 2018.

Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings. Harvard University Press, 2005.

Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49. Penguin, 2012 [1966].

Rabbits. Season 1. Podcast. The Public Radio Alliance, 2017.

Sandra. Season 1. Podcast. Gimlet Media, 2018.

Soltani, Farokh. “Inner Ears and Distant Worlds: Podcast Dramaturgy and the Theatre of the Mind.” Podcasting: New Aural Cultures and Digital Media, edited by Dario Llinares, Neil Fox and Richard Berry, Springer, 2018, pp. 189-208.

Spinelli, Martin, and Lance Dann. Podcasting: The Audio Media Revolution. Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2019.

Swiatek, Lucasz. “The Podcast as Intimate Bridging Medium.” Podcasting: New Aural Cultures and Digital Media, edited by Dario Llinares, Neil Fox and Richard Berry, Springer, 2018, pp. 173- 188

Tanis. Season 1. Podcast. The Public Radio Alliance, 2015.

Three Days of The Condor. Movie. Syndey Pollack, 1975.

Weinstock, Jeffrey, eds. Critical Approaches to Welcome to Night Vale: Podcasting between Weather and the Void, Palgrave MacMillan, 2018. Welcome to Night Vale. Podcast. Night Vale Presents, 2012-Present.

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

Citation:

Nitjtmans, Hanne,  “Podcasting Paranoia: Aesthetics, Politics, and Community in American Fictional Podcasts” Mp3. Cities of Sound: Podcasting as Public Texts, Media and Performances. 2021 Pacific Ancient Modern Language Association Conference https://anchor.fm/citiesofsound/episodes/Hanne-Nijtmans—Podcasting-Paranoia-Aesthetics–Politics–and-Community-in-American-Fictional-Podcasts-e1a5i7n

Music by Kevin MacCleod

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

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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.

3- AC Carlson – “Reports of Violence Erupted Today”: Limetown and the Potential of Podcast Fiction”

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Fiction podcasts deserve further attention as a form defined by particular production, distribution, and listening practices. Two-Up Studio’s 2015 fiction podcast Limetown, while now an example of the “Golden Age” of podcast fiction, highlights the possibility of fiction podcasting to blur the line between truth and fiction.

Annamarie Carlson is a Ph.D. student in Rhetoric at Indiana University-Bloomington. They have an MA in English Literature from Northern Arizona University. Annamarie’s scholarly interests can usually be found at the blurry intersection of narrative, culture, and media, all broadly conceived. To put it another way, they are fascinated by the interplay of the stories we tell, the technologies used to tell them, and the relationship of stories and technologies with whatever it is we mean when we say “culture”. They have a creative as well as an academic interest in podcasting, audio fiction, and video games.

Music by: Kevin McCleod. (incomtech.org) 

Citation:Carlson, Annamarie. “T2- Annamarie Carlson – “Reports of Violence Erupted Today”: Limetown and the Potential of Podcast Fiction.”” Mp3. Cities of Sound:City of Sound: Podcasting as Public Texts, Media and Performances, n.d https://anchor.fm/citiesofsound/episodes/3–Annamarie-Carlson—Reports-of-Violence-Erupted-Today-Limetown-and-the-Potential-of-Podcast-Fiction-e1a4so7