Josh Epstein, a graduate student in the Department of English and 2007-2008 Warren Center Graduate Student Dissertation Fellow, will present a talk. He will examine literary modernism through the person of George Antheil, the composer, writer, inventor, and tireless self-publicist whose career intersected in various, often unexpected ways with modernists of every stripe: musical, cinematic, artistic, and literary. An innovator of
"noise-music"--music that appropriates and implements sounds typically considered non-musical--Antheil took part of a larger, transcontinental cultural scene in which noise had a persistent social, political, and aesthetic significance.

The talk will investigate Antheil's personal and professional acquaintance with
Ezra Pound, arguing that Pound's fascination with the young composer, and with the aesthetic and cultural value of noise in general, bespeaks an anxiety about the larger social ramifications of aesthetic form.

Epstein is the George J. Graham Jr. Fellow at the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities; his research has also been supported by the Robert Manson Myers Award in English and by research grants from the Vanderbilt College of Arts and Sciences.