Talking Book: From Literacy to Orality

Andrew Leland began his career when he dropped out of college to work as managing editor of the Believer, a monthly arts-and-culture magazine published by McSweeney’s. After working at the magazine for nearly a decade, he started the Organist, an experimental arts podcast that attempted to transmute the aesthetic of the magazine into sonic form. Over that same period, his degenerative retinal condition continued to progress, leaving him legally blind. These experiences have led him to reflect on the relationship between text and voice, writing for the eye and for the ear. This tension — between orality and literacy, and the ways that literature and media intersect and are shaped by disability — are the subject of this talk and audio workshop at Penn’s Price Lab for Digital Humanities.