| Original Full Text | Illinois State University ISU ReD: Research and eData Theses and Dissertations 2024 Resonance: a Methodology and Pedagogy for Socially Just Storytelling Helen Plevka-Jones Illinois State University, h.plevkajones@gmail.com Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.library.illinoisstate.edu/etd Recommended Citation Plevka-Jones, Helen, "Resonance: a Methodology and Pedagogy for Socially Just Storytelling" (2024). Theses and Dissertations. 2000. https://ir.library.illinoisstate.edu/etd/2000 This Dissertation-Open Access is brought to you for free and open access by ISU ReD: Research and eData. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ISU ReD: Research and eData. For more information, please contact ISUReD@ilstu.edu. i RESONANCE: A METHODOLOGY AND PEDAGOGY FOR SOCIALLY JUST STORYTELLING HELEN PLEVKA-JONES 239 Pages Through a close analysis of Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive and a comparative analysis of the intertexts it references, this dissertation argues that literary scholars and literacy pedagogues can learn from sound studies and archival practices together to achieve more socially just reading, writing, and teaching. The novel narrates a family traveling across the United States, experiencing their own journey while learning about past forced migrations upon the same land and present attempted migrations into the country. As they encounter and interact with different print, audio, and visual artifacts, the characters achieve a more inclusive and complex understanding of both their familial and national narratives. Sometimes these artifacts are woven into the narrative itself, while others are listed explicitly in “boxes,” which serve as the novel’s bibliography and shape the eclectic reading list that inspired this dissertation. Through her intentional method of intertextuality, Luiselli lets the past, present, and future be heard simultaneously through the family’s story and provides a model for both literary analysis and literacy teaching. Just as the study of sound trains ears to hear simultaneity and multiplicity, archival approaches curate and hold different perspectives and temporalities together at once; from these interdisciplinary assertions, I propose a methodology and pedagogy of resonance that helps readers understand stories that move between geographic spaces and historical realities. KEYWORDS: literary theory, sound studies, archival practices, literacy pedagogy, intertextuality ii RESONANCE: A METHODOLOGY AND PEDAGOGY FOR SOCIALLY JUST STORYTELLING HELEN PLEVKA-JONES A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Department of English ILLINOIS STATE UNIVERSITY 2024 iii © 2024 Helen Plevka-Jones iv RESONANCE: A METHODOLOGY AND PEDAGOGY FOR SOCIALLY JUST STORYTELLING HELEN PLEVKA-JONES COMMITTEE MEMBERS: Katherine Ellison, Chair Susan Kalter Allison Alcorn i ACKNOWLEDGMENTS In the spirit of archival practices, the following curation represents the artifacts I carry with me from the people who have carried me through this dissertation, each accompanied by gratitude, humility, and love. First is a folder titled Illinois State University, overflowing with emails from Katherine Ellison, whose rapid reply time rivals my own; through the darkness and uncertainty of the past several years, she has been a beacon of light and a source of delight not only for me personally but also to our entire department and university community. There are marginal comments from Susan Kalter, whose care and criticality challenged me to push my work further than I ever knew it could go. There are slides from a classroom visit with Allison Alcorn, who embraced my work’s interdisciplinarity and invited me to share my passion with her music history students. There is a draft of my English Studies exam overseen by Elise Hurley, whose seminar guided me to understand the possibilities of my work towards social justice. There are transcripts from Zoom session chats in the Illinois State Writing Project, led by Bob Broad, who helped me remember that I am, in fact, a writer. In a box labeled Morton High School are reminders of my role as a teacher. There are scribbled notes from conversations with Courtney Eddleman, my former teacher, turned colleague, turned instructional coach, who unceasingly encouraged me across multiple decades. There is a tiny plastic bucket symbolizing the ways in which we fill each other up, gifted by another former teacher who became my next-door neighbor and a lifelong pal, Krista Kolls. There are Post-it notes with daily jokes and doodles left on my desk by Sydney Young, my self-proclaimed teacher bestie 4 life. ii Tucked even further back in the archive are other miscellaneous items. There is a photograph from Deborah Cohn’s graduate seminar at Indiana University when she invited Valeria Luiselli to speak with us; I had already fallen in love with Luiselli’s writing, but hearing her speak inspired me to figure out why. There is a video from my undergraduate lecture recital, through the mentorship of Randall Beebe and the instruction of Magie Beck at Eastern Illinois University, who let me take myself seriously as both a scholar and a musician. There are programs from concerts with the Southern Indiana Wind Ensemble, the Prairie Winds Ensemble, and the Peoria Municipal Band, three small communities where I have continued to find a sense of belonging between multiple moves. Interspersed between these artifacts are texts with Megan Hildebrand, Meaghan Murphy, Jamie Lauer, and Maddie Keyser. These friends and fellow scholars have been a sounding board for me as my ideas take shape and my life takes different directions. Despite the distance, these women are always there for me. I am grateful for each of these artifacts and all of the ways they have collectively supported my work. Thanks, too, to my family, always resonating through my work: Frank and Eileen Plevka; Richard and Lucille Cruzan; John and Jeanenne Plevka; Mike, Hannah, Elsie, Sadie, and Hayes Schulte; Brittany, Reid, and Everly Plevka; Dennis, Mary, Mallory, and Emily Jones; Oskar, Cabbage, and June. Your support and encouragement mean the world. And to the one beside me through it all, Mitchell Jones. Thank you for listening to and inspiring me every single day. H.P.J. iii CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS i I. INTRODUCTION: A METHODOLOGY OF RESONANCE 1 II. RESONANCE AND INTERTEXTUALITY: READING THE NOVEL AS A SONIC ARCHIVE 30 III. RESONANCE AND TRANSMODALITY: INTERPRETING STORIES VIA SONIC EPISTEMOLOGIES 81 IV. RESONANCE AND TRANSNATIONALITY: LISTENING TO BORDERLANDS LITERATURES 109 V. RESONANCE AND TRANSHISTORICITY: UNDERSTANDING NARRATIVES OF DISPLACEMENT AND MIGRATION 141 VI. CONCLUSION: A PEDAGOGY OF RESONANCE 165 The MeSearch/WeSearch Project 170 The Artivism Reviewed Project 201 WORKS CITED 228 1 I. INTRODUCTION: A METHODOLOGY OF RESONANCE I have always been a listener. The third of three kids growing up in a small town in Central Illinois, I was content to sit back and take life in, slowly processing and waiting thoughtfully for my moment to speak. Admittedly, my dad—with his sentimentality, his verbosity, and his journalist’s drive to find the story—made this easy for me. As a kid, I reveled in the family history, asking for the same tales over and over. Tell me again how Pa-pa learned accordion, and he would launch into the lore about how his father fell off a horse and broke his arm then was instructed by a doctor to start playing the squeeze-box for rehabilitation. The rest is history. It is our history: a familial narrative shaped by a self-taught musician rising to North Central Kansas polka band fame, falling in love with another Czech farmer’s daughter, moving together from the country into town to raise a family, and then, when their younger son was in high school, moving for a brief bit over to Illinois. Their son, my dad, wanted to be a photographer just like his big brother, but the school newspaper already had a photographer and instead needed a reporter. The budding journalist met an aspiring English teacher and stayed in Illinois to go to college, work for various newspapers, and have those three kids. Or so the story goes. Our story could begin anywhere, both in time across generations and in place across locations, spanning back to the relatives who initially immigrated to the United States and reaching forward towards my nieces and nephew, but I have chosen these tiny moments from the past because they anchor my understanding of who I am and how my family got me here. Although I was not there then, I can watch these memories play out on silent 8mm film projected onto a wall and view these 2 memories in glossy 4x6 pictures tucked into albums stored under my parents’ bed. However, I feel most connected to my family and our history when I hear the cassette tape recordings of my Pa-pa and his band, The Rhythm Aces, performing at local dances; I remember singing along with the “Apple, Peaches, Pumpkin Pie” polka and the “Blue Skirts” waltz for my own private shows on my grandparents’ front porch before he passed away. One audible artifact that has not survived, however, is a voice recording of my Ma-ma being interviewed for an oral history project as, in the final months of her own life, she shared stories from her childhood I had never heard before and a smattering of Czech words and phrases I cannot confirm in any dictionaries. Despite the file being lost from my dad’s phone forever, I still find myself listening to and learning from her voice, her stories, and her wisdom. Taken together with my Pa-pa’s music, I wondered about the role of sound and the function of aurality beyond audio recording technologies in shaping our memories and interpretations. Whereas my dad’s passion to document and reminisce is at the core of my work, it is my mom’s curiosity and perspective as an educator that continually inspires me to seek context and recognize how our family stories play out along larger community and national narratives shaped by migrations across and into the land. Sensing a similar awareness and advocacy playing out in Valeria Luiselli’s 2019 novel Lost Children Archive, I was inspired to listen closely to the work, capture the resonances I was hearing, and articulate how attention to sound can change the ways we read and write stories of ourselves, our communities, our nation, and our world in a socially just way. Alongside teacher-research in a secondary English Language Arts classroom, this dissertation performs a close reading of Luiselli’s novel through literary sound studies, archival practices, and literacy theory to propose resonance as both a methodology and a pedagogy of inclusivity. 3 Resonance happens when two or more wavelengths of similar frequency occur in a shared space simultaneously and amplify the oscillation. This amplification makes us aware of a new pitch that could not have been heard in either wavelength individually. Colloquially, the word “resonant” might be used to characterize how the quality of a voice is heard as rich, deep, or full, or it could be used by a reader to describe how a narrative meaningfully connects with a personal memory or feeling. In either case, the acoustic definition of “resonance” underscores the colloquial meaning of “resonant” because they both involve an encounter—the listener’s body comes into contact with and is affected by the sound of the voice, and the reader’s reaction is caused by the story interacting with a thought or sentiment they are already holding. I find resonances between my family’s history and the stories narrated in Lost Children Archive as my personal memories interact with the narrative developing on the page and amplify shared themes regarding intergenerational and transnational journeys. Furthermore, Luiselli’s compositional techniques emulate the phenomenon of resonance as she references and alludes to many intertexts both within and beyond the narrative, creating rich and deep connections between the surface-level narrative and the many literary voices beneath it. While the frame tale of Lost Children Archive in itself tells an important story of a family traveling across the United States and learning about children migrating into the country at its border with Mexico, listening for the resonances between the novel and its intertexts creates a more inclusive and complex reading of immigration narratives from which writers can also learn to tell their own important stories of movement, growth, and change. Therefore, a methodology and pedagogy of resonance offers opportunities to expand upon and enrich existing approaches to intertextuality and interdisciplinarity through the study of sound in literature. 4 Developing this approach requires working from the colloquial and acoustic definitions of resonance to trace their theoretical implications. In their “Introduction” to Keywords in Sound, David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny acknowledge the complexity of writing about sound because the words we use to identify and describe sonic phenomena have multiple, interrelated meanings. They explain that sound itself is a “vibration that is perceived and becomes known through its materiality” but our understanding of sound happens through metaphors that “construct perceptual conditions of hearing and shape the territories and boundaries of sound in social life” (1). As an example of one specific sonic concept, then, resonance identifies the sound material of a voice encountering a body and being heard as rich, deep, or full, and resonance is also the sound-based metaphor for describing how a story connects meaningfully with a reader. The latter definition is derived from reader-response theories and insights into the rhetorical aspects of narrative, which Veit Erlmann further studies in his Keywords entry on “Resonance” as well as his larger work Reason and Resonance: A History of Modern Aurality (2010). Erlmann first acknowledges how the term is used in the natural sciences to identify a transfer of energy in physics, an orbital influence in astronomy, and a coming together of atoms in chemistry, then he suggests, “in the humanities, resonance more recently has become part of a rich metaphorology that seeks to replace the binaries of structuralist thought with a notion of discourse that is diametrically opposed to a distancing and objectifying form of knowledge” (175). This “rich metaphorology” empowers resonance as a methodology to read for social justice; whereas structuralist theory has been critiqued for distancing readers from texts in search of objective truths, resonance encourages a closeness that brings readers in contact with stories to experience how they overlap, which works against erasure, 5 subsumption, and silencing by welcoming all narratives and perspectives as potentially resonant material. Erlmann’s distinction between how resonance is a function of physical perception in the sciences as well as a matter of philosophical discourse in the humanities supports Novak and Sakakeeny’s opening claim: Sound resides in this feedback loop of materiality and metaphor, infusing words with a diverse spectrum of meanings and interpretations. To engage sound as the interrelation of materiality and metaphor is to show how deeply the apparently separate fields of perception and discourse are entwined in everyday experiences and understandings of sound, and how far they extend across physical, philosophical, and cultural contexts. (1) Erlmann furthers the argument that this interplay between perception and discourse through the concept of resonance is not new but rather has a much longer “hidden history” of understanding connectedness and interrelations “that [have] been overlooked by predominantly ocularcentric discourses and paradigms” (176). According to Erlmann, sonic principles have always been at play within the work of deconstructionism and poststructuralism from the 1960s and 1970s: Because resonance names the Other against which thought is defined and privileged as philosophy’s possibility and core operation, and because resonance concurrently denotes the materiality of auditory perception, resonance is eminently suited to dissolve the binary of the materiality of things and the immateriality of signs that has been at the center of Western thought for much of the modern era. (181) 6 Taken together, Novak and Sakakeeny’s broad definitions of sound alongside Erlmann’s specific focus on resonance lend themselves to the study of the sonic concept within literature; because literary texts can contain the “physical, philosophical, and cultural contexts” that Novak and Sakakeeny outline, reading resonantly helps to continue the work of dissolving binaries that Erlmann highlights. Furthermore, recognizing the potential of resonance as having a productive role in contemporary literary theory means working at its intersection with cultural studies and considering how attention to sound deconstructs other binaries, including those found at national borders. Whereas the lines on a map, like the one between Mexico and the United States, create visual boundaries in space that reify binary notions of belonging and otherness, sound serves as a reminder of continual and omnidirectional movement across borders. Sound can travel across either side of a border, which underscores the potential of resonance to create new ways of understanding immigration and borderlands narratives. Resonance creates connections, which engender socially just understandings of others in ways that can change both how we read others’ narratives and how we write our own. In this dissertation, I explore how an attunement to resonances between stories and across texts changes how readers listen to and interpret literature in ways that augment existing theories of reading. This methodology and pedagogy I am proposing are informed and inspired by Lost Children Archive. The frame tale of Luiselli’s novel features a family of four—none of whom are named but will instead be referred to in relation to each other as the mother, the father, the son, and the daughter—traveling from their home in New York City to the Chiricahua Apache desert in Arizona where, the father claims, “the last free peoples on the entire American continent lived before they had to 7 surrender to the white-eyes” (26). While this oversimplified claim will be further problematized later in this dissertation, I will first explore how the father approaches his study as a sound archivist seeking to record how the soundscape of the Native American past can be heard as “an inventory of echoes” across the present landscape (21). Meanwhile, the mother is also a sound artist becoming increasingly attuned to how that history resonates with the present crisis of Latin American child migrants arriving in the U.S. border with Mexico; she worries about the uncertain future both for those seeking reunification with family already in the United States and those forcibly separated from their parents upon arrival, specifically under the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policies that preceded the changing landscape of immigration legislation, which led to the Biden administration’s policies throughout the Covid-19 pandemic. The father and mother characters have a common interest in stories of movement and change across geographies and histories in ways that resonate with the author’s own experiences. As evidenced in Luiselli’s 2017 nonfiction work, Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions, this journey in Lost Children Archive is based on a real road trip she took with her then-husband, Mexican novelist Álvero Enrigue, and their two children. Waiting for their green cards to arrive and thus unable to leave the country, the family traveled from their home in Harlem, New York, to a town in Cochise County, Arizona, near the Mexico-U.S. border in 2014. Enrigue also recounts his version of this story in his 2018 novel Ahora me rindo y eso es todo, likewise featuring a protagonist who travels to the border to find remaining traces of the Apache leader Geronimo, just like Luiselli’s father character. In a way, Luiselli writes their eventual divorce into her version of the journey by underscoring the developing tension between the mother and father characters as they travel closer to 8 the border but seemingly further from each other. Whereas the father romanticizes and simplifies Apache history from a limited perspective, perpetuating a false narrative of “Chief Nana, Chief Loco, Chihuahua, [and] Geronimo” as “the last of the Chiricahuas,” the mother calls his stories into question and grapples with the interrelations of Native American displacement and Latin American immigration (75). While these are topics Luiselli continually explores in her fiction, nonfiction, and other creative work, she claims that this novel is not autobiographical or autofictional—the characters exist separate from the world of her lived reality. In this way, the novel is not as much about the characters as it is about their journey and its many resonances with other journeys that have happened across and into the same landscapes. The novel is a vehicle through which Luiselli can grapple with issues of race, ethnicity, and migration, and critique the ways in which these issues are often oversimplified or ignored. This hybrid approach to literature empowers her to write stories that are relevant to her personal and family history while advocating for others in her community. Because her father was a diplomat for Mexico and her mother worked for non-governmental organizations, at age two Luiselli moved from her birthplace in Mexico, to Wisconsin, then Costa Rica, South Korea, Mexico again, India, Spain, and France, until settling in New York City for graduate school and her career as a writer and professor. Luiselli uses writing as a way to root amidst her experiences of displacement, and as she further explains in her “2020 Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Literature” feature video, she also uses her writing to advocate for the Hispanic community in the United States, both those already living in the country and those seeking refuge. She critiques how many news media portray Latin American child migrants strictly as a matter of national security and instead works to refocus the issue 9 as a humanitarian crisis. Her writing seeks to offer alternate and multiple stories that counter dominant narratives. This advocacy for human rights and the power of storytelling is evident across her most recent works. She started writing Lost Children Archive after the 2014 road trip but needed to pause and publish Tell Me How It Ends to engage more directly with the social justice issues that most concerned her. This long-form essay details her personal experience volunteering as a translator for children in immigration court and struggling to piece together the fragments of stories she heard. She problematizes how the intake questionnaire itself is incapable of telling a complete story of the asylum-seeker’s journey leading up to that point, yet the survey is used to determine the individual’s next steps. Through Lost Children Archive, Luiselli was able to then respond to this critique by emulating multiple different ways of composing and understanding stories more inclusively through documentary practices. Accordingly, her 2019 MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Grant was awarded for “challenging conventional notions of authorship in fiction, essays, and inventive hybrids of the two that pose profound questions about the various ways we piece together stories and document the lives of others” (“Valeria Luiselli, Writer”). Lost Children Archive not only demonstrates these qualities of her work by blurring the lines between fiction and nonfiction, but it also incorporates innovative approaches to intertextuality, which further challenge how we tell and understand stories about ourselves and, especially, about others. This dissertation will explore the multiple ways in which Luiselli composes intertextually to create transhistorical resonances between migration narratives. In his “Introduction” to Intertextuality, Graham Allen provides an overview of how intertextuality in literary theory, like 10 resonance in sound studies, is about the “relationality, interconnectedness and interdependence” between two or more ideas (5). Ferdinand de Saussure traced these connections through language, developing semiotics as a form of structural linguistics that recognizes the arbitrary relationship between the signified and the signifier. In Course in General Linguistics (1915), Saussure recognizes how the sound of a word as “the ear perceives articulated syllables as auditory impressions” does not immediately produce meaning; instead, it is through linguistic structures governing all languages that the multiple potential meanings of a sound emerge (24). Allen claims Saussure’s impact on the linguistic turn in the humanities set the stage for intertextuality as theorists continued to explore how those rules and associations are learned through language and literature (10). For example, Mikhail Bakhtin approached language as acquiring meaning within the specific social contexts where words are exchanged and only capable of acquiring new meanings as those words become sites of contestation in specific new social contexts. In The Dialogic Imagination, written in Russian in the 1940s and translated into English in 1981, Bakhtin focused specifically on novels as sites of linguistic exchange, where multiple voices and perspectives could come together in dialogic interchange. He referred to the multiplicity of independent and often conflicting voices in literature as polyphonic, demonstrating one instance where literary theory has already borrowed from sound-based metaphors. Polyphony, in music, refers to the simultaneous sounding of two or more tones or melodic lines, derived from the Greek word for “many sounds.” Studying novels as polyphonic does not have to do with the melodic or harmonious qualities of a narrative but does attend to the multiplicity of voices and ideologies that can be simultaneously represented in one literary text. It was Julia Kristeva’s reading of Bakhtin’s concept of the polyphonic novel that then introduced the term intertextuality in her 1966 essay 11 “Word, Dialogue and Novel” when she claims: “any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another” (37). Kristeva then uses the term intertextuality to show how the ways that people understand these interconnected ideas—created through the “mosaic” and its modulations—are always changing as they move across time and place between different contexts. Luiselli’s writing engages with intertextuality both in the multiple ways she creates a “mosaic of quotations” from other writers within her narrative as well as the ways she narrates characters learning from multiple voices simultaneously. Intertextual readings recognize the validity and authority of each voice’s storytelling to shape the overall narrative and impact the reader’s response. Therefore, an attunement to resonance is the way in which Luiselli’s book invites its readers to engage with intertextual references, which holds implications for literary theory and literacy pedagogy beyond this novel. As Jonathan Culler acknowledges in Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction, all literary theories are interdisciplinary, analytical, speculative, critical, and reflexive, created by communities of readers and thinkers. Accordingly, my approach to literature through resonance is influenced by reader-response theory and its surrounding frameworks of hermeneutics, stylistics, semiotics, and psychoanalysis; I understand reading as a dynamic and interactive process of relating past information to a present understanding and toward future hypotheses. However, by proposing resonance as a methodology and pedagogy, rather than a theory, I am articulating a specific approach to reading and teaching that works through these preceding theories. I often refer to this approach as an attunement, meaning an awareness, sensitivity, and responsiveness to stories. In other words, a methodology of resonance is a way of curating and 12 considering data—in this case, stories. This definition of methodology is informed by Stephanie Daza and Walter Gershon, who, in addition to advocating for sonic approaches to qualitative research as further detailed below, acknowledge how methodologies are “agentic/affective processes” that actively involve the participant’s mind and body as they engage with material (642). It is also inspired by Aja Martinez’s Counterstory, in which the rhetorician advocates for storytelling as an active methodology; she emphasizes how in English Studies, “we’ve all been telling stories all along,” and while “some stories are elevated to the status of theory, scholarship, and literature,” those by or about marginalized perspectives are not given that same academic status (1–2). Luiselli’s hybrid approaches to telling the stories about the Hispanic community in the United States broadly and Latin American child migrants specifically, therefore, models innovative approaches to storytelling and compels new approaches to reading and teaching. That she chooses to share these stories through the perspectives of sound artists, rather than her and her ex-husband’s actual professions as writers, further underscores the importance of sound to sharing and receiving stories. Thus, this dissertation defines, demonstrates, and develops a methodology of resonance by using a sonic concept to study intertextuality, then discusses how this methodology also informs a pedagogy for students’ storytelling and research practices. Daza and Gershon speak to this immense potential of sound methodologies by first claiming that “everything resonates,” meaning that all material—both conceptual, like the ideas emanating from the pages of the novel, and physical, like the surfaces making up the book itself—holds the potential to make meaningful connections with human subjects (641). They claim that resonance offers a powerful alternative to conventional reliance on relevance in qualitative research. From this assertion, they further explain: 13 If everything resonates theoretically and literally, then sound methodologies can function like an omnidirectional microphone, acquiring the messy is-ness of the everyday that carries within braided signals of values, ideas, ideals, and processes. Methodologically, it provides a means to examine echoes across time and contexts, opens relationships within and between ecologies, breaks down barriers between siloed fields and methodologies, provides a means for the marginalized to literally voice their perspectives, and to consider complex interrelations and orientations inside and beyond people. (641) My methodology suggests that resonance helps us consider the complexity between people as well. Synthesizing Daza and Gershon’s advocacy for listening to the voices of marginalized individuals with Martinez’s call for valuing the stories that often are not heard means proposing a new methodology not against but in ongoing conversation with already developing theories. Through a methodology of resonance, these theorists’ ideas continue vibrating beneath this dissertation as it progresses, amplifying their shared interests in more socially just and inclusive literary theory. Furthermore, by proposing a pedagogy to accompany the methodology, I demonstrate how Luiselli’s novel also inspires new approaches to writing. Alongside the mother character’s concern for migrant children at the border, she also questions how to teach her own kids to understand stories that do not have a straightforward, linear temporality, including their complicated family situation, as those develop in relation to larger, simultaneously developing national narratives of movement, migration, and displacement. For example, early in their journey, as they enjoy a quiet morning together, the daughter asks the mother to draw four boxes for her, labeled “Character,” “Setting,” 14 “Problem,” and “Solution,” just as she has been taught to do at school; the mother reflects to herself, “Bad literary education begins too early and continues for too long” (61). She further reminisces about a time when she asked the son to identify the differences between the parts of speech, and he replied, “nouns were the letters on the yellow cards above the blackboard, and verbs were the ones on the blue cards below the blackboard” (61). Her critique, therefore, concerns not just “bad literary education” but also bad literacy education, both in formal spaces of education and the everyday ways in which individuals learn to interact with stories. Literacy pedagogy considers how individuals understand and interpret texts as well as how they understand and interpret themselves, their communities, and the world through stories. The daughter in Lost Children Archive, who ultimately fills her four boxes with a shark, the ocean, a tree, and a shark biting another shark, has been taught that stories are simple iterations of characters, settings, problems, and solutions, yet when she describes what she has illustrated to the mother, her story carries emotional weight about the “shark feeling sad and confused because another shark bit him,” plays with temporality and pacing as “he goes to his thinking-tree” until he “finally figures it out,” and reaches a resolution with future implications when the shark realizes “he just has to bite the other shark back for biting him” (63). The four-square storytelling structure the daughter has been taught cannot convey the depth and complexity of her narrative on its own, yet Luiselli shows how the daughter has the insights and awarenesses to tell a nuanced story beyond the confines of the page. My pedagogy of resonance asserts that all learners are capable of hearing and creating connections through their reading and writing practices. 15 Learning from sonic epistemologies can, therefore, help make literacy teaching more inclusive. Steph Ceraso, author of Sounding Composition, is one contemporary English Studies scholar aware of this possibility as she brings sound studies into Rhetoric and Composition. She acknowledges the increased ubiquity of multimodal composition in a digital age but argues that little attention has been paid to the role of sound specifically when telling or receiving stories beyond the printed page. In response, she proposes “multimodal listening” as a practice of “attending to the ecological relationship among sound, bodies, environments, and materials,” which “can help all of us take advantage of the affordances of sound and become thoughtful, sensitive listener-composers in any setting” (3). Like Novak and Sakakeeny, Ceraso recognizes sound as both material and metaphor that creates connections and disrupts binaries in the way that Erlmann suggests. A methodology and pedagogy of resonance similarly takes a holistic approach to sound through text to bring Sound Studies into Literary and Cultural Studies, responding to Daza and Gershon’s call for more sonic approaches to research and teaching. Therefore, through a close analysis of Luiselli’s novel and a comparative analysis of the intertexts it references, this dissertation will argue that literary scholars and literacy pedagogues can learn from sound studies to achieve more inclusive reading and teaching. Specifically, it proposes a methodology and pedagogy of resonance to help readers understand the complexities of stories that move between geographic spaces and develop across historical moments. With Lost Children Archive at its center, it will then layer an archive of other interdisciplinary texts referenced throughout the novel in Luiselli’s intentional curatorial style, followed by teacher-research in an 12th-grade English Language Arts classroom. Starting from a single text, rather than a corpus of works across a period, 16 geography, or genre, allows this dissertation space to follow the bibliographic trails Luiselli traces, and incorporating teacher-research will connect this exploration back to its practical application in the classroom and implications in other spaces of learning. Taken together, I advocate for resonance as a socially just way of listening to stories. My analysis is supported by theoretical frameworks from both English Studies and Sound Studies scholarship. The literature review that follows will use an early moment in the characters’ journey to exemplify how these theories have developed, where they coalesce, and what gaps in the scholarship remain. As the family drives through North Carolina and across Tennessee, they listen to Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring Suite on repeat while looking out the windows at the surrounding mountains. The multiple ways in which the characters experience the soundscape playing out against the landscape, and the style through which Luiselli represents their experience, resonates with questions asked by both literary and sound scholars. The question of how to study music and literature together was initially posed by Calvin S. Brown in his 1948 Music and Literature: A Comparison of the Arts. He initially posits that “music and literature…are alike in that they are arts presented through the sense of hearing, having their development in time, and hence requiring a good memory for their comprehension” (11). Simply put, one sounded tone or written word alone does not tell a story, but as the listener hears the progression of notes sounding in forward-moving time or as the reader moves through the accumulating language developing on a page, narrative meaning is made. The audience’s ability to hold onto previously heard tones or previously read words in their memory creates the tension and release that drive a story. However, beyond these aural, temporal, and memory-based similarities that music and literature share, 17 Brown indicates significant differences that complicate this interrelation. Whereas, he says, music is heard as sound via sound, literature is heard as “sounds to which external significance has been arbitrarily attached” (11). Thus, listeners of music experience resonance as the material of soundwaves encountering their bodies and affecting their sentiments, whereas readers of literature experience resonance as the metaphor of this phenomenon invoked by language. Brown’s initial scholarship suggests two significant ways of studying the relationship between music and literature. First, there is the possibility of reading literature as a musical composition; although the sounds are arbitrarily attached to words, the ways in which they are heard by the reader in forward-moving time and are comprehended via memory are significant. In an analysis of Lost Children Archive, this approach would mean theorizing the multiple narrative perspectives as voices in a musical composition developing polyphonically in forward-moving time; this method also works for reading poetry as music by applying musical concepts to the ways words are sounded and heard in verse. Brown’s second method suggests a different approach: studying music in literature. He was curious about what happens when language not only referencing but also describing existing compositions resonates with readers familiar with the piece. When the characters in Lost Children Archive are listening to and discussing Appalachian Spring Suite, a reader who has heard the music before might start hearing the “Simple Gifts” melody in their head, remembering how Copland integrates the Shaker tune into his orchestration. This approach to studying music and literature together presents an intriguing way to consider how a reader could simultaneously hear music and words through the experience of a literary text, but it is tenuous at best, dependent upon readers’ previous experiences and assumptions about their cultural ways of understanding and remembering 18 music. It represents the pitfalls of following some leading figures in early twentieth-century narrative theory whose endeavors elevated so-called high culture and excluded readers/listeners without the same precedent knowledge; the Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory outlines how Umberto Eco’s contributions to reader response theory emphasized the importance of narrative meaning as determined by cultural codes of signification, which Culler acknowledged as limiting readership to those already acquainted with the codes of certain cultural communities (485). More contemporary approaches to reader-response theory works against these constraints by incorporating empirical research from cognitive psychology to better understand how all readers uniquely and collectively can interpret a text. From Music and Literature, both literary theorists and musicologists continued questioning this complicated interrelationship as scholarship and the arts themselves moved into the twenty-first century through globalization and technologization. The International Association for Word and Music Studies (WMA) was started in the late nineties to create a shared space for interdisciplinary study. In his 1997 survey of the field, Walter Bernhart acknowledges how concurrently developing methods from cultural studies, including new musicology and ethnomusicology alongside literary historicism, were influencing their thinking; the WMA founders go beyond Brown’s initial comparisons of music and literature to consider how their similarities and differences are dependent upon context. Steven Paul Scher, for example, offers a typology establishing three modes of inquiry: literature and music, music in literature, and literature in music. In other words, a study of literature and music would analyze Luiselli’s novel and Copland’s composition as two separate entities that might share similar themes; a study of music in literature, then, would look more like the approaches 19 suggested above by recognizing the unique experience for Luiselli’s readers engaging with descriptions of Copland’s music; finally, literature in music would be used to study musical adaptations of literary works. Perhaps fitting into this third category would be a study of the “Simple Gifts” lyrics in their original form as a Shaker folk song, then an analysis of how that narrative is transposed musically by Copland into the instrumental suite. The WMA created the interdisciplinary space necessary for honoring the depth, complexity, and multidirectional possibilities of projects like these working across genres, time periods, and cultures. While each of Scher’s modes of inquiry offers interesting potential for considering the different interarts relationships at play in Lost Children Archive, the study of music in literature best lends itself to the initial passages referencing Copland’s composition in Luiselli’s novel. The narration of this moment reads almost like an early WMA article as the father describes and interprets the story of the music to his family, as recounted through the mother’s perspective: Making me pause, play, and pause again, my husband explains each element of the piece to the children: the tempo, the tonal links between movements, the overall structure of the composition. He tells them it’s a programmatic piece, and says it’s about white-eyes marrying, reproducing, conquering new land, and then driving Indians out of that land. He explains what a programmatic composition is, how it tells a story, how each section of the instruments in the orchestra—woodwinds, string, brass, percussion—represents a specific character, and how the instruments interact just like people talking, falling in love, fighting, and making up again. (Luiselli 80) 20 These connections are insightful and “instructive,” as the father promises they will be (79). Hearing the music and this explanation while simultaneously looking out at the landscape of their journey, the son asks for clarity: “This song takes place in these same mountains we are driving through right now, yes?” The father nods then adds what the mother calls “a pedantic coda: Except it’s not called a song. It’s just called a piece, or in fact a suite” (80). The father presents his description and definitions as the authoritative account of the composition, but as the mother’s narration will soon reveal, there is more than one possible story being told by the music. This moment also underscores the interpersonal conflicts that continue to play out across the novel as the mother questions the veracity and inclusivity of the father’s stories. Continued work in Literary and Cultural Studies has further articulated the complexities of what happens when music is brought into literature, helping to reinforce and further theorize how one listener or reader’s perception is never the only possible interpretation of a given text. Werner Wolf referred to it as intermediality, revising Scher’s typology to better understand the different modes through which narrative meaning can be created and the different ways through which music can emerge in and engage with literature (Wolf 52). After explaining how he understands media as ways of communicating through distinct semiotic systems, Wolf defines intermediality as “a particular…relation between (at least) two conventionally distinct media of expression or communication: this relation consists in a verifiable, direct or indirect, involvement of more than one conventionally distinct medium in the signification of an artefact” (42). As the passage in Lost Children Archive exemplifies, intertextual references to music demonstrate intermediality because they can involve not only the tonalities and harmonic progressions themselves but also performances and 21 interpretations of that music. Tuning out the family’s conversation for a while, the mother looks up “Copland Appalachian” on her phone and finds an account that contradicts most of her husband’s story. Furthermore, she reflects upon a video recording she finds of the ballet, choreographed and danced by Martha Graham: As her compact, perfect, square little body swiftly dances, Martha Graham narrates the interior lives of the characters using a precise body lexicon—contraction, release, spiral, fall, recovery—threading all her movements into clear phrases. Her phrases are so impeccably danced that they seem to spell out a clear meaning, even when if you try to translate them back into words, that meaning immediately fades away again—as usually happens when anyone tries to explain dance or music. (81) As this passage illustrates, then, the focus of the work of studying music and literature together is not necessarily to succeed in the impossible task of translating what sounds in our heads while we read back into words but rather to celebrate the power of intermediality to create new vocabularies for understanding stories. Whereas literary theorists are exploring these ways of reading intermediality, literacy pedagogues have similarly been theorizing multimodality and multiliteracies. First proposed by the New London Group in 1996, multiliteracies reflect both “the multiplicity of communications channels and media, and the increasing salience of cultural and linguistic diversity” through globalization and changing technologies of the twenty-first century (63). The New London Group delineates six design elements possible in any text: linguistic, visual, audio, gestural, spatial, and multimodal (65). While the first five elements can make meaning independently, multimodality relates 22 to any combination of two or more elements being simultaneously engaged. By teaching and learning through a theory of design, which systematically considers how the different elements of any given text work together to convey a message, a pedagogy of multiliteracies is “one in which language and other modes of meaning are dynamic representational resources, constantly being remade by their users as they work to achieve their various cultural purposes” (64). As the mother experiences the landscape of the Appalachians while hearing the soundscape of Copland’s music, her husband’s commentary, and her children’s questions, she is demonstrating each of the six design elements identified by the literacy pedagogues through words, images, sound, and movement. Readers, in turn, experience Luiselli’s novel multimodally through the invocation of audio via the linguistic. It is important to note that the New London Group’s theory of multiliteracies is not limited to just music as audio but rather any form of sound that makes meaning, representing a trend towards inclusivity demonstrated in literary studies as well. The theories of music and/in/as literature established by Brown and developed by the WMA set the stage for studying intermediality, and the work of the New London Group underscored how sound serves as a meaningful mode of literacy that can happen through but is not exclusive to music. Sakakeeny helps make this distinction in Keywords in Sound by first critiquing the conventional definition of music as just “organized sound” (112). He argues that the definition is more complicated and instead proposes music “as a set of performative acts and objects of inscription that invite particular modes of listening” (113). In other words, music is sound that is performed and inscribed for an audience to receive and interpret; as the mother and father’s experiences with Copland’s Appalachian Spring Suite demonstrate, those interpretations can be infinitely different, but they 23 emerge out of a shared vocabulary for making meaning from music. By opening up intermedial studies of literature from music to sound, reception and interpretation are not limited by culturally-specific “modes of listening,” responding to calls for more inclusive and socially just methodologies. Accordingly, word and music studies is transforming into the subfield of literary sound studies, and scholars from beyond the WMA are expanding upon initial methodologies and deepening our awareness of aurality, and not just musicality, in literature. Anna Snaith’s collection Sound and Literature demonstrates how she is considering “the coalescence of the literary and the sonic” (1). She positions either as separate and autonomous entities; Copland’s suite exists as an inscribed and performed set of sounds, while Luiselli’s novel exists as a written collection of language developing for a reader in forward-moving time. However, Snaith also acknowledges how “literary texts can serve as sonic archives,” an idea that is essential to how Lost Children Archive invites itself to be read (5). Jennifer Lynn Stoever likewise understands literature as a space for documenting sounds, which she uses to study race in the United States. Although, she claims, “race in America is a visual phenomenon,” the visual makes meaning alongside other sensory experiences, and she studies sounds specifically to show “how listening operates as an organ of racial discernment, categorization, and resistance in the shadow of vision’s alleged cultural dominance” (3–4). Building from W.E.B. DuBois’s foundational theory of the color line, she proposes “the sonic color line” as determining different ways of hearing the same sound. Her study of Frederick Douglass’s 1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs’s 1861 Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl explores how either writer recorded specific instances of listening that resisted the visuality of the color line. Through Jacobs, for example, she identifies “aural literacy and auditory imagination as crucial skill sets slaves attain as a 24 consequence of enslavement” (53). Stoever details how Jacobs’s narrative writing recalls the ways she carefully listened for, anticipated, and responded to the actions of her master in order to evade his sexual and physical abuse. “Aural literacy and auditory imagination,” according to Stoever, “can be honed as potential sites of freedom and resistance that evade the sonic color line” (53). This method of studying race and aurality through literary texts also lends itself to listening to migration narratives. Just as race is often perceived as a primarily visual phenomenon, national boundaries are seen as marking identity, determining who does and does not belong on either side; however, sound moves across arbitrary borders, a perspective that Latin American sound studies scholars have been articulating. Salomé Voegelin works through possible-worlds theory, a method of studying alternative worlds as equally viable to the actual world, to explain how “the soundscape offers an alternative perspective on the landscape” (12). This alternative challenges conventional notions of place and belonging because if the world were understood aurally, rather than ocularly, our cultural ways of understanding space would be better attuned to the fluidity of borderlands. Furthermore, Voegelin not only develops a theory of sound but also advocates for the practice of listening because it is “an innovative and generative practice, as a strategy of engagement that we employ deliberately to explore a different landscape than the one framed by vision” (12). Ren Ellis Neyra’s The Cry of the Senses similarly suggests a methodology of “multisensorial poetic listening to attune us to the ethical and imaginary possibilities of besideness and sensorially errant solidarity in the Caribbean Americas” (21). Like Daza and Gershon offering resonance as an alternative to relevance, Ellis Neyra suggests “sensorially errant solidarity” as a side-by-side archipelagic perspective on the hemisphere that subverts US hegemony: by listening across cultures from the ground, rather than looking at territories from the 25 top down, Ellis Neyra asserts, all nation states throughout the Americas can be valued and respected. This emphasis on listening practices as necessary to imagining new and better futures relates to what Stoever calls “aural literacy” as a way of listening to literature specifically in order to “accrue knowledge by listening and engaging with the world through making and perceiving sounds” (470). Whereas Stoever focuses on how Blackness is sounded and heard in the United States, Voegelin and Ellis Neyra speak to how sound can help Latin American identity be understood differently in the United States as well. This dissertation will demonstrate how Lost Children Archive participates in this work of challenging conventional notions of place and belonging through a focus on sound and attention to intertextuality. It will then synthesize how Luiselli’s writing cultivates both a methodology and pedagogy of resonance with implications across both literary theory and literacy pedagogy. Just as Ellis Neyra’s book “enacts how it wants to be read and felt—sonically and synesthetically—with the archive it has built and for which it advocates,” my approaches to Luiselli’s novel are likewise open to how the novel invites itself to be read across the senses, particularly through sound, and in relation to other texts (17). Chapters 2–5 use the interstitial bibliographies included throughout the novel to guide a thematic progression through personal, familial, national, and global narratives of movement, migration, and change. The final chapter brings these stories together through a pedagogical exploration of how these approaches apply to not only the stories we read but also the stories we write. Chapter 2, “Resonance and Intertextuality: Reading the Novel as a Sonic Archive,” will continue outlining the multiple ways Luiselli integrates scholarly, literary, musical, and artistic voices into her narrative. As this chapter will explain in depth, Luiselli curates an archive supporting the 26 novel through multiple interrelated methods of intertextuality, including interstitial bibliographies between chapter breaks, quotes and paraphrases spoken or contemplated by characters, and allusions made through narrative techniques. I then perform a comparative analysis of the various texts listed in the first bibliography. Alongside a folder containing clips from R. Murray Schafer’s The Soundscape, a catalog from the Smithsonian Folkways Recordings World of Sound, and two scholarly articles from the journal Organised Sound, the bibliography lists ten books, ranging from personal journals, critical essays, fictional novels, and poetry. I argue that each of these texts both enact and interrogate archival practices by collecting, inventorying, and cataloging artifacts either about or made of sound. My analysis demonstrates how the sounds of these artifacts resonate through Luiselli’s narration. Chapter 3, “Resonance and Transmodality: Interpreting Stories via Sonic Epistemologies,” then further develops the role of sound in literature by giving an overview of the different ways in which sound is experienced and contemplated by characters in the novel. Not only are there references to actual compositions like Copland’s Appalachian Spring Suite or albums like Paul Simon’s Graceland, but there are also acoustic phenomena enacted, like voicing, echoes, and silence. The texts listed in the next bibliography help to deepen my methodology of resonance through seminal sound studies texts by Steven Feld, R. Murray Schafer, Cathy Lane, and Angus Carlyle. Other contents of this bibliography include: photography collections documenting journeys across the United States by Robert Frank, Sally Mann, and Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov; an autobiography by Rebecca Solnit; three CDs by Steven Feld, the Kitchen Sisters, and Scott Smallwood; and four references to soundmapping projects that attempt to impose audio upon visuals. Together these texts guide an analysis of how 27 landscapes can be understood as soundscapes by pairing the aural literacies with visual and textual literacies. Chapter 4, “Resonance and Transnationality: Listening to Literature across Borders” will showcase how this methodology of resonance applies to literary analysis specifically. Accompanying the characters’ own musings on storytelling and memory as their journey continues towards the U.S. Southwest, the next bibliography contains eight novels, the Bible, and two musical scores. The novelists and composers cited in this bibliography come from the United States, England, Italy, Chile, France, and Spain, but a focused analysis of the works by Cormac McCarthy and Roberto Bolaño specifically cited in the novel brings this chapter to the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. In doing so, this chapter serves to underscore the mother character’s concerns for child migrants in these spaces, questioning how their stories are documented and interpreted. Reading resonantly enables more inclusive, transnational literacies for better understanding migration narratives. Chapter 5, “Resonance and Transhistoricity: Understanding Narratives of Displacement and Migration,” demonstrates how this methodology works to read migration narratives not only into the United States but also across the United States through different moments in history. As the characters in Lost Children Archive travel closer to the Chiricahua Apache land, they are simultaneously hearing stories about child migrants crossing at the Mexico-U.S. border and learning more about the indigenous peoples from these same borderlands spaces. In this chapter, I problematize how the father’s archive of texts about Native Americans lacks Native voices; within the larger context and questions of the novel, this critique resonates with the reception and reputation of Latin American immigration. Luiselli’s writing beyond Lost Children Archive, including the fictional short story 28 “Shakespeare, New Mexico” and her nonfiction essay “Staging the Frontier: The Wild West Meets the Southern Border,” are included in this chapter to augment the problems of representation and reenactment demonstrated through these historical texts. This chapter ultimately asserts the dissertation’s underlying claim that resonance empowers more socially just and inclusive ways of understanding ourselves, each other, and the world we share, but it also recognizes the limitations of a methodology of resonance. In response, I call for more literacy practices that attune learners to the potential for connections across geographies and moments in time. Chapter 6, “Conclusion: A Pedagogy of Resonance,” then responds by sharing two projects that challenged my students to listen for connections not only within themselves but also across the larger contexts of their school, community, nation, and world. I share insights from teacher-research performed in a dual-credit Expository Writing course at a high school in Central Illinois. The MeSearch/WeSearch project was a semester-long narrative writing experience that invited students to collect, document, interpret, analyze, synthesize, curate, and share artifacts that represented their senior year of high school. The Artivism Reviewed project then brought these same students into existing digital archives for a research unit on artists and activists represented in the Library of Congress online collections. By synthesizing literacy theory, archival practices, and composition studies, my teacher-research addresses pedagogical issues of individual and collective identity development as well as critical literacies for understanding the stories the U.S. tells itself about itself. These projects helped students learn to listen more carefully for resonances across stories. Essentially, this dissertation argues that scholars and teachers in English Studies can learn from sonic concepts—in this case, resonance—to teach new literacies for hearing the complexity of race, 29 identity, and migration across the Americas. Just as music trains ears to hear multiple voices simultaneously, readers can do the same with literature and, in turn, gain a deeper understanding of themselves, their communities, and the world. 30 II. RESONANCE AND INTERTEXTUALITY: READING THE NOVEL AS A SONIC ARCHIVE Box I (34) ● Four Notebooks ○ “On Collecting” ○ “On Archiving” ○ “On Inventorying” ○ “On Cataloguing” ● Ten Books ○ The Museum of Unconditional Surrender, Dubravka Ugrešić ○ Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947–1963, Susan Sontag ○ As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Notebooks and Journals, 1964–1980, Susan Sontag ○ The Collected Works of Billy the Kid, Michael Ondaatje ○ Relocated: Twenty Sculptures by Isamu Noguchi from Japan, Isamu Noguchi, Thomas Messer, and Bonnie Rychlak ○ Radio Benjamin, Walter Benjamin ○ Journal des faux-monnayeurs, André Gide ○ A Brief History of Portable Literature, Enrique Vila-Matas ○ Perpetual Inventory, Rosalind E. Krauss ○ The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson ● Folder ○ The Soundscape, R. Murray Schafer ○ Whale sound charts ○ Smithsonian Folkways Recordings World of Sound Catalog #1 ○ “Uncanny Soundscapes: Towards an Inoperative Acoustic Community,” Iain Foreman, Organised Sound 16 (03) ○ “Voices from the Past: Compositional Approaches to Using Recorded Speech,” Cathy Lane, Organised Sound 11 (01) The stories I shared about how my family came to be are unique to me—my identities, my experiences, and my perspective, usually from the middle-right bucket seat of our Dodge Caravan as the car-sick-prone child who needed to see a full view ahead. Meanwhile from the backseat, my often-bickering older siblings hold different memories of our family journeys, including the larger story of 31 our genealogy as well as our countless road trips. At least once or twice a year, we would venture out west to the North Central Kansas Free Fair as well as our fair share of funerals as our living relatives dwindled. Each familiar landmark along the highway and back served as a cue. The IGA in Marysville, Kansas, reminded my sister to make fun of me for the time I knocked over an entire display of canned pumpkin pie mix. The exit sign for Palmyra, Missouri, prompted my dad and me to launch into a made-up jingle for the town. When we passed the rest stop just outside of Springfield, Illinois, I’d ask if anyone remembered the time when they were serving free hot chocolate, which nobody else ever seemed to recall. Luiselli reflects upon this idea of the family car as a space of both shared and separate perspectives, together on a journey but existing as individuals. As their journey begins, she sets the stage by inventorying the characters alongside their physical possessions: In the front seats: he and I. In the glove compartment: proof of insurance, registration, owner’s manual, and road maps. In the backseat: the two children, their backpacks, a tissue box, and a blue cooler with water bottles and perishable snacks. And in the trunk: a small duffle bag with my Sony PCM-D50 digital recorder, headphones, cables, and extra batteries; a large Porta-Brace organizer for his collapsible boom pole, mic, headphones, cables, zeppelin and dead-cat windshield, and the 702T Sound Device. Also: four small suitcases with our clothes, and seven bankers boxes (15” x 12” x 10”), double-thick bottoms and solid lids. (7–8) From this list, the first-person mother then reflects on how their children are far more than just stable entities held in the vehicle but are, of course, dynamic and complex individuals who have stories 32 spanning beyond the timeline of just this road trip. Because the mother and father keep “a respectful pact of silence” about their lives with their previous partners before they met each other, “the children have always wanted to listen to stories about themselves within the context of us” (8). Both children ask to hear the same stories over and over again, and the mother notes that “if we miss a part, confuse a detail, or if they notice any minimal variation to the version they remember, they interrupt, correct us, and demand that the story be told once more, properly this time” (8). Like my siblings and me, these fictional children are raised to understand themselves in the context of their family history through oral storytelling. Through this family lore and the continual creation of new memories together as the journey advances, either child also holds a unique perspective and will remember these moments differently. Although the novel opens with the mother wondering how she will tell her children the story of this road trip after it is over, she also starts coming to terms with the fact that the children will have their own stories to tell as well. For example, as the daughter gradually goes from lively and chatty to quiet and pensive in the backseat, the mother reflects, “I don’t know what she’s thinking, what she knows and doesn’t know. I don’t know if she sees the same world we see,” accepting that within a shared familial narrative there are individual variations in perspectives and interpretations (139–140). Ultimately, the mother accepts that “the only thing that parents can really give their children are little knowledges” taught through stories, which children share back as well (185). As represented within the intimacy of the vehicle, a family is always in ongoing conversation with itself as its stories modulate and develop. Luiselli represents this release of control over the narrative structurally in the second half of the novel when the point of view shifts from the mother to the son and then the daughter. 33 Within the mother’s sections, however, Luiselli also represents how personal narratives come together to form family narratives through her multiple modes of intertextuality. Just as my parents, my siblings, and I individually and collectively remember our family road trips to Kansas, each member of the fictional family will contribute their own personal remembrances and perspectives to the larger story of their journey out west. On the page is one overarching narrative shared by Luiselli, but resonating beneath the narrative are multiple simultaneous and interrelated stories from each character’s individual perspectives as well as from texts outside the novel that she brings to readers’ awareness via intertextuality. Reading the novel as a sonic archive offers a new way of understanding intertextuality as multiple stories sounding simultaneously through the primary narrative. To enact a methodology of resonance, this chapter first outlines Luiselli’s multiple modes of intertextuality, then I listen to how the literary and scholarly voices cited in the first interstitial bibliography come together in the shared space of the novel to resonate with and amplify its underlying themes concerning race, identity, and migration. Studying this novel as a sonic archive about multiple simultaneous journeys across and into the United States, then, relates to what Arjun Appadurai calls the diasporic or migrant archive; in his article “Archive and Aspiration,” he characterizes the migrant archive “by the presence of voice, agency and debate, rather than of mere reading, reception and interpretation” (22). Whereas all archives are sites of memory, archives by and for migrants feature a hyper-valuing of memory in the face of change, loss, and uncertainty (21). These archives are created by and for migrants desiring “to sort out the meaning of memory in relation to the demands of cultural reproduction” (23). In other words, whereas the term and concept of cultural reproduction, theorized by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu as the social processes by which culture 34 is passed down across generations and through institutional contexts, often limits or ignores complex histories of immigration, migrants theorize and/or enact practices wherein they themselves are responsible to make sense of and share their own stories. The disruption and ruptures of their experiences cannot be adequately represented and reproduced by conventional archives. Appadurai claims: For migrants, more than for others, the archive is a map. It is a guide to the uncertainties of identity-building under adverse conditions. The archive is a search for the memories that count and not a home for memories with a preordained significance. (23) In Lost Children Archive, then, this mapping happens on the page and through the voices brought together via intertextuality. As Luiselli explains in an interview video for her 2020 Vilcek Prize for Creative Promise in Literature, her own experiences of migration as a child and young adult have led her to write through archival practices. Writing has always been a way for her to find a sense of grounding and belonging across her multiple moves from Mexico City, Mexico, her birthplace, and from multiple other countries before settling in the United States at age twenty-five to study and write about the injustices impacting her own communities. To explore “the ways in which Hispanics are treated as kind of second-class citizens” in the United States, Luiselli relies upon archival practices to guide her creative process: I move between fiction and non-fiction when I’m making. I write fiction through documentary practices. I always start by compiling an archive of material that I’m 35 going to be questioning. I work with legal documents. I work with testimonies. I work with news bits, sort of layering an archive to understand the space that I am going to be moving in fictionally. Whereas this archival process may be happening in the background of her previous works of fiction and not as immediately discernible to readers, in Lost Children Archive, she makes this work visible and integral to the narrative. In other talks and interviews, Luiselli has mentioned the amount of material that her publishers encouraged her to cut from original drafts of the novel, so what she leaves for her readers is selectively purposeful, meant to be noticed and engaged with. Following Appadurai's definition of migrant archives as “highly active and interactive,” in this chapter I explore how Lost Children Archive serves as a “site of negotiation between collective memory and desire” (23). As Luiselli argues in the Vilcek video, dominant narratives about Latin American child migrants in contemporary news media tend to focus on migration as simply a matter of national security rather than a transnational human rights issue. However, understanding the novel as a sonic archive and studying it through a methodology of resonance enables the negotiation of collective memory and desire at the core of humanity through multiple voices simultaneously telling their stories. Luiselli enacts this multivocality through intertextuality. As she explains in the “Works Cited (Notes on Sources)” section at the end of the novel, “Lost Children Archive is in part the result of a dialogue with many different texts, as well as other non textual sources” (379). She affirms how “the archive that sustains this novel” is intended to be visible to the reader and that “references to sources…function as intralinear markers that point to the many voices in the conversation that the book sustains with the past” (379). In her article “Ashes and ‘the Archive,’” British-studies scholar 36 Frances Dolan—another contemporary archivist Luisellli cites alongside Appadurai—calls for this kind of collaboration between writers to learn from the past. By incorporating other literary and nonliterary texts into her own writing, Luiselli enacts Dolan’s call to work from existing artifacts to provide new perspectives on already studied subjects (401). Appadurai refers to this project as understanding “all documentation as intervention, and all archiving as part of some collective project” (16). Luiselli pursues this possibility by enacting a collaborative conversation with the past through six different ways of referencing textual, musical, visual, and audio-visual sources: listing other texts in interstitial bibliographies, directly quoting other texts, paraphrasing other texts, echoing intertextual references between narrative voices, alluding to literary techniques, and inventing fictional works within the narrative. Most immediate to the reader are the interstitial bibliographies that Luiselli includes between chapter breaks. These lists of texts represent the boxes of research materials that the mother and father characters bring along for the journey, a practice initiated by the father: [The father] bought some bankers boxes and filled them with stuff: books, index cards full of notes and quotes, cutouts, scraps, and maps, field recording and sound surveys he found in public libraries and private archives, as well as a series of little brown notebooks where he wrote daily, almost obsessively. (20) This “stuff,” intended to support his latest professional sound project studying the echoes of the Chiricahua Apache past in the present, fill four boxes that constitute the bibliographies Luiselli labels as Boxes I–IV and places after the first, second, third, and fourth chapters of the novel. In addition to the father’s boxes, the mother fills another box with “a reasonable amount of well-filtered material that 37 would help [her] to understand how to document the children’s crisis at the border” (24). Her material includes everyday artifacts, reflecting the kind of archive Luiselli describes curating for herself in the Vilcek interview, including maps, migrant mortality reports, loose notes, and photographs. This bibliography also lists secondary scholarly materials, including published books, articles, and CDs, as well as a folder with citations for texts related to archival theory, which includes Appadurai’s and Dolan’s articles. Luiselli labels this curation Box V and places it after the novel’s seventh chapter (241–257). Whereas Boxes I–IV form the basis of my bibliography for Chapters 2–5 of this dissertation respectively, insights from scholars in Box V are woven throughout as I continue to interrogate how Luiselli both enacts and represents archival theories through her writing; specifically, I cite Terry Cook, Marisa J. Fuentes, Jacques Derrida, Dolan, and Appadurai. Contributing to this analysis of archive theory are also the children’s boxes and their alternate approaches to filling them. Noticing their parents’ boxes, they each demand their own, but rather than curating their collections before embarking upon the trip, they both decide to leave their boxes empty. The son reasons, “So I can collect stuff on the way,” and the daughter eagerly agrees, “Me too” (24). Accordingly, Box VI (the daughter’s) and Box VII (the son’s) do not appear to the readers until the novel’s final section, from pages 341–344 and 351–375 respectively, when Luiselli shifts the narrative voice from the mother and to the son’s perspective. Whereas the father’s and mother’s boxes seem to serve the conventional function of an archive as “a home for memories with a pre-ordained significance,” the son’s and daughter’s documentary practices more closely align with Appadurai’s idea of the migrant archive as “a continuous and conscious work of the imagination” and “a search for the memories that count” (23). The children’s archival practices enact the kind of inclusive storytelling 38 techniques that motivate and inspire the pedagogy of resonance I propose in Chapter 6 for students to collect, create, and curate artifacts; their source material is not selected before their trip begins but rather found along the journey and welcomed into their active, dynamic archives. This is not to say that the mother’s and father’s archives are passive or exclusive spaces, but their boxes are stable curations of texts already determined before leaving on their road trip. For this reason, I will continue to use the mother’s and father’s boxes throughout this and the following three chapters to demonstrate a methodology of resonance for engaging with intertextuality from artifacts that already exist in the world. In addition to the bibliographic boxes, Luiselli also has her characters directly quote sources that relate to their inner concerns. For example, as the mother recalls her husband’s initial announcement that he needed to travel to Arizona to work on his latest sound project, she remembers wondering whether their marriage and sense of family would survive through the trip or dissipate along the way. She recalls Anne Carson’s poem “Reticent Sonnet” when considering how “pronouns shifted place instantly in our confused syntax while we negotiated the terms of the relocation” (26). A line from Carson’s poem, “part of a system that argues with shadow,” prompts the mother to question whether the poet was actually referring to pronouns or to the people rearranging themselves through changing locations (27). Similarly, the mother reflects upon a longer quote from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, which she characterizes as “a kind of ur-text or manifesto for my husband and me when we were still a new couple” (29). The line “Passing stranger! you do not know how longingly I look upon you,” from Whitman’s “To a Stranger,” reminds her of when they initially met (29). Not only does it resonate with the fact that they were once only strangers to each other, but they also met 39 through a shared soundscaping project when they were both tasked with “recording the sounds of strangers” in New York City (29). The ways in which Luiselli not only cites these texts but uses them to reveal characters’ psyches as they negotiate memories and reality mimics readers’ own experience with her novel. By referencing these intertexts, Luiselli is creating opportunities for her readers to find connections. These references also happen as paraphrases, deepening the archive and strengthening its support beneath the primary narrative. As the mother further contemplates her marriage, she wishes she had understood “it simply as a pact between two people willing to be the guardians of each other’s solitude, as Rilke or some other equanimous, philosophical soul had long ago prescribed” (21–22). Despite her offhand, uncertain attribution, the idea does belong to Rainer Maria Rilke from a letter to German expressionist painter Paula Modersohn-Becker, which appears in the anthology Rilke on Love and Other Difficulties. However, by deemphasizing the author’s agency, Luiselli seems to be underscoring the importance of ideas as they are remembered, interpreted, and then acted upon by readers. Her use of intertextuality is not just a mode of intellectual signaling but rather meant to be engaged with. She intends for her readers to bring their own knowledges and emotions to the stories set forth in the narrative, then hear resonances among those stories and with their own repertoire of stories, texts, and experiences. Luiselli’s other three methods of intertextuality are less direct but just as integral. In the “Works Cited (Notes on Sources),” she explains how when the narrative voice shifts from the mother to the children in the latter half of the novel, “works previously used by the female first-person narrator are ‘echoed,’” representing the ways in which intertextual references do not simply exist in the 40 moment they are quoted or paraphrased but are carried across the narrative for the reader to recall and hear again later (379). She also makes references to other literary works and specific authors’ techniques, which “are spread nearly invisibly…and are meant to appear as thin ‘threads’ of literary allusion” (379). One specific thread is to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, where Luiselli argues “the technique of shifting narrative viewpoints via an object moving in the sky was…first invented” (380). In the very opening passage of the novel, the mother’s narrative voice notices: “An airplane passes above us and leaves a straight long scar on the palate of the cloudless sky” (5). Planes specifically carrying migrants are seen by characters again later in the novel. It is unclear whether these are the same planes passing through in either moment of the narrative or whether they are two separate instances of air traffic overhead, but Luiselli effectively utilizes this technique of shifting temporality and perspective through a shared sensory experience—in this example, it is seeing a plane, but as this dissertation will emphasize, it can also happen through hearing a sound or a song. Beyond the scope of this dissertation is Luiselli’s fifth method of intertextuality where she invents a book called Elegies for Lost Children, which is read by both the mother and the son at different points in the novel and is “composed by means of a series of allusions to literary works that are about voyages, journeying, migrating, etc.” (380). Whereas this invented book could be perceived as a novel-as-archive within a novel-as-archive with further layers of potentially resonant material, I will focus on the novel at hand and its first five interstitial bibliographies to further explore how Luiselli invites a new way of listening to intertextuality towards more inclusive understandings of stories across geographies and moments in time. 41 This chapter will go on to demonstrate this methodology of listening to intertextuality in the novel as a sonic archive by studying the materials listed in Box I in relation to the chapter that precedes it, “Relocations.” This title underscores multiple meanings of movement from one place to another. On one level, there is the primary narrative of the family and their moving in together from father/son and mother/daughter into husband, wife, brother, and sister, then there is their physical relocation across the United States from New York to Arizona. Layered beneath this story are the father and mother’s concerns for historical and contemporary migrations both across and into the United States, while Luiselli’s archive of intertextual references regarding journeys globally provides further support beyond national, literary, and scholarly contexts. As they are described and reflected upon through the mother’s narrative voice, these various forms of relocation happen not linearly or chronologically along a timeline but instead are collapsed and perceived in cacophonous simultaneity. For example, the novel opens with the mother looking at the son and daughter sleeping, observing the rising and falling of their chests with each breath in the present moment; at the same time, she remembers similar moments of watching her children at rest in the past, and she anticipates how they might change as time continues progressing forward and they begin their westward relocation. In this way, artifacts in an archive serve as anchors to time across place or place across time. As the titles of the notebooks in the father’s Box I emphasize, the interrelated acts of collecting, archiving, inventorying, and cataloguing make this anchoring possible. Before coming together as a family unit, the mother and father met as sound archivists, where they enacted these practices professionally. The characters met when employed by a soundscaping project across New York City that was “meant to sample and collect all the keynotes and soundmarks 42 that were emblematic of the city” (6). The idea of a soundscape and the specific concepts of keynotes and soundmarks come from R. Murray Schafer’s seminal text The Soundscape: The Tuning of the World. Writing in 1977, Schafer asked, “What is the relationship between man and the sounds of his environment and what happens when those sounds change?” (3–4). He presented the soundscape as simply the sonic environment in which those sounds and their changes could be heard. Keynote sounds, then, are sounds that provide the “tonality” of a space and “do not have to be listened to consciously” in order to apprehend (9), whereas a soundmark, similar to a landmark, “refers to a community sound which is unique or possesses qualities which make it specially regarded or noticed” (10). For the fictional soundscape project across New York City, these ambient noises and significant sounds include: “Subway cars screeching to a halt, music in the long underground hallways of Forty-Second Street, ministered preaching in Harlem, bells, rumors and murmurs inside the Wall Street stock exchange” (6). Although Schafer’s methodology has been critiqued for its ethnocentric ambition—to find the “tuning of the world” by trusting only certain experts to privilege some sounds as important while silencing and eliminating others—Luiselli’s characters seem to take up these techniques in a more socially just and inclusive ways in line with how sound studies scholarship has developed since Schafer. Their team is interdisciplinary, including “journalists, sound artists, geographers, urbanists, writers, historians, acoustemologists, anthropologists, musicians, and even bathymetrists,” and through this list-making style, the narrator inventories the variety of “sounds that the city produced and that usually went by, as noise, unnoticed,” including: Cash registers opening and closing in delis, a script being rehearsed in an empty Broadway theater, underwater currents in the Hudson, Canada geese flocking and 43 shitting over Van Cortlandt Park, swings swinging in Astoria playgrounds, elderly Korean women filing wealthy fingernails on the Upper West Side, a fire breaking through an old tenement building in the Bronx, a passerby yelling a stream of motherfuckers at another. (6) Rather than seeking “relevant” sounds to fit a predetermined narrative, as Daza and Gershon argue qualitative analysis usually defaults to, the mother and father enact inclusive documenting techniques to collect, archive, inventory, and catalog the sounds of the city. Through resonance, then, these sounds overlap and their significances are amplified, making the sonic data more meaningful together than they would have been on their own. Not only does the New York Soundscape project motivate the plot by bringing the mother, the father, and their children together as a family, but it also serves to characterize the parents and develop their perspectives as archivists and storytellers. In recalling how they were paired together and tasked with “surveying the most linguistically diverse metropolis on the planet, and mapping the entirety of languages that its adults and children speak,” the mother voices excitement and curiosity (7). She then reflects on how months of venturing out, “not knowing what would happen but always sure we’d find something new,” their haphazard collection slowly turned into a curated archive of “accumulated hours of tape of people speaking, telling stories, pausing, telling lies, praying, hesitating, confessing, breathing” (13). In Dispossessed Lives, cited in Box V, Marisa J. Fuentes emphasizes that the materials in an archive do not tell stories in themselves but instead, as Appadurai underscores with the migrant archive, require human interaction and interpretation. Therefore, whose voices are recorded and shared, as well as whose stories are not, is dependent upon power. Institutions have as much 44 power to include as they do to exclude. Whereas Fuentes analyzes how colonial power was reinscribed on the body of the official, state-sanctioned archives holding stories of Black enslaved women in urban Barbados, Luiselli’s characters seem aware of how power affects the stories they collect in their professional lives as well as the stories they create in their personal lives. Through the family’s experiences of and research into relocations, we can understand the sonic migrant archive as always open and continually modulating through interpretations as more artifacts are collected and accumulated. Upon relocating from their respective apartments and moving into a new home together, the mother and father start perceiving their new family life through the same linguistic terms and archivist practices that guide their professional work. On their first night together, the mother and father capture the sounds of the children sleeping; they first joke that the son’s snores replying to the daughter’s farts are one of the “languages of the city” that they need to record (11). They then follow that impulse seriously, not actually for the New York Soundscape project but for their own personal purposes instead: After all, we’d trained our minds to seize recording opportunities, trained our ears to listen to our daily lives as if they were raw tape. All of it, us and them, here and there, inside and outside, was registered, collected, archived. New families, like young nations after violent wars of independence or social revolutions, perhaps need to anchor their beginnings in a symbolic moment and nail that instant in time. (12) Alongside the assertion of artifacts as anchors to time and place, this early quote underscores the two core principles that support this dissertation’s proposal of a theory of resonance: the idea that minds 45 can be trained, changed, and attuned towards sound and archival practices, and the premise that this family’s story serves as a microcosm for the ways nations tell stories of movement, migration, belonging, and otherness. As these initial microcosmic moments with the family demonstrate, the archive does not simply exist on its own but rather necessitates human interaction and interpretation to make sense of the story it holds, a responsibility that has been historically tied with power and, as the Latin root of the term “curate” affirms, requires care. The openness and receptiveness of the sonic archive specifically might seem overwhelming to inventory and catalog, demonstrating the kind of “messy is-ness” that Daza and Gershon acknowledge as inherent in sonic methodologies (641). The mother likewise questions: “When, in the future, we dig into our intimate archive, replay our family tape, will it amount to a story? A soundscape? Or will it all be sound rubble, noise, and debris?” (29). The novel seems to reply, “Yes, and,” to all of her questions, celebrating the meaningful and healing connections that can be found in the chaos and cacophony of the sonic archive. The father’s and mother’s experiences both demonstrate, through their own resonances with the sonic material, how meaningful connections and lasting interpretations can be made. In the initial New York Soundscape project, the father enjoyed “transitional spaces, like train stations, airports, and bus stops” (13). His new idea for an independent project likewise concerns movement and change by documenting ambient sounds, “sampling things like the sound of wind blowing through plains or parking lots; footsteps walking on gravel, cement, or sand; maybe pennies falling into cash registers, teeth grinding peanuts, a child’s hand probing a jacket pocket full of pebbles” (15). He begins preparing for a new project by collecting books, maps, and photographs, then starts adding index cards, scraps of paper, and his own notebooks into the banker’s boxes, leaving his wife to wonder “how 46 all of that would eventually be translated into a sound piece” (20). He ultimately tells her that his goal is to create “an ‘inventory of echoes,’ [says] it would be about the ghosts of Geronimo and the last Apaches” (21). The texts in his bibliographies, Boxes I–IV, offer insight into how he wants to translate his textual and material artifacts into a sound piece that inventories echoes of forced migrations and displacements from the past. However, as the limited and exclusive nature of his texts in Box IV will ultimately reveal, his project is reproducing and perpetuating a false and colonizing narrative that unjustly ignores the reality of still living Apaches. He confines his study to a problematic archive, which I will further problematize in Chapter 5 while exploring the limitations that my methodology of resonance implies. Meanwhile, the mother turns her attention towards her own new sound project that likewise listens to the traces of relocations but with a more inclusive and critical perspective. Rather than focusing on transitional spaces, she is interested in presences and absences, which she first learns to listen to through language. During the New York Soundscape project, she looked forward to being in schools and spending time with children, where the echoes or absences thereof of native languages, whether indigenous to the Americas or from other home nations around the world, were especially evident: I’d hold my recorder up close to each child’s mouth as they uttered sounds, responding to my prompts. I asked them to recall songs and sayings they heard in their homes. Their accents were often anglicized, domesticated, their parents’ languages now foreign to them. I remember their actual physical tongues—pink, earnest, 47 disciplined—trying to wrap themselves around the sounds of their more and more distant mother tongues. (13) This recollection reveals the mother’s interest in generational movement and the ways relocations are differently experienced by parents and their children. For example, she encounters a woman named Manuela, who speaks Trique, an Oto-Manguean language spoken by approximately 30,000 Trique people in Mexico and 5,000 immigrants in the United States. In exchange for recording this “rare language to come by,” Maneula asks the mother to translate her daughters’ legal documents from Spanish into English, then to serve as a live translator between a lawyer and herself (17). Manuela left her daughters with their grandmother in Mexico, crossed the Mexico-U.S. border without documents, and found a job in New York City, waiting until she could pay a coyote, the term used in reference to those aiding migrants across the border, to bring her daughters to her. The girls eventually call her from a Border Patrol detention center, and the officer watching them asserts that they will need legal representation (18). Manuela’s struggle to find a lawyer willing to take on the case motivates the mother to continue pursuing these issues through her archival work. Whereas news media start to cover these stories from a national security approach, she proposes a project “to narrate the stories from a different angle…a sound documentary about the children’s crisis at the border” (20). The mother initially anticipates staying in New York to keep interviewing parents and children from within the legal system, as she compiles her archive of research, and when her husband announces his need to travel southwest, she accepts that relocating closer to the borderlands will effectively anchor her work geographically. Furthermore, the mother’s initial encounter and continued contact with a living indigenous woman underscore the diverging path that her work takes in relation to her 48 husband’s study of past indigenous cultures; whereas the mother continues studying how the past is audible, visible, and still affective in the present, the father seems to understand indigenous history as fixed and unchanging, an issue that will be further explored in Chapter 5 of this dissertation. While the mother and father are both confident about their individual work, they are uncertain about their shared future beyond these projects and the implications for their family, questioning whether their relocation is temporary or permanent. The mother articulates these underlying tensions when she asks how she will give the son and daughter “a proper story” with a clear beginning, middle, and end, as well as satisfying answers about their history and identity as a family: “I’m not sure which parts of our story we might each choose to pluck and edit out for them, or which ones we’ll shuffle around and insert back in to produce a final version” (5). However, while their journey across the United States does show a kind of linear narrative with a beginning, middle, and end, the ways in which Luiselli plays with this linearity through the effects of layering demonstrates how narrative conventions and expectations can be subverted towards more inclusive storytelling. Although the first half of the novel is shared exclusively through the mother character’s point of view, the narration modulates between past remembrance, present reflection, and future anticipation across multiple different geographic spaces: The four of us moving in together four years ago; my husband’s many relocations before that one, as well as my own; the relocations of the hundreds of people and families we had interviewed and recorded for the city soundscape project; those of refugee children whose story I was now going to try to document; and those of the last 49 Chiricahua Apache peoples, whose ghosts my husband would soon start chasing after. Everyone leaves, if they need to, if they can, or if they have to. (32) Through the shared theme of relocation, the resonances between these journeys emerge, each amplifying what happens when someone chooses or is forced to move. However, the repeated reference to the ghosts of “the last Chiricahua Apache peoples” falsely implies that there are no longer living Chiricahua Apaches. The mother’s reflections here and at later points in the narrative seem to sense this tension and a discomfort with the father’s claim, but she is not yet able to articulate it and, ultimately, never explicitly calls out the injustice of perpetuating this lie. The character’s journey as an archivist represents a genuine struggle to find context, verify facts, and determine how best to tell a story, both for her children in the backseat and for a wider audience to her sound project. She senses the potential of resonances, but is not yet sure how to interpret the messages they might be amplifying. So, she continues listening and developing a critical practice, demonstrating the ways readers are likewise encouraged to engage with Lost Children Archive. It never offers explicit answers but rather a series of suggestions through the traces of multiple stories sounding together at once. The texts in Box I specifically share common interest in the acts of collecting, archiving, inventorying, and cataloging, but it is not immediately evident on the page what these texts are saying about these acts together. Understanding resonances takes time and focused attention. Therefore, the analysis that follows will perform a close listening to the texts listed in Box I as they are referenced in and related to the primary narrative of the novel. By close listening, rather than simply close reading, I mean to emphasize an attunement to the sonic qualities of individual texts and awareness of the thematic resonances between texts; close listening is an augmentation of close reading 50 that lets multiple levels of storytelling from the primary narrative itself and through its intertextual references be heard simultaneously together. Through this analysis, I consider how the father’s notebooks, labeled “On Collecting,” “On Archiving,” “On Inventorying,” and “On Cataloguing,” inform how he will turn textual and material artifacts into a sound piece, while also exploring how these practices inspire the mother’s own archival and familial storytelling techniques. Listing each of these terms in their verb form demonstrates that the father is not interested in collections, archives, inventories, or catalogs as stable objects or concepts; instead, he is interested in the processes they entail and how they involve human interaction and interpretation. These specific acts of interaction and interpretation lend themselves to one another. Broadly defined, “to collect” is to find and gather artifacts, whereas “to archive” is to save those artifacts for later. “To inventory” means going back through the collected and archived artifacts to identify them individually, while “to catalog” means organizing the artifacts in relation to each other for an audience. Taken together, these terms epitomize how the mother and father are continually accumulating, engaging with, and interpreting artifacts as they prepare for their journey. A clear example of artifacts that have been collected, archived, inventoried, and cataloged is the “Smithsonian Folkways Recordings World of Sound Catalog #1.” Available as both the physical catalog that the father keeps in Box I and a digitized PDF on the Smithsonian Folkways website, this catalog “provides the most comprehensive and immediate view of the entire collection housed at Smithsonian Folkways” (“World of Sound Catalog”). As the nonprofit record label of the Smithsonian Institution, Smithsonian Folkways is dedicated to “the documentation, preservation, and dissemination of sound” (“Mission and History”). The label was founded as Folkways Recordings by 51 Moses Asch who, similar to R. Murray Schafer, “sought to record and document the entire world of sound” through music, poetry, spoken language, and oral histories globally (“Mission and History”). Upon Asch’s death in 1986, the label was acquired by the Smithsonian Institution Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, which upheld Asch’s request to keep all of its four-thousand albums and sixty-thousand tracks available to the public. Hence, the World of Sound Catalog lists album titles, album artists, years produced, and CD prices. Interestingly, these comprehensive PDF catalogs have not yet been fully digitized for viewers and potential consumers to navigate through search terms and filters; instead, there are three different versions of the catalog to scroll through. The catalog’s readers and the label’s potential customers are subject to organizational choices already made to frame and categorize the materials. Catalog #1, the one the father keeps in his first bankers box, is organized by genre, whereas #2 is organized by record label and #3 is organized by artist name. These three organizational choices demonstrate the element of human interaction on either side of the archive—the archivists must determine how best to catalog the artifacts so that they are accessible and made sensible for an audience. For example, would an audience want to see similar styles of sound grouped together, such as African American Music, Humor, Language Instruction, or Soundtracks and Musicals? Or, would it be more informative to frame the albums by their record labels so they could see similar time periods and techniques at once? If the audience already knows what specific artist they are looking for, might it be easier to search alphabetically through an uncategorized list? The decision to create three separate catalogs, organized by genre, record label, and artist name respectively, underscores how there can be multiple organizational principles depending on the purpose of the audience’s experience with the catalog. 52 I considered similar questions when deciding how to organize my analysis of the intertexts in Box I given that they are listed, as they appear at the start of this chapter, in seemingly no particular order other than being grouped by medium: notebooks, books, and the contents of a folder. They could be reorganized alphabetically by authors’ last names to fit MLA bibliographic conventions: Benjamin, Dickinson, Foreman, Gide, Krauss, Lane, Noguchi, Ondaatje, Schafer, Smithsonian Folkways, Sontag, Ugrešić, and Vila-Matas. Alternatively, they could be listed chronologically by their year of initial creation: 1830–1866: Dickinson 1925: Gide 1927–1933: Benjamin 1964–1980: Sontag 1970: Ondaatje 1977: Schafer 1985: Vila-Matas 1996: Ugrešić 2006: Lane 2008: Krauss 2011: Foreman 2011: Smithsonian Folkways Given that Box I cites multiple collected works, several in translation, two sets of critical commentary on artists’ work, and one set of transcriptions, this chronology is complicated by variability and 53 uncertainty. Perhaps, then, organizing texts by genre would offer the audience more accessibility and sensibility: Poetry Ondaatje Dickinson Novel Ugrešić Gide Vila-Matas Journal Sontag Essay Benjamin Krauss Collection Noguchi Smithsonian Folkways 54 Scholarship Schafer Lane Foreman However, because several of these writers, like Luiselli, are composing in hybrid forms, this categorization by genre is also imperfect and complicated; while helpful for orienting the reader at a glance, it is not authentic to the ways in which these texts are intertextually woven together throughout the novel. Therefore, I return to the given organization of Box I, moving text-by-text through the ten books listed in Box I, while continuing to reference the contents of the folder to augment the ideas suggested by these fundamental bibliographic texts. The close listening that follows will develop, define, theorize, and exemplify what it means to collect, archive, inventory, and catalog while analyzing how these archival actions create meaningful resonances. Dubravka Ugrešić’s The Museum of Unconditional Surrender underscores why archives matter for migrants’ memories and identities. The author herself was born in 1949 in then Yugoslavia, now Croatia, but she refused to identify as a Croatian writer due to her experiences of exile. Because she took a firm anti-war stance and publicly criticized nationalism when war broke out in former Yugoslavia in 1991, she was targeted as a traitor and forced to leave her home country. She spent the remainder of her life in the Netherlands and used her lived experiences of relocation to inform her fiction, much like Luiselli’s approaches to Lost Children Archive. Ugrešić’s novel cited in Box I is similarly written through a first-person female perspective and features post-Wall Berlin and war-torn 55 Yugoslavia. By toggling between past and present as well as between geographic spaces, the narrative voice questions how someone forced to leave their home country should remember the past, exist in the present, and anticipate the future. Ugrešić’s novel’s narration modulates between prose, diary entries, and lists of fragmented reflections disconnected from a discernible plot trajectory but relevant to its themes and resonant with the possibility of sound in the archive. In one of those early fragments, the narrative voice states: “An exile feels that the state of exile is a constant, special sensitivity to sound. So I sometimes feel that exile is nothing but a state of searching for and recollecting sound” (7). One of the first sounds the narrator collects is music as she passes a violinist “playing Hungarian Gypsy songs” on the street in Munich; while she is compelled by and “drawn to the sound of music,” she is shaken by the knowing glances and smiles the musician gives her (7). Hearing the music allows the narrator to connect with something familiar from her past, but seeing the performer try to connect with her as a fellow nonnative in the present is jarring. Later, through a further reflection on what and how the exile feels, she compares this cognitive dissonance to a dream state: The exile feels that the state of exile has the structure of a dream. All at once, as in a dream, faces appear which he had forgotten, or perhaps had never met, places which he is undoubtedly seeing for the first time, but that he feels he knows from somewhere. The dream is a magnetic field which attracts images from the past, present and future. (9) This entire passage is repeated verbatim in a fragment in the closing chapter of the novel (235–236). The content of this passage and its stylistic repetition affirm that for exiles, migrants, and others 56 experiencing relocation, collecting is always a way of recollecting as well. What is collected in the present to be saved for the future also serves as a reminder of the past—the migrant archive, as articulated by Appadurai, hyper-values the power of memory to connect back with a certain place or time. The migrant archive, then, is also always a space that operates across multiple moments in time simultaneously. According to Appadurai, “for migrants, more than for others, the archive is a map. It is a guide to the uncertainties of identity-building under adverse conditions” (23). The narrator in The Museum of Unconditional Surrender experiences the reverse, understanding a map as an archive. A friend gifts her a tourist map of Yugoslavia that he found at a Berlin flea-market, and she traces its contours with her fingers, each boundary line and label reminding her of memories she had across the country’s landscape, yet seeming “all so small and so unreal, as though it never existed” (100). These are the kinds of memories the father in Lost Children Archive thinks he will be able to recollect in sound by traveling through and to the geographical spaces of migration across the United States. However, like the multiple layered narratives in Luiselli’s novel, the national memory surrounding Ugrešić’s novel is also recalled microcosmically through a familial narrative. Similar to how Luiselli titles Part I of her novel “Family Soundscape,” Ugrešić titles Part Two of hers “Family museum.” This “museum” is housed in a pigskin bag bought by the narrator’s mother following the war in Yugoslavia, which, in itself, serves as a symbolic reminder of a luxury item desired and acquired in a time of desperation. The bag further serves as a kind of archive, from which the narrator inventories its contents: 57 photographs (of my mother mainly), letters (of my father’s), a gold coin, a silver cigarette case, a pure silk scarf and…a lock of hair…later on an almond-shaped gold ring (a present from my father) and a little square of gold for teeth would be added to this household treasure. (14) With time, she explains, the bag began to break down, and its contents started spilling out. While the photographs were initially relocated to the shoeboxes for a while, the narrator’s mother decides that the only dignified way to keep the artifacts is in albums. The narrator’s mother takes it upon herself to catalog and organize the photographs, and while at first there is no discernible order, she later attempts to rearrange the albums, “seeking to establish a chronology of events, but for some unknown reason the principle broke down there as well” (16). The narrator later compares the act of compiling a photo album to composing an autobiography, both as “activities guided by the hand of the invisible angel of nostalgia” (29). This reflection resonates with the mother’s concerns in Lost Children Archive about whether her collection of family artifacts will ultimately become a story or a soundscape. Ugrešić’s fiction affirms that for anyone, and for migrants specifically, the process of making sense of a familial and national narrative is always ongoing, but small moments of understanding are made possible by artifacts serving as anchors to a certain time and/or place. Ugrešić’s protagonist’s assertion that exiles are constantly searching for familiar sounds and living in a dream state of fleeing connections underscores how these anchors are continually found, lost, and recollected. Susan Sontag’s journals, the second and third books in Box I, further explore the variety of possibilities for what can be collected, archived, identified, and cataloged, ultimately suggesting how all artifacts—textual, audio, visual, and audio-visual—can have sonic qualities. These books exist as 58 collections in themselves, published as reprinted versions of the writer, philosopher, critic, and activist’s journals and notebooks. As her son David Rieff, the editor of the three-volume series, explains in the preface of the first volume, Sontag died of blood cancer “without leaving any instructions as to what to do with either her papers or her uncollected or unfinished writing” (vii). Sontag was an avid and at times seemingly compulsive diarist, recording intricate details of her daily life as she moved between New York, Arizona, California, Chicago, and Paris, while also traveling extensively in her later years; however, there are also large swaths of time in which she left no trace of herself on the page. Rieff acknowledges that the collections are imperfect and necessarily incomplete, raising questions of authorship, editorship, and intention for an audience, including whether he has the right to shape and share his mother’s story. As a collection of primary sources, though, the story does not stand on its own, as if it were a definitive account of a life; instead, its audience is actively involved in the process of interpretation. Rieff has collected, archived, inventoried, and cataloged the writings, making his own organizational choices about which years and genres to group together, much like the decisions exemplified by the Smithsonian catalogs. Rieff also provides thematic titles that guide the reader into each collection: Reborn: Journals & Notebooks 1947–1963, As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals & Notebooks, 1964–1980, and At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches. From there, the reader is left to interpret the story of Sontag’s life through her own archival impulses. The father in Lost Children Archive carries only the first two books, which hold Sontag’s journals and notebooks and show her as a self-aware and ambitious archivist—instead of trying to collect and interpret others’ stories, Sontag shows an ongoing project of making sense of herself through her personal writing. In Reborn, she identifies herself as a “historian of relationships,” 59 responsible for remembering the significant moments and tiny details in the story a couple tells about themselves (243). She also explains that she has a “librarian’s mentality,” describing her “inability to throw anything out, finding all things (esp. In words) ‘interesting’ + worth saving” (254). This perspective as a historian and librarian is also how she perceives her own reading habits: “My reading is hoarding, accumulating, storing up for the future, filling the hole of the present” (306). Scattered throughout the journals are lists upon lists of book titles and authors she would like to read as well as her notes on what she is reading, offering another way of composing intertextually; even if the texts’ only similarity is that they are of interest to the same person, Sontag’s casual bibliographies create connections. Through her references and reactions, readers gain a deeper understanding of Sontag than her personal writing accomplishes on its own. Although Sontag seems to view her habits as a collector somewhat negatively in Reborn, the entries shared in As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh celebrate their potential toward a stronger sense of self. As a historian, librarian, and hoarder, she goes on to perform “a systematic research into myself” (105) and praises her “cartographic mind” as a talent for “understanding things—+ ordering them—+ using them” (169). Sometimes Sontag performs this research simply by recalling the events of a day as it is winding down, but she also uses her journals to revisit earlier moments in life, which she has already recorded or just recently remembered. Through this continual practice, she understands, orders, and uses her writing to make sense of changing relationships and developing intellect while anticipating her next steps ahead. Although Sontag is not a refugee, exile, or migrant by definition, her experiences of relocation around the United States, coupled with her compulsion to collect the past, make sense of the present, and anticipate the future, amplify what Ugrešić’s novel explores about “searching for and recollecting 60 sound.” Through her reading and writing practices, Sontag is always seeking the right pitches to help her articulate the story she wants to tell. In addition to her inventories of books to be read as well as films to be seen and music to be listened to, Sontag also shares extensive lists of words. Without any explanation or contextualization, several entries in As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh are lists composed of words and phrases, such as: …been sheared off …worked into the grain of …pounded flat by grudging spurned incredulous spew launch unfits one for… equivocal evinced pollute reshuffled choice insult… debased dispersed 61 makeshift despondent (69–70) Sontag may simply be exercising a writing technique of listing interesting vocabulary terms she might want to employ in future pieces, but these inventories of words hold resonant potential for her. In an earlier entry, she quotes literary critic and poet William Empson on how “words have resonances, halos, vibrations” (qtd. in Sontag 35). Her writing demonstrates keen attention to the sonorous qualities of language—not just that words might roll nicely off the tongue or create a compelling rhythm in combination, but that they hold resonant potential to harmonize and create deeper meaning in relation to other words than they could in isolation. When words are composed intentionally alongside other meaningful words, they can amplify an underlying theme. Michael Ondaatje is similarly attuned to the sonorous qualities of words in his The Collected Works of Billy the Kid. Performing perhaps the opposite of the father’s transmediation from textual artifacts into a sound piece, Ondaatje demonstrates how sound can be recorded in a literary text. Written by the Sri-Lankan born Booker Prize author now residing in Canada, this book is the first in the father’s curated collection that deals specifically with the storied past of the U.S. Southwest. Presented as a collection in itself, Ondaatje moves between poetry and prose while also integrating fictional primary source documents, including photographs, news clippings, and interviews. By layering this archive explicitly on the page, Ondaatje makes both visible and audible the sights and sounds of the Old West through which the legendary figure of Billy the Kid moved. Modulating between poetry and prose alongside the primary source documents, the narrative voice of Billy the Kid himself raises questions about how his own story should be told, even from the 62 dead. An opening passage first inventories those killed “by me,” including ten named white individuals, a white blacksmith, eight Native Americans, “one man who bit me during a robbery,” a cat, and some birds (6). Then, it lists those killed “(By them)—,” his enemies: Charlie, Tom O’Folliard Angela D’s split arm, and Pat Garrett sliced off my head. Blood a necklace on me all my life. (6) From these lists, the subsequent pages then recount these fatal moments, eventually including Billy the Kid’s own death, in further detail. As a notorious outlaw who was always on the move, Billy the Kid continues to recollect even from the dead; like the archival impulses exhibited by Ugrešić’s protagonist and Sontag herself, the Billy the Kid character is trying to reach back to remember and hold onto memories that he trusts will make sense later. This voice from the dead seems to be asking himself: How did this happen? Like the mother’s struggle to find a beginning of their family story in Lost Children Archive, Ondaatje’s Billy the Kid challenges himself to “find the beginning, the slight silver key to unlock it, to dig it out. Here then is a maze to begin, be in” (20). This reflection affirms that the act of simply inventorying, creating a stable list, does not tell a story in itself, but it presents an opportunity for further exploration through the material brought together in a shared space. Ondaatje’s writing further demonstrates how the body itself is one such space upon and within which sound can be archived as embodied memories then translated into text. As Billy the Kid remembers attempting to fall asleep in a deserted barn, his experience reflects the adage that you can 63 close eyelids but not earlids: “I heard birds and the odd animal scrape their feet, the rotten wood magnifying the sound so they entered my dreams and nightmares” (17). Even at rest, the protagonist is unable to escape the animals’ sounds, serving as persistent reminders that time continues ahead. Furthermore, sound is also heard as affirming the presence of other human beings. When Billy the Kid remembers being taken into a house, he reflects that although his hosts barely talked to each other, he could “imagine the dialogue of noise—the scraping cup, the tilting chair, the cough, the suction as an arm lifts off a table breaking the lock that was formed by air and the wet of the surface” (32). In other words, even if the hosts were not communicating verbally, their presences in relation to each other and their home were made known aurally. These sonic presences, which also included “footsteps sounded like clangs over the floors, echoes shuddering across the rooms,” reminded him that in the continual movement of time, he is not alone (33). Stories, then, are not found in stationary isolation but move through interactions and interpretations, hearing the sound of another and understanding what it signifies. Perhaps Billy the Kid’s narrated memories could best be described as onomatopoeic. As this extended passage from his final hiding place before his death exemplifies, the narrative voice recollects moments by the ways they were heard: Sound up. Loud and vibrating in the room. My ears picking up all the burning hum of flies letting go across the room. The mattress under Pete Maxwell shifting its straw, each blade loud in its clear flick against another. Even the now and then crack at the glass as the day’s heat evaporates from the window against the dark of the desert. 64 And then that breathing, not Maxwell’s but the other’s. The breathing precise but forced into quiet but regular streams. Think of the dark air going up through the nose, down to the stomach rolling around on itself, and then up and out like a fountain spilling through his teeth hisssssssssss sssssssssssssss. (90) The reader is reminded that these awarenesses are not present but have passed when the protagonist, pages later, witnesses his own “brain coming out like red grass / this breaking where red things wade” (95). The ways in which Ondaatje presents these “Collected Works” from the fictional ghost of an outlaw, remembering his life in sound yet recording it in text, resonates with the father’s ambition to record an “inventory of echoes” and demonstrates how these the traces of the west can be transmediated through multiple genres. The possibilities of capturing sounds through non-sonic media are also explored through the next text in Box I, a catalog accompanying an exhibition titled Relocated: Twenty Sculptures by Isamu Noguchi from Japan. The sculptures photographed and analyzed in this text evidence how the artist sought to visually represent the voices he heard emanating from within the stone he worked with. The title of the catalog speaks both to the sculptor’s lived experiences of displacement as well as the process of shipping his sculptures from their place of creation in Japan to a posthumous exhibition in New York. Noguchi himself was born the son of a Japanese poet and an American writer in 1904 in Los Angeles; the family moved to Japan during his early childhood, then he returned to the United States for school and continued to travel extensively as he built his career as an artist. Noguchi’s perspective on relocations was further affected by Japanese-American internment during WWII. Although Noguchi was not forcibly moved from his home to a camp, he entered a camp voluntarily to promote 65 the arts. However, because he actively spoke out against the injustice of the camps, he was later investigated for alleged suspicious activity. His experience as an American citizen whose outward appearance does not fit expectations for whiteness resonates with the experiences of Latin American migrants at the center of Luiselli’s novel, emphasizing how bodies are often interpreted visually from the outside when individuals’ stories held inside need to be listened to. Noguchi’s work exemplifies this kind of deep listening beyond the surface, as the critical commentaries surrounding the photographs in the catalog affirm. In the “Preface,” the exhibition’s Executive Director Shoji Sadao encourages the audience to consider the sculptures as “the confrontation, the dialogue that Noguchi held with each stone. If you look and listen, both will speak to you” (5). Thomas Messer’s “Introduction” further underscores Noguchi’s “concern with the alternatives between vision directed toward external reality and one reflective of internal states” (8). Although his work existed as visual, physical, and material artifacts in stone, Noguchi believed that each rock had a unique voice within it; it was his responsibility to cut away the layers so the rock could be heard. Just as Sadao’s contextualization refers to the artist in dialogue with the material, editor Bonnie Rychlak’s critical commentary also refers to the artist’s relationship with the material as a conversation. She quotes how Noguchi himself understood this process: Before I set to work on a rock like this, I go often to stand in front of it and after a while, I begin to hear a voice speaking to me from the rock. I try to follow what that voice tells me, cutting the rock according to its own instructions. The next day, I may hear a different voice and then I’ll follow that one. (qtd. in Rychlak 35) 66 Noguchi’s process demonstrates a careful and open-minded listening, recognizing that one day’s interpretation might sound different the next. He hears how voices move across time, despite how the rocks remain in place, similar to how the father in Lost Children Archive seeks to record echoes still reverberating in historic locations. Furthermore, it is important to recognize, though, that the idea of relocation in Noguchi’s collection not only describes how the finished sculptures moved from his studio to the exhibition but also signifies the displacement of the stones from their original place in nature; this recognition resonates with the mother’s project on child migration. She wants to make sure that the stories she is going to study and share are fully contextualized and honor the complicated journeys they took to reach her. The intertexts in Box I analyzed thus far seem to suggest that artifacts in an archive, whether read, seen, or heard, transmediate complex stories that can be heard through close listening beyond the surface; Ugrešić’s protagonist collected visual artifacts, Sontag inventoried meaningful language, Ondatje’s Billy the Kid cataloged sounds, and Noguchi archived voices in stone. The next intertext in Box I raises questions of transcription and translation alongside transmediation. Radio Benjamin is a collection of radio programing performed by German Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin between 1927 to 1933 on the fledgling Radio Berlin and Radio Frankfurt before fleeing Germany as Hitler rose to power. In her “Introduction” to the book, Lecia Rosenthal outlines the complexity of the archival processes that made it possible to translate unrecorded and often unscripted spoken German radio broadcasts into written English essays. Because radio was in its infancy, Benjamin’s broadcasts were not recorded for posterity and only existed sonically as a live performance. For this reason, critics like Denis Hollier characterize radio broadcast as “nonarchivable” because “sound remains merely an event and disappears without a trace” (Hollier 18– 67 19). Rosenthal, however, refutes this claim and argues that the contingencies and limitations of archiving radio should not be wholly dismissed but instead further investigated. Rosenthal takes these complexities of live, unrecorded broadcast into account as she carefully contextualizes the collection of transcriptions for readers. She explains how there is one brief surviving clip from a Benjamin radio play; however, the recording does not even contain his voice but rather those of his collaborators, leaving questions about the extent of his role as the primary voice and producer (xiii). There are no doubts that he wrote the episodes, but the surviving transcripts would have been dictated to a typist, introducing potential deviations from his original words. Furthermore, the transcripts were created in preparation for each episode and not adjusted during or after the broadcast to account for any revisions or improvisations. Although not every transcript was saved and archived, those that survived were first published in German in Gesammelte Schriften, the collected works of Benjamin across all of his modes of composition. Rosenthal acknowledges that these transcripts were not cataloged by genre but instead included among Benjamin’s other essays, thus emphasizing the significance of Radio Benjamin to not only translate works into English but to separate them intentionally from his non-radio writings. The editors further categorize the radio transcript by topic, genre, and intended audience. There are Youth Hour Radio Stories for Children; Radio Plays for Children; Radio Talks, Plays, Dialogues, and Listening Models; and Writings on Radio, Off Air. Taken together, the complexity of archiving these transcripts and publishing this book exemplifies how meaning may be found not only in the artifacts themselves—in this case, radio broadcasts—but in the decisions made surrounding their documentation and publication. 68 From these collected, archived, inventoried, and cataloged radio transcripts, it is evident that Benjamin was highly self-aware of both the possibilities and the limitations of the new sonic media. In the stories and plays for children specifically, he uses radio to create a unique connection with his audience. The transcript of the very first Youth Hour program exemplifies how Benjamin speaks directly to his audience and uses a collective voice: “Today I’d like to speak with you about the Berlin Schnauze. This so-called big snout is the first thing that comes to mind when talking about Berliners” (3). Importantly, Benjamin affirms that he is talking “with” his audience of children, not talking “at” or “to” them, and he assumes a familiarity of shared experiences and perspectives as Berliners. When, in a subsequent episode, he discusses the sounds of the Berlin market, he can ask, “when you visit the market with your mother, is it not sometimes thrilling and festive?” (11). However, through this assumed shared experience in the present, Benjamin also accounts for the age difference between himself and his audience, frequently remarking on how the present of Berlin has changed from its past when he was a child. Nonetheless, Benjamin maintains that the sounds of the street sellers in the market remain the same: “When you hear a speech like this, there’s no need to mourn old Berlin, because it can still be found here in new Berlin” (16). Through these present sounds and the awarenesses he encourages, Benjamin’s audience can also understand the past, exemplifying how resonance lets listeners hear more than one time period and generation at once. Benjamin cultivates a community of listeners both through their shared aural experiences in the city and through their shared aural experience via the radio programming. He frequently references previous episodes, cultivating a community of listenership and building upon previous stories, but he also concedes that the relationship between the broadcaster and the listener is not a two-way 69 interaction. If, for example, he were to run into one of his listeners in the Berlin market, he admits, “We won’t recognize each other. That’s the downside of radio” (14). Occasionally Benjamin references other limitations of radio broadcasting. For example, his audience cannot see how a word is spelled, which, he says, “is important because you will have to imagine the spelling in the letter,” in order to understand the irony of the story he then begins to tell about a character named Kaspar Hauser (113). He also recognizes the constraints of time in radio broadcasting: “If we had enough time—which I and hopefully you as well would appreciate—I could introduce you to another strange personage who appeared at this point in Hauser’s life” (116). While this aside seems to critique his producers at the radio station, Benjamin generally utilizes the opportunity of audio for creating connection and community with an audience in a way that he could not have otherwise reached in print media. Benjamin is noted as devaluing his work as a radio broadcaster—leading to some of the gaps in the archive that Rosenthal acknowledges, simply because he did not care enough about the work to think it was worth saving—but his theoretical writings about the medium show how he valued its possibilities. Specifically, his essay “Reflections on Radio” opens by insisting that radio creates connections in an approachable, relatable manner: “Every child recognizes that it is in the interest of radio to bring anyone before the microphone at any opportunity, making the public witness to interviews and conversations in which anyone might have a say” (363). He argues that while other contemporary cultural media, such as opera and novels, have cultivated passivity in their audiences, radio has radical possibility for actively involving the audience by “focus[ing] his reflections on the real reactions” to the broadcast (363). As one of his earlier radio plays satirizes, radio was received in the audience’s home, “where the voice is like a guest; upon arrival, it is usually assessed just as quickly and 70 as sharply” (364). Benjamin claims that by embracing the role of witness and embodying the aurality of radio, listeners could experience deeper connectedness and active involvement in the broadcasted story. The father’s and the mother’s projects in Lost Children Archive both seem aware of this potential to foster awareness and advocacy for past, present, and future migrations through audio technologies and sonic epistemologies. Whereas the textual artifacts in their bibliographies are disparate and disconnected at first glance, by listening to their resonances together in a shared space, powerful connections are made with an audience. This emphasis on active and critical listening as integral to storytelling is shared by the next text listed in Box I: André Gide’s Journal des faux-monnayuers, translated to English by Dorothy Bussy as The Counterfeiters. This highly self-reflexive novel questions the nature of morality, literature, and society in early twentieth-century, middle-class France as it follows the interconnected lives of aspiring and established writers and critics. All throughout the novel, characters are either quietly listening or empathetically calling out, trying to learn from or create connections with others. Characters’ journals and letters to each other serve as artifacts that are continually reread and reinterpreted as the narrative progresses. Included paratextually in the English translation are Gide’s own journals kept while writing the novel, providing a unique perspective into how the author thought about writers writing about writing. The translated novel, therefore, serves as another kind of archive in itself, holding the author’s own personal reflections on the writing process alongside fictional journals and letters from and between characters as well as third-person omniscient prose. Not only does this omniscient voice see everything, but it also hears all the sounds and silences through which the characters move. The opening passage begins with Bernard, a young aspiring 71 writer, who, much like Ondaatje’s Billy the Kid, sits in silence, listening for sounds indicating the presence of others in his home until he is certain that he is alone and can read a mysterious letter addressed to his mother (3). Devastated by the revelation it contains that the man he knows as his father was not actually his birth father, he knows he needs to find his friend Olivier “to air my mind a little” and process his emotions (4). He seeks to externalize his thoughts and, both colloquially and literally, feel heard. Upon walking to the school where he expects to find his friend, he first starts “to listen to some others who were quarreling behind [Olivier]” until he can be alone with his companion (6); explaining his situation and his decision to leave home, Bernard captures Olivier’s attention by commanding, “Listen” (7). Later that night, when Bernard is hiding for the night in Olivier’s bedroom and the friends are whispering back and forth to one another, Olivier’s younger brother pretends to be asleep, sneaking past Bernard’s sonic radar, while “listening with all his might in the dark” (29). This opening passage affirms that the novel is interested in multiple kinds of simultaneous listenings—to environment and to others, in intimacy and in secret. Ears, as multiple texts in Box I affirm, are always open, always sensing, and always collecting. According to The Counterfeiters, active and conscientious listening is necessary for good storytelling. A later conversation between two older friends, Lilian and Robert, explicitly addresses this imperative. Lilian jokes that Robert has “all the qualities of a man of letters—you are vain, hypocritical, fickle, selfish…” but tells him, “You’ll never be a good novelist…Because you don’t know how to listen” (47–48). Robert tries to defend himself, stating that he is listening to Lilian in their conversation and wonders how else he could respond, but she affirms that a true storyteller listens to more than simply what is said—in other words, a storyteller listens for the resonances beneath the 72 primary narrative. The young Bernard seems to be more attuned to the importance of listening and proposes, “I should like to write a story of a person who starts by listening to everyone” (195). Given that the novel opens with Bernard himself listening for anyone, this moment is self-referential and is further supported by Gide’s journal entries. The author describes his process of character development: The poor novelist constructs his characters; he controls them and makes them speak. The true novelist listens to them and watches them function; he eavesdrops on them even before he knows them. It is only according to what he hears them say that he begins to understand who they are. (444) Just like Noguchi listening for the voices telling their own stories within his material, Gide demonstrates a writing methodology of listening for the subjects of his work to tell their own stories. The narration, fictional journals and letters, and the author’s own reflections all advocate for deep and careful listening as integral to storytelling. The father and mother in Lost Children Archive are similarly aware of this necessity and responsibility, but they are uncertain about what kinds of stories they will find through the process of collecting, archiving, inventorying, and cataloging then interpreting the resonances that emerge. This advocacy for listening as part of the writing process, and the affirmation that writing is indeed an ongoing process, is further amplified by Enrique Vila-Matas’s History of Portable Literature, which similarly celebrates the beauty of listening beneath the surface of stories. As another piece of genre-bending fiction in translation from Box I, this novel presents itself as a brief history of a secret literary society. The narrative voice analyzes how the fictional personas of real writers and artists, such 73 as Marcel Duchamp, Federico García Lorca, and Georgia O’Keefe, were in continual conversation with each other, both literally in their social gatherings and metaphorically through their art. The society celebrates their shared, conspiratorial silences: “Everyone fell silent, understanding that there was really no need for any audible conversation, since we’d already been in conversation for a very long time (though not expressed with words)” (12–13). Vila Matas represents these writers in conversation literally by staging the space of the fictional secret society, but he also underscores the ways in which their actual artistic works develop in relation to each other, demonstrating how there is still an ongoing conversation happening even when it cannot be heard. The writers’ literature is theorized as having a kind of secret rhythm beating beneath each of their texts that connect them together through shared temporality (29). Ultimately, the writings of this society are presented as being continuous in their interconnectedness; no matter who is putting the story on paper, upon a canvas, into stone, or through any other media, it is part of a greater narrative supported by the society’s rhythm and resonances beneath the work. This novel affirms what the father already knows about the interconnectedness and resonant possibilities of the past in the present while also teaching him, perhaps, the importance of naming the echoes in his inventory through his own form of citational practices. Nonetheless, The History of Portable Literature also underscores the limitations and potential complications of a methodology of resonance. One fellow member is criticized as a fraud for setting out to gather African legends but only collecting incomplete fragments: 74 Given his habit of not listening when people told him stories, he instead plucked out two or three random words, using them to construct open fictions in his mind (tales very different from the ones he was actually told). (45) In addition to resonating with the idea from Gide’s novel that writers must be listeners, this criticism also challenges the efficacy and ethics of a methodology of resonance through which only fragments of texts are transcribed and brought into the space of analysis—can everything truly resonate? And if a writer articulates what they feel from an external vibration making an internal connection, how does the writer distinguish between where they end and the source of the resonance begins? How, in other words, can the father make sure to ethically identify the original sources of the echoes he wants to inventory? The solutions Luiselli herself seems to find, to avoid the colonial theft of others’ stories, are her multiple interconnected citational practices. By naming her sources both within the world of her characters as well as extratextually, her intentional intertextuality puts writers in conversation to resonate with each other as well as herself while mapping for readers the origin points beyond the text. From this fiction, I then propose resonance as a methodology that can be applied to literary analysis and a pedagogy that can be enacted in literacy education. Bringing Luiselli’s intertexts together again within the context of a dissertation creates a unique space in which I can amplify resonances I hear across the texts while also recognizing the potential limitations of this methodology. Working from Luiselli’s bibliographies, rather than creating my own, means that there will inevitably be voices excluded from the conversation that could have offered further insights. However, the ultimate goal of my methodology is to demonstrate a practice of close listening and critical engagement taught through sound, contextualized through archives, and explored through literature. 75 The penultimate book listed in Box I provides theoretical underpinnings to this methodology and the texts it has been used to study so far. Even the title of Rosalind Krauss’s Perpetual Inventory underscores the perpetuity and continuity of narrative as never complete but always ongoing; whereas the father’s project relies upon ears that are always open and listening, Krauss’s collection of essays focuses on the visual arts. She asserts in the “Introduction” that “a critic constantly revises” her perspectives and her interpretations through “a perpetual reassessment of the field she surveys and the demand that it be articulated in writing” (xi). As Krauss demonstrates through her essays, a critic can and should change their mind about a work of art as time continues forward while works and interpretations continue to accumulate. This assertion is contextualized within the specific considerations of postmodernity; Krauss cites Jean François Lyotard on the “postmodern condition” as “the end of what he terms the ‘master narrative,’” and she proposes her own focus on the “post-medium condition” (xii). She defines this condition further by exploring medium as both material and metaphor for visuality, echoing contemporary sound studies conversations about the materials and metaphors of aurality. Krauss explains that “a medium is, after all, a shared language developed over centuries of practice so that no individual initiative, we would think, can either organize new sources of its meaning or change established ones” (51). In this sense, a medium is a way of organizing, or of cataloging, meaning together through a shared visual—or aural—language. Krauss further relies upon the rhetoric of archival practices by referencing Foucault’s essay, “What Is an Author?” Foucault asserts that the name of an author has “a classificatory function,” through which readers can “group together a certain number of texts, define them, differentiate them and contrast them to others” (227). As Luiselli’s citational practices enact, naming an author and title serves to identify and anchor a text 76 to its origins while also bringing it into the always ongoing conversation shared between writers, musicians, and visual artists. These anchors indicate a particular time and place, just as the mother records and reflects upon presences and absences through stories of migration and change. Similarly, these citational practices enable the kind of transmediation the father intends to perform as he works from textual artifacts to tell a story in sound. The intertexts in Box I analyzed so far have offered insights into how the mother and father are thinking about their individual sound projects, but the final book in the father’s first bibliography relates to the kind of story they want to be able to tell their children about their own family history and journey as well as the transnational narratives of migration upon which their own story is layered. The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson resonates with each of the intertexts already cited and ultimately affirms that meaningful stories can be shared without clear beginnings, middles, and ends—instead, readers can listen carefully to the resonances beneath and in between the words. To demonstrate this point and to show how a methodology of resonance can push the boundaries of academic scholarship beyond formal prose writing, I have created a found poem, which I develop over the following three pages. It is composed of fragments from Dickinson’s poetry, which, in subsequent pages are cited by their page number from the Collected Works and underlaid with my summaries of key ideas from each of the intertexts from Box I (italics), thus amplifying themes I found from the first chapter of Luiselli’s novel (bolded italics). Together, the three pages of this found poem visualize the palimpsest of resonances I heard as a careful listener and critical reader of multiple voices together in conversation. It is intended to show, rather than tell, how a methodology of resonance honors intertextual connections. 77 I heard recede the disappointed tide! Therefore, as one returned, I feel, Odd secrets of the line to tell! An azure depth, a wordless tune Transcending ecstasy. The bees will not forget the tune Their old forefathers sang. It is not bird, it has no nest; Nor band in brass and scarlet dressed, Nor tambourine, nor man; It is not hymn from pulpit read, The morning stars the treble led Through which men reach Where presence is denied them I live with him, I hear his voice… Taught me by Time, On what concerns our mutual mind, The literature of old; The world is not conclusion; A sequel stands beyond, Invisible, as music, But positive, as sound. 78 Each fragment resonates with key themes from each of the intertexts, together amplifying the possibilities of what it means to listen to a story. I heard recede the disappointed tide! Therefore, as one returned, I feel, Odd secrets of the line to tell! from page 79, resonating with Ugrešić’s idea on sound as embodied memories, returning a migrant to a former place and time An azure depth, a wordless tune Transcending ecstasy. from page 30, resonating with Sontag’s continual search for deeper meanings to everyday experiences and observations The bees will not forget the tune Their old forefathers sang. from page 158, resonating with Ondaatje’s interest in the sonic persistence of the natural world It is not bird, it has no nest; Nor band in brass and scarlet dressed, Nor tambourine, nor man; It is not hymn from pulpit read, The morning stars the treble led from page 48, titled “Melodies Unheard,” resonating with Noguchi’s emphasis on listening to the world beyond immediately perceptible texts Through which men reach Where presence is denied them from page 78, resonating with Benjamin’s advocacy for the possibility of sound to create otherwise unobtainable connections I live with him, I hear his voice… Taught me by Time, from page 156, resonating with Gide on how to listen is to learn how to perceive time, presences, and motion On what concerns our mutual mind, The literature of old; from page 10, resonating with Vila-Matas’s depiction of literature creating ongoing and collective stories The world is not conclusion; A sequel stands beyond, Invisible, as music, But positive, as sound. from page 170, resonating with Krauss’s theorization of perpetuity and the idea that sonic epistemologies deepen conventional ways of knowing 79 Each fragment resonates with key themes from each of the intertexts, together amplifying the possibilities of what it means to listen to a story. I heard recede the disappointed tide! Heard together at once, these texts amplify Therefore, as one returned, I feel, the idea that although most stories do not have Odd secrets of the line to tell! a clear beginning, middle, and end—experienced from page 79, resonating with Ugrešić’s idea on sound as embodied memories, returning a migrant to a former place and time An azure depth, a wordless tune and remembered in non-linear temporality Transcending ecstasy. and moving across multiple places and spaces—the from page 30, resonating with Sontag’s continual search for deeper meanings to everyday experiences and observations The bees will not forget the tune acts of collecting, archiving, inventorying, and Their old forefathers sang. cataloging involve interaction and interpretation. from page 158, resonating with Ondaatje’s interest in the sonic persistence of the natural world It is not bird, it has no nest; The reader, listener, or viewer moves with the given Nor band in brass and scarlet dressed, material yet exists alongside their own Nor tambourine, nor man; thoughts, sights, and sounds. Stories begin when the It is not hymn from pulpit read, audience listens, when they enter the space of The morning stars the treble led the narrative, subject to the shape and pacing from page 48, titled “Melodies Unheard,” resonating with Noguchi’s emphasis on listening to the world beyond immediately perceptible texts Through which men reach offered by a writer. The fragments of the family Where presence is denied them story that the mother and father decide to record, from page 78, resonating with Benjamin’s advocacy for the possibility of sound to create otherwise unobtainable connections I live with him, I hear his voice… as well as the pieces of the transnational Taught me by Time, narrative that they choose to tell their son and daughter, from page 156, resonating with Gide on how to listen is to learn how to perceive time, presences, and motion On what concerns our mutual mind, will shape the ways in which the children The literature of old; will understand themselves, their communities, from page 10, resonating with Vila-Matas’s depiction of literature creating ongoing and collective stories The world is not conclusion; and the world. Their own stories will be A sequel stands beyond, always ongoing, continually revised, but anchored by Invisible, as music, the artifacts—both as metaphorical memories and material But positive, as sound. objects—they carry with them and recollect as sound. from page 170, resonating with Krauss’s theorization of perpetuity and the idea that sonic epistemologies deepen conventional ways of knowing 80 Demonstrating the methodological potential of resonance by mapping words upon the page also leads into attempts at soundmapping undertaken by projects cited in Box II, which I will explore in the following chapter. The texts in Box I from this chapter, however, work together to provide a new perspective on intertextuality as a function of resonance. Meaning is made through connections that occur both within and between texts. Luiselli represents this process by including the interstitial bibliographies between chapter breaks and emulates it by citing texts within the writing as well. The environment she creates between characters in a family traveling together in a car serves as a microcosm for how the United States understands its own stories of movement, migration, and change through an always ongoing process of archiving narratives and hearing them in relation to each other. As the chapters that follow will further explore, demystifying this process and attuning our ears to the sonic principles that support it fosters more inclusive storytelling and teaching practices. 81 III. RESONANCE AND TRANSMODALITY: INTERPRETING STORIES VIA SONIC EPISTEMOLOGIES Box II (70) ● Four Notebooks ○ “On Soundscaping” ○ “On Acoustemology” ○ “On Documenting” ○ “On Field Recording” ● Seven Books ○ Sound and Sentiment, Steven Feld ○ The Americans, Robert Frank (introduction by Jack Kerouac) ○ Immediate Family, Sally Mann ○ Ilf and Petrov’s American Road Trip, Ilya I’lf and Evgeny Petrov ○ The Soundscape, R. Murray Schafer ○ A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Rebecca Solnit ○ In the Field: The Art of Field Recording, Cathy Lane and Angus Carlyle, eds. ● Three Compact Discs ○ Voices of the Rainforest, Steven Feld ○ Lost & Found Sound, The Kitchen Sisters ○ Desert Winds, Scott Smallwood ● Folder “About Sound Maps” ○ “Sound Around You” project, University of Sanford, UK ○ The Soundscape Newsletter, vols. I–X, World Forum for Acoustic Ecology ○ “NYSoundmap,” the New York Society for Acoustic Ecology ○ “Fonoteca Bahia Blanca,” Argentina Just as my own personal narrative shared at the beginning of this dissertation and developed in the previous chapter traces both the heritage and geography that lead to me, the title of the second section in Lost Children Archive, “Routes & Roots,” emphasizes the interconnections between familial and national narratives. Multiple personal narratives come together to tell a family’s story, and it is the synthesis of diverse familial and community narratives that shape the story of a nation. As Luiselli’s work recognizes, however, some narratives are amplified louder than others; understanding privilege 82 sonically means recognizing how race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, socioeconomic class, and ability affect whose voices are given the opportunity to speak and whose stories are given a platform to be heard. However, the study of sound is just as powerful in dismantling inequities as it is in perpetuating them. Just as a trained musician will hear not only the melody but the supporting lines and harmonies beneath it in a polyphonic composition, attuning reading practices to sonic ways of knowing means hearing multiple stories simultaneously. This ability to hear multiplicity lets us hear marginalized voices as equally meaningful alongside often otherwise dominant narratives. The methodology of resonance enacted in the previous chapter showed how the novel serves as an archive holding multiple perspectives together at once. Just as the characters in the family are learning from the various texts and artifacts in the boxes but developing their own unique interpretations, readers of the novel likewise develop new understandings through the resonances created by intertextuality within this novel as archive. This chapter will further explore the role of sonic epistemologies in how we can engage with archives and literature, underscoring the ways national narratives are heard in print, via audio, with images, or through other multimodal means of expression, each of which Luiselli references or otherwise represents within the novel. To listen to the story of the United States in a sonically attuned and socially just way means hearing diverse voices resonating together in a variety of spaces, including literature. Making this argument, therefore, relies more on the metaphors of sound than its materiality; while several of the audio texts referenced within this chapter can be sought out and literally listened to by a hearing audience, a methodology of resonance does not exclude non- 83 hearing readers. It works through sonic epistemologies represented within literary texts and enacted in reading practices rather than through sound experiences. By sonic epistemologies, I do not mean knowledge about sound—familiarity with composers and songs, understanding acoustic techniques, or knowledge of music theory—but instead, sonic epistemologies refer to ways of acquiring knowledge through sound, or sonic ways of knowing, rather than knowledge about sound. Luiselli represents sonic epistemologies when the mother character refers to the idea of an archive as “a kind of valley in which your thoughts can bounce back to you, transformed,” explaining: You whisper intuitions and thoughts into the emptiness, hoping to hear something back. And sometimes, just sometimes, an echo does indeed return, a real reverberation of something, bouncing back with clarity when you’ve finally hit the right pitch and found the right surface. (42) This reflection on how thoughts become knowledge through an acoustic process of whispers reverberating and returning back as meaningful echoes demonstrates sonic epistemologies at work, and the emphasis on finding “the right pitch” and “the right surface” epitomizes how the materiality of sound becomes the metaphor for relationality through resonance. There is an encounter and a lasting collection, just as the colloquial, acoustic, and metaphorical definitions of resonance imply. Conceptualizing the ways in which we learn from archives through sonic epistemologies, then, means hearing the multiple simultaneous voices they hold and listening for the echoes that reverberate back with amplified meaning. 84 While sonic ways of knowing have clear implications for engaging with audio technologies, they can also be engaged in powerful ways with print and visual texts to challenge conventional notions of archives. The mother’s personal documentary practices demonstrate how sonic epistemologies create meaningful connections and lasting memories. She explains that in recording her own life, she has never kept a personal journal, but instead, “My journals are the things I underline in books” (58). For example, as the family settles into their hotel beds for their first night away from home, she retrieves Nathalie Léger’s Suite for Barbara Loden from one of her husband’s boxes and, in her restlessness, underlines parts of sentences, such as “the story of a woman who has lost something important but does not know exactly what” (44). Feeling like “a woman who has lost something important” herself, this line resonates in the colloquial sense of a kindred connection—she empathizes with what Léger is describing. However, her act of underlining the passage also demonstrates the acoustic meaning of resonance as an amplified oscillation; these words that she is emphasizing on the page now stand out among the others and are, then, inscribed into her own memory and saved in her personal archive to return to later. The next evening, she narrates that experience of returning to previously underlined passages and hearing past connections anew in the present. She opts for the 1947–1963 collection of Sontag’s journals, cited and analyzed in Chapter 2 of this dissertation, and recalls how she and her husband used to read the edited collection together. They would both underline beautiful or powerful passages in attempts to document what she calls “an afterglow” of “the concept you just grasped and the emotions it produced,” knowing that it would soon be gone (59). Reviewing the ink and pencil markings beneath Sontag’s words and in the margins of the pages, the mother remembers how those moments in 85 the text produced “those sudden, subtle, and possibly microchemical raptures—little lights flickering deep inside the brain tissue—that some people experience when they finally find words for a very simple yet till then utterly unspeakable feeling” (59). Although certain lines may not create the same connections that they once did when she or her husband initially read, the presence of the underlines serves as a palimpsest, evidencing what resonated with them in that moment from the past and providing points of comparison for how their perspectives have since changed. For example, as she continues to reread the book and their annotations the next day, a passage that had not been previously underlined now stands out to her. While reading Sontag’s description of her child playing outside, the mother looks up to see her own son and daughter playing around the hotel and is struck by how “the page before me is a strange mirror of the exact moment I am witnessing” (68). These books, therefore, are stored within her personal archive, and these passages represent “the right pitch” and “the right surface” with which she can hear her own thoughts reverberate. She can listen to how they change with time. The excerpts that I continue to analyze throughout this chapter and the intertexts I connect them with exemplify how sonic epistemologies are at work in all modes of documenting and engaging with documented materials, regardless of whether they are created or received via sound. Listening for resonances in archives through sonic epistemologies provides a relatively new approach in comparison to how archives have been historically perceived and engaged with through ocular epistemologies. In his own definition of the term “archive” as “the set of discourses actually pronounced,” Foucault uses ocular language to describe the function of these discourses, “envisaged not only as a set of events which would have taken place once and for all…but also as a set that 86 continues to function, to be transformed through history, and to provide the possibility of appearing in other discourses” (qtd. in Lawlor and Nale 20). Foucault understands these discourses as initially “pronounced,” or sounded aloud, but then he envisions them as a set of events that might be seen again later, thereby privileging sight over sound. Given that audio recording technology only emerged in the late nineteenth-century, it makes sense that perceptions of how cultural materials are preserved and shared were initially tied to visual ways of knowing. Nonetheless, sonic epistemologies are inherent in how memories are stored and accessed within the archive as valley. When Derrida began exploring how digital media was changing the relationship between writing, memory, and archives, he introduced sonic epistemologies into the discourse and evidenced how they have always been at work in cultural memory-making. In his 1994 book Archive Fever, Derrida uses the term “resonance” to describe the role of an “exergue,” the epigraph or inscription at the start of a book: To cite before beginning is to give the tone through the resonance of a few words, the meaning or form of which ought to set the stage. In other words, the exergue consists in capitalizing on an ellipsis. In accumulating capital in advance and in preparing the surplus value of an archive. (7) Derrida plays upon the multiple interrelated meanings of an inscription—as a material marking engraved physically into a surface and a metaphorical marking engraved psychologically into the memory—to suggest how a few words can make an impression, which continues to resonate with the individual’s engagement with an archive. The mother’s definition of an archive as a valley and her practice of underlining meaningful passages in books seem to take inspiration from Derrida’s visual 87 and tactile definition as she explores how she hears echoes through her multiple modes of documentation. The mother’s perspective and practices also influence her son’s interest in documenting their journey. Upon receiving a Polaroid camera, the son’s takes his first photograph, which features his parents posed at an aquarium, but the picture develops out of the camera “entirely creamy white, as if he’s documented our future instead of the present” (38). His subsequent attempts continue to come out overexposed or underfocused, but while he continues to struggle with the practical intricacies of how the device works, his mother is more concerned with the theoretical implications of documenting. He asks her, “What am I supposed to do?” and she responds: I tell him—trying to translate between a language I know well and a language I know little about—that he just needs to think of photographing as if he were recording the sound of an echo. But in truth, it’s difficult to draw parallels between sonography and photography. A camera can capture an entire portion of a landscape in a single impression; but a microphone, even a parabolic one, can sample only fragments and details. (54–55) He clarifies that he simply wants to know “which button to press and when,” but her esoteric explanation exemplifies how she is continually questioning what it means to document something and how different modes of documentation have medium-specific limitations (55). What a photograph achieves in depth, a sound recording can capture in specificity, but both can only record incomplete fragments of stories. The texts in Box II collectively argue and effectively teach her that neither photography nor sonography can tell a complete story on their own. Records will always be 88 incomplete, but recording practices can be more inclusive. By layering artifacts together and engaging in different modes of archiving simultaneously, a more complete story can be shared, and this story can be listened to through sonic ways of knowing, creating resonances between stories, regardless of modality. The three photography books in Box II demonstrate this act of layering visual media, sometimes alongside writing, raising questions about both the potential and limitations of this modality to create resonances. Sally Mann’s Immediate Family, focuses on a familial narrative by visualizing the kind of youthful innocence Sontag depicts and the mother witnesses. The mother reflects on how “in [Mann’s] pictures there isn’t nostalgia for the fleeting moment, captured by chance with a camera. Rather there’s a confession” (42). In the collection’s “Introduction,” Mann affirms this intention behind each photograph. Because she was raised in the Blue Ridge Mountain foothills and then witnessed her own children growing up in the same place, she felt a special connection between her own past and her children’s present, especially in the summertime. Through her role as both their mother and their photographer—the person documenting their lives—she collects the kids’ everyday moments visually with a kind of intimacy made possible by their familial bonds. Any other photographer, even at the same time, in the same place, and with the same children as subjects, could not capture the same vulnerability and familiarity she documents in her children, sometimes posed and gazing directly into the camera while other times unaware or careless of their mother’s presence. In the critical commentary at the end of Immediate Family, essayist Reynolds Price contextualizes how “the inexpensive home-camera may have invented an important part of what we’ve come to mean in America in the twentieth century by family,” arguing that with the increased affordability and 89 accessibility of the camera came the expectation that life, and specifically family life, should be documented (77). The way in which Mann characterizes the purpose of this collection as a celebration of childhood resonates with the mother’s concern for documenting her children’s lives and questions about how to make sense of those intimate, “immediate family” artifacts against a larger, more expansive national context. In other words, how can the specific stories of these photographs play out against and in concert with a larger national narrative? Robert Frank’s photography book The Americans seeks to illustrate this national context by humanizing the same geographic spaces through which the family in Luiselli’s novel travels. Just like Mann’s collection, the positionality of the documentarist, the subject of the documents, and the purpose of the documentation are essential to understanding how this book functions as an intertext for the characters in Lost Children Archive. In his “Introduction” to the collection, Jack Kerouac praises “the humor, the sadness, the EVERYTHING-ness and American-ness” of Frank’s photographs (2). Whereas the written commentaries surrounding the photographs do not disclose anything about Frank’s positionality in relation to his subjects, the images themselves evidence how he engaged as both an active participant and a passive bystander depending on the moments being documented. For example, in one shot titled “Jehovah’s Witness—Los Angeles,” a solitary man stands in his suit, displaying a pamphlet reading, “Awake!” and staring directly into the camera lens with a befuddled perspective, whereas the woman in focus in “Elevator—Miami Beach” looks past the photographer seemingly unbothered by Frank’s presence and the man sleeping on the ground in “Public park—Cleveland, Ohio” may not have ever known that he was photographed. The ways in which Frank identifies his subjects is also interesting; every photograph is named by place—usually both city and 90 state, but sometimes just city, sometimes just state, and sometimes with specific highway markers—and most have a descriptor of the specific location being photographed, but few identify the people featured by name. The purpose of this collection, as Kerouac suggests, is to visualize the American character by documenting individual people, places, and events, and then collecting them together as a book. Rather than one intimate family as in Mann’s work, the subjects of Frank’s collection are more disparate and seemingly disconnected, yet they still share thematic ties through their depictions of the American character. In the same way, the mother character seeks to collect and document artifacts that together tell a more complete story than they would have on their own. She shares a similar positionality in relation to her own children like Mann, but her larger project focused on Latin American child migrants seems more like Frank’s attempt at curating a far-reaching collection of multiple perspectives across the nation. First, however, a third photography book in Box II offers another approach to how visual documentation can be interpreted through sonic epistemologies. This collection states the unique positionality of its documentarists and purpose of their documentation explicitly in its title: Ilf & Petrov’s American Road Trip: The 1935 Travelogue of Two Soviet Writers. The two noted satirists, Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov, take this trip across the United States as special correspondents, or what they call “literary tourists” (x). Preceding a sense of resentment caused by the Cold War, the two photographers are in awe of American technology and industry and, like Frank, seek to understand the true American character at the core of this progress but with outsiders’ perspectives. This book is also different from the other two in that the story of their road trip is told through a balance of both photography and short essays organized by themes like “The Road” and “Advertising,” places such as 91 “The Small Town,” “The Desert,” and “New York,” and people including, interestingly, “Americans,” “Indians,” and “Negroes,” as if to convey that the latter two categories of identity are not included within the first. Despite Native Americans being guaranteed the right to vote in 1924 and Black Americans being granted citizenship by the 14th Amendment in 1868, these categorizations demonstrate how the outsiders’ perspective still perceives these groups as distinctly different from white Americans. Alongside Mann’s and Frank’s photography collections, Ilf and Petrov’s exemplifies that the way in which artifacts are organized and identified for an audience matters. Documentarists make intentional choices about inclusion, exclusion, representation and presentation. As the mother’s experiences as a reader and viewer, as well as her own attempts at documentary practices, remind us, there is far more to a story than just the title it is given or the ways it is otherwise labeled or categorized. How the audience engages with and interprets a narrative matters, and these practices are not only studied explicitly through formal literacy education but also learned inherently through sonic epistemologies that shape everyday interactions. The mother’s rereading of Sontag exemplifies how reading is relational and dynamic; like the role of the photographers in shaping the visual stories being told, a reader’s position and perception similarly shapes the ways in which narratives are received. A literary text remains a stable, unchanging set of words carefully crafted by a writer to share a story, and a photography collection like Mann’s, Frank’s, or Ilf and Petrov’s, is likewise an unchanging curation of images intended to convey a theme or cultivate a tone. The ways in which that story, theme, or tone can be interpreted and reinterpreted over time by a reader or viewer can change. As Foucault’s definition of an archive reminds us, our initial impressions are always still continuing “to function” and “to be transformed through history” 92 when we return to the artifacts stored in an archive. Adding Derrida’s considerations into this definition, then, introduces the possibility of resonances across various interpretations. Understanding this multiplicity through sonic epistemologies, then, means that multiple perspectives can be honored and heard simultaneously. In other words, the photography collections exemplify a physical layering of pages upon pages featuring individual photographs, which do gather collective significance sequentially as the viewer progresses through the book and considers each in relation to what preceded it, but each photograph is viewed one at a time. Even if the same sets of pictures were laid out on a table, rather than stacked in a book, a viewer could see all the images simultaneously, but they would still need to look at each individually in order to understand its unique significance, while others are relegated to their peripheral vision. Sound, on the other hand, enables simultaneous hearing and listening. From the same scenario, we can imagine that instead of taking photographs, Mann, Frank, and Ilf and Petrov chose instead to record audio from the various moments and locations that make up their collections. Whether by utilizing a plethora of acoustic or electric devices or by using a digital mixing interface, these recordings could be played and heard simultaneously. It would be cacophony, but careful listeners can direct their auditory attention to specific sounds while still hearing the others alongside it. Resonance, then, is the theoretical apparatus to consider what could be created through this unique simultaneity and how it can be applied to other sensory modes of understanding and interpreting stories. Luiselli’s engagement with practical audio technology and sound studies scholarship further demonstrates the potential of sonic epistemologies for understanding the complexity of stories across all modes of expression. Although Luiselli herself was not a sound documentarist before composing 93 Lost Children Archive, she became so interested and invested in the careers of her characters that her latest project is a sound project. In a conversation with the University of Michigan Zell Visiting Writers Series, Luiselli jokes about how life imitates art, but the subject of this project is a serious advancement of her advocacy for immigration rights. Titled “Echoes from the Borderlands,” it is a twenty-four-hour sonic essay that samples different layers of violence imposed upon the land and the female body at the borderlands. A combination of oral interviews, ambient soundscapes, music recordings, poetry readings, and other audio archive material are layered upon each other, enacting the kind of sonic multiplicity she represents in the novel. While continuing to analyze the structure of Lost Children Archive as a sonic archive and the actions of its characters as sound archivists, it is interesting to consider how this initial engagement with sound studies theory led Luiselli into her next project. The analysis to which I will now turn focuses specifically on the audio technologies, recording techniques, and sound theories referenced and represented within the novel, which helps to demonstrate the sonic epistemologies inherent in reading Lost Children Archive. Similar to Mann’s impulse to document her family’s life through photography, the mother and father in Lost Children Archive use their professional equipment and archivist mindsets to make field recordings of their family life. Upon arriving at a hotel for the night, for example, the husband sets up his gear and holds out the boom stick just beyond the bathroom door, recording the sounds of the children taking a bath as well as a dog barking the next room over and a motor roaring in the parking lot outside (41). Whereas photography frames its subject within a definite border, sonography involves omnidirectionality; the brief moment of recording the children and the surrounding sounds reminds us that the family’s life is never entirely isolated, despite the facade of walls, but instead exists 94 within and among multiple simultaneous ongoing narratives. The father rarely articulates his intentions for making these recordings, but the mother’s narrative voice often reflects upon the reasoning behind her impulse to record and, at times, questions its efficacy: For the first time in years, there are slices of our private space that I’d like to record, sounds that I again feel an impulse to document and store…I want to record these first sounds of our trip together, maybe because they feel like the last sounds of something. But at the same time I don’t, because I don’t want to interfere with my recording; I don’t want to turn this particular moment of our lives together into a document for a future archive. If I could only, simply, underline certain things with my mind, I would (60) The expectation to record family life, as explained above by Price, carries with it a responsibility to always be thinking ahead and questioning how one wants to remember the present in the future, when the moment has become the past. Approaching this conflict from a maternal role, like Mann, leaves the mother desiring a subtler way to document her experience. If she could translate the world into words, she would be able to mark up and annotate her life for her own personal archive of memories in the same ways she does with print texts. Instead, she has to make choices about when and how to record, which are deeply informed by the history of audio technology and the practice of field recording. As the possibilities of sound recording advanced from the Acoustic era into the Electrical era in the early twentieth century, naturalists began recording wildlife and ethnographers began documenting human culture through sound. In their collection In the Field: The Art of Field 95 Recording, Cathy Lane and Angus Carlyle outline how the early history of field recording emerged from a desire to preserve for posterity the sounds of the natural world and sounds that humans make through it. Just as the democratization of photography created an impulse to document family life, increasingly personal and portable audio recording technology created the expectation that if something can be recorded, then it should be recorded. The practice developed through technological advances and creative innovations, leading into three distinct contexts in which, according to Lane and Carlyle, field recording matters: “at the point of original recording, in the glow of the sound studio, and in the different ways that audiences can be invited to engage with the work” (60). Their book uses guiding questions—such as “What made you start field recording?” and “When you recorded there, what attracted you to that place, to those sounds?”—to structure interviews with contemporary artists who utilize field recording with unique “approach[es] to the heard world” (11). The ways in which these sound artists describe the purpose of their work echoes many of the same sentiments shared by the photographers. For example, Budhadita Chattopadhyay says he attempts to record “the memory of a place in sound” (56); Christina Kubisch explains that she creates “portraits of places” through sound (68). Like The Americans and Ilf & Petrov’s American Road Trip, the subjects of their projects are places. Other field recording artists follow in the steps of the early sound ethnographers and, like Mann, are more interested in documenting people. In either case, the positionality of the field recording artist in relation to their subject and environment are essential to how they understand the purpose of their work in documenting the world through sound. Perhaps receiving the widest variety of responses is Lane and Carlyle’s interview question, “How do you think you are present in your recording?” Andrea Polli, for example, discusses 96 the role of the recorder’s body in the recording; in her work documenting weather patterns in Antarctica, she celebrates the sound of her own footsteps walking across a glacier as essential to the recording and perceives herself as an integral and inevitable performer in the soundscape (20). On the other hand, Felicity Ford focuses on the role of stillness in her recordings. She explains how “with photography there can be a quickness that is about ‘Bang! Bang! Bang!’, but field recording forces you to be still and to concentrate in an environment” (86). This stillness, she argues, creates a kind of presence and awareness that other modes of recording cannot achieve. Hiroki Sasajima similarly is aware of his presence in his recordings as well, but unlike Polli does not “want there to be any trace of myself as a physical sound on the recordings” (128). Despite these varying approaches to the role of the recorder in the recording, every artist interviewed in this book speaks in one way or another to the power of listening. Ford calls field recording “a practice, a methodology, a way of listening to the world” (93). Similarly, Steve Feld connects his perspective on listening and recording specifically with archival practices: “My recordings are always an archive of my history of listening and of the history of listening that is being recorded” (209). In other words, Feld recognizes that he is not only recording the environment surrounding him nor just other human beings interacting with that environment, but rather he is recording his own role within the environment and among other individuals. Therefore, the echoes heard in the archive as valley are created through the resonances created between the artifacts themselves and the archivist. Like the mother rereading and reflecting upon her old annotations in Sontag, Feld perceives his accumulated recordings as a kind of personal archive that demonstrates his always changing approaches to the art of field recording. This perspective is further showcased in another text in Box II, 97 Feld’s seminal work Sound and Sentiment. To introduce his ethnographic study of the Kaluli people of Papua New Guinea, Feld presents “sound as a cultural system, that is a system of symbols,” which can then be analyzed to understand “the ethos and quality of life” in a community (3). He opens by sharing a Kaluli folktale, “The Boy Who Became a Muni Bird.” Essentially, a boy and his older sister are catching crayfish, and while the sister catches several, the boy does not. He begs, whines, and cries for her to share, but she continually refuses until she turns around and sees that her brother has turned into a bird. He flies off, “repeating the muni cry, a descending eeeeeeeeee,” which Feld attempts to transcribe onto a treble clef through relative pitches (20–21). From this story, Feld first analyzes how the cautionary tale demonstrates three essential elements of Kaluli culture: boys are taught to be “demanding and persistent…socialized to beg, cajole, and have tantrums” while girls are encouraged to be helpful and place others’ needs before their own (25); the sharing of food is expected among both family and friends (28); and because the Kaluli people deeply value “fellowship, comradery, and companionship,” the threat of abandonment and isolation is legitimate cause for deep frustration, sorrow, and anxiety (28). That the sister rejects her brother’s request, refuses to share her catch, and denies him the connection he craves is antithetical to Kaluli social norms, and the audience is, thus, expected to empathize with and feel bad for the boy. Not only does the story of the muni bird resonate with Kaluli values, but the sound of the muni bird is also heard in Kaluli music making as an integral way of expressing sorrow. Feld details how “Kaluli people construct culturally metaphoric ideals from natural historical observations” and, thus, take seriously the process of taxonomizing and identifying bird calls, among other natural sounds, because they can help them make sense of their own thoughts and feelings (30). Over the 98 course of his ground-breaking ethnomusicological work, Feld shares not just analyses of his field recordings in the Bosavi region but also insights from the people he lived with and learned from to analyze the different ways that sound serves as aesthetically-coded sentiment: “These bird sounds and bird sound words reorganize experience onto an emotional plane resonating with deeply felt Kaluli sentiments” (216). In the book’s Postscript, added seven years after its initial publication in 1982, Feld describes the process of sharing this work back with the Kaluli community and compares what he included with what they thought he left out (255). Whereas he had focused almost exclusively on the muni bird story and sentiments, they asked why he did not include the sounds of other animals, all equally essential to Kaluli ways of knowing. These questions underscore Feld’s positionality as the field recorder in comparison to the perspective of the community he is recording and analyzing. Whereas he is writing for an audience of primarily North American and European academics trained in Western literary and music traditions, he is writing about a different culture in which storytelling and music-making practices hold different meaning. The resonances either audience hears with the work, therefore, are different. While Feld tried to use the specific story of the muni bird to make a broader argument about the relationship between sound and sentiment, he responded to their critique by furthering his work in conversation with the Kaluli community to attempt more inclusive ethnographic practices. In 1991 Feld produced Voices of the Rainforest, which is also kept in Box II, an album that he describes as “a tape recording depicting a day in the life of the Kaluli and their tropic rain forest home” (266). Rather than transcribing the sounds of music making and translating oral storytelling into words as he did in Sound and Sentiment, this time Feld works only in audio; he explains that doing so allows him to 99 attempt “an editing dialogue with sounds in order to more reflexively work with Kaluli in a sensate idiom so naturally their own” (266). In other words, he has an audible dialogue with sound and with the specific sounds that he records, creating a way to edit those sounds acoustically and make his editing process evident to his audience. Like the father in Lost Children Archive recording his children in the bathtub alongside the ambient hotel sounds around them, Voices of the Rainforest allows its audience to hear the Kaluli voices speaking and singing amidst the natural soundscape. This soundscape does not just serve as background noise but creates the sounds that cultivate cultural ways of knowing. The concept of soundscapes emerged alongside the practice of field recording as the technological advances challenged scholars to consider the role of sound in the world. The term “soundscape” was first coined and theorized in R. Murray Schafer in The Soundscape: The Tuning of the World. Referencing this text in Box II, the mother recalls: I remember reading it many years ago and only understanding a meager portion of it but understanding at least that it was a titanic effort, possibly in vain, to organize the surplus of sound that human presence in the world had created. By separating and cataloguing sounds, Schafer was trying to get rid of noise. (57) Schafer understood the entire world as a “macrocosmic musical composition,” and as the mother recounts, his goal was to identify and categorize sounds within it that he found most meaningful (5). These attempts became formalized as The World Soundscape Project, and while the work of this group and the initiatives that followed from it created the foundation of contemporary sound studies, many of Schafer’s initial intentions “to get rid of noise” were problematic. For example, he recognized 100 certain authors, including Erich Remarque, William Faulkner, Leo Tolstoy, Thomas Hardy, and Thomas Mann, as “earwitnesses” able to record the sounds of particular times and places in words (9). This suggestion provides the basis for contemporary literary sound studies scholarship, but the corpus of writers that he cites—all white males—hints at other exclusionary features of his theory and objectives (9). He later asserts explicitly the dominance of Western Europe as a site for study, then followed by the United States as the next important context to catalog; thus, the “world” of Schafer’s World Soundscape project seems intentionally limited to the Global North. These gaps in Schafer’s research, however, are quite contradictory to his stated purpose. Schafer feared the intrusion of sounds brought about by the Industrial Revolution; he was wary of the separation of sounds from their original environment made possible by the Electric Revolution; and yet, he showed no interest in studying developing countries that were not experiencing these same issues in the 1970s when his work was published. Despite its pitfalls, Schafer’s seminal book started a conversation that has continued through the Digital Revolution and become more inclusive. This shift is evidenced by The Soundscape Newsletter, the first ten issues of which the father keeps in Box II. The first issue, published August 1991, introduces the newsletter as fostering an “international, interdisciplinary community of professionals…addressing issues such as acoustic ecology, acoustic design, noise, silence, music in a muzak-ridden world” (1). This international qualifier is challenged, however, by Hildegard Westerkamp in her introduction to the fifth issue, published March 1993: Dear Soundscape listeners, friends, designers, colleagues, enthusiasts, researchers, soundmakers, ecologists, composers, recordists, musicians, audio artists from: France, 101 Uruguay, USA, Finland, Switzerland, Italy, Canada, Germany, Austria, Portugal, Israel, Czekoslovakia [sic], Belgium, England, New Zealand, Argentina, Holland, Australia, Brazil, Japan, Egypt, Thailand, Northern Ireland, Sweden, India, Poland, Russia… Impressive and exciting as the above list may seem, it is slightly misleading especially as far as countries are concerned. The majority of our subscribers come from Western Europe, North America and Japan. But we are now hearing more and more from other parts of the world, such as Eastern Europe, South America, New Zealand and most recently from India (1) Westerkamp acknowledges the limited worldview still represented by the World Soundscape Project—this list includes no Central American and few South American countries, no African countries, and few Asian countries. However, she also continues to contextualize the issue with a sense of optimism towards expansion and inclusion. This perspective coincides with her own concurrent invitation to conduct a workshop at the Goethe Institut in New Delhi, where she says she became aware of the pervasiveness of eurocentric assumptions in sound studies scholarship. The advances of cultural studies in the late-twentieth century prompted a rethinking and deepening of Schafer’s initial assertions about whose sound matters and how it should be preserved. The mother in Lost Children Archive likewise grapples with these questions of inclusivity and representation in her own storytelling. Furthermore, Westerkamp’s hope that the society will continue growing and reaching other places around the world is also fueled by the larger effects of technologization and globalization at the turn of the century. In the early stages of the organization, communication was limited to print distribution, making possibilities for connection between scholars slow and uncertain. For example, 102 early issues of the newsletter feature subscriber introductions where readers have submitted a paragraph about their work and often included their postal address for further correspondence. Another series of issues evidences the tedium of coordinating an academic conference via mail as Westerkamp solicited proposals, encouraged attendance, and shared itineraries for the 1993 The Tuning of the World international conference. The first issue following the conference expresses the successes of being able to meet together in person and the limitations of continuing to collaborate at a distance: “Since the conference, the Canadian steering committee has ‘met’ in the form of three conference calls, an acoustically most frustrating way to meet” (2). As communication technologies quickly advanced into the twenty-first century, however, the feasibility of an international community became increasingly possible. The presence of these newsletters within Box II serves as a reminder of how technologization and globalization are interrelated, opening more inclusive and accessible possibilities for sharing knowledge via sound and thus motivating further study of the theories behind sonic epistemologies. While I am proposing resonance as a way for listening to multiplicity in literature through sonic epistemologies, this methodology is deeply inspired by the work of field recording and soundscaping artists. The various sound projects listed in Box II exemplify how contemporary artists are working through sound to make multiplicities audible and challenge the limitations of other genres. For example, Luiselli cites a series produced by The Kitchen Sisters called Lost and Found Sound, first aired by National Public Radio in 1999. This program first solicited listener recordings of their “lost” sounds from across the twentieth century; broadly conceived, listeners could submit any audio clips from their personal or familial collections that they found meaningful. Like the field 103 recording artists explain and the evolution of soundscaping demonstrates, The Kitchen Sisters acknowledge how the twentieth century was the first full century to be recorded in sound. Rather than letting disparate recordings that might otherwise only exist as physical objects accumulating dust in attics and basements, The Kitchen Sisters sought to bring those artifacts together and give them shared sonic space in the airwaves for a broader audience to hear. From a man describing the day he claims he heard Abraham Lincoln deliver the Gettysburg Address to a young girl creating her own mock radio program, the moments that individuals chose to push the “record” button and the memories that listeners selected to send in to the program range from the extraordinary to the mundane. This project exemplifies the philosophy supporting my methodology of resonance as multiple individual voices are brought together to articulate something new; in this case, the recordings create an audible portrait of human culture across the United States in the 1900s. Whereas The Kitchen Sisters use sound to connect with the past, Scott Smallwood’s 2002 sound project Desert Winds, another album cited in Box II, focuses on sound as cultivating presence. The album was recorded in the desert surrounding Wendover, Utah, and features six tracks over the course of about forty minutes, including: 1. Debris, 2. Night Walk, 3. Rusted Womb of a Bomber, 4. Wind Tunnel, 5. Chest and Chair, and 6. Ruins of Clang. Smallwood finds material artifacts in the desert, such as debris, pipes, and furniture, and uses them to create new sounds with only the help of the wind. As François Couture says in his review of the album, “the hand of the composer is subtle,” which aligns more with field recording artists like Sasajima as Smallwood’s “presence [goes] largely unnoticed in favor of re-creating the ‘natural habitat’ of the sounds.” Accordingly, Smallwood’s production philosophy likewise avoided electronic mixing for the fear of interfering with and 104 corrupting the recordings; instead, he utilized the mechanical technique of overlaying records simultaneously to bring the sounds together into one cohesive unit. The album has since been digitized and made available online for free via Bandcamp, which again underscores how digital technology has continued to impact the accessibility and distribution of sonic arts. However, the final three sound projects cited in Box II demonstrate the pitfalls of the Internet Age in relation to longevity and availability. Under the category “Soundmaps,” Luiselli lists Sound Around You, NY Soundmap, and Sonoteca Bahía Blanca. However, two of these three projects exist only as traces of what they once were or intended to be online. The site housing Sound Around You presents its purpose as a worldwide soundscape project to “capture, comment on and upload your day-to-day sound environments.” There is a world map where contributors would have linked their recording to a specific place with an option for user ratings on the sound quality, but the links no longer function. Similarly, the website for NY Soundmap, which was likely the inspiration for Luiselli’s fictional New York Soundscape Project where her characters were employed, likewise exists as only a series of broken links to initiatives such as Sound Seeker, a map intended to privilege the ear over the eye, and City in a Soundwalk, which encourages experiencing urban spaces in sound. While the frameworks for these innovative projects still remain, the absence of meaningful content serves as a reminder of how studying digitally-born projects involves different considerations than traditional archival methods. Nonetheless, Sonoteca Bahía Blanca remains a robust virtual space for collecting and sharing geo-referenced sounds of the city in Argentina. Holding the honor of a UNESCO Intangible Heritage of Humanity site, the project invites and involves the community by soliciting crowd-sourced sound 105 recordings alongside the following required information: name, description, setting (address/place), date, time, moment, device, contact information, and username. Visitors to the Mapa Sonoro site are met with an interactive satellite map showing the city from overhead with clickable geotags that link to the recordings and descriptions. The soundmap, is thus, a visual, textual, and audio space through which visitors engage multiple literacies to better understand the city than just a standard map, written description, or decontextualized sound clip would on its own. With the support of UNESCO and the investment of the Bahía Blanca community towards the project, this soundmap demonstrates the possibility of multimodality for telling an inclusive story through digital technology, in ways that Luiselli’s own work as a sound artist has gone on to emulate. If Sound Around you exemplifies Luiselli’s focus on the transnational, international, and global, and if NY Soundmap connects to the local and specific backstories of the mother and father characters, Luiselli seems to include Sonoteca Bahía Blanca as an example of a successful soundmapping project that has continued to live on and develop despite the changes in digital technologies that have affected the other two projects. One additional text in Box II, however, demonstrates the ways in which this transmodality can be engaged not in digital projects but within written narratives. Rebecca Solnit’s 2005 A Field Guide to Getting Lost is a book of personal essays, but she presents the collection as “a few of my own maps” to help readers navigate their own experiences of being lost or grappling with loss (24). In essays titled “Open Door,” “Daisy Chains,” “Abandon,” “Two Arrowheads,” and “One-Story House,” Solnit tells stories about getting lost in the wilderness, in cities, in books, and in relationships, then uses her words to trace the trails she found along the way. Every other essay is titled “The Blue of Distance,” providing four philosophical interludes that build upon the imagery of where the ocean meets the sky: 106 The world is blue at its edges and in its depths. This blue is the light that got lost. Light at the blue end of the spectrum does not travel the whole distance from the sun to us. It disperses among the molecules of the air, it scatters in water…This light that does not touch us, does not travel the whole distance, the light that gets lost, gives us the beauty of the world, so much of which is in the color blue. (27) Solnit uses this imagery to suggest that some things can only be sensed at a distance and are impossible to perceive any closer. She builds upon this idea in relation to uncertainty for navigating loss; her metaphor provides assurance that the path ahead will always be inevitably unknown, yet each step still creates meaningful movement forward. She cultivates a sense of presence that cannot be found in the facade of familiarity but instead must be sought in unfamiliar spaces, by simply getting lost. Her intention is not like that of the soundmaps to recreate a physical space for others to experience, but rather she seeks to demonstrate her own process of navigating loss and uncertainty. Visual or sonic media would not work to tell her stories, so instead she uses language to share her memories and reflections, letting her readers visualize and listen to her storytelling. Solnit’s book seems to provide a tonal and stylistic shift from the other texts in Box II, yet it offers an important thematic accompaniment to the work of photographers, field recording artists, and soundscape theorists. A Field Guide to Getting Lost reminds its readers to stay curious, open, and aware across the senses. In relation to the mother and father’s questions about how to document the story of their family and to transmediate the stories of the nation, Solnit’s writing provides reassurance that there is no single, repeatable procedure—instead storytelling is always a process of discovery and continual rediscovery. As the mother’s experience rereading Sontag underscores, it is through 107 rediscovery that resonances can be heard, but as the father’s awareness as a field recording artist demonstrates, hearing meaningful resonances requires attunement and practice. Of the four notebooks (“On Soundscaping,” “On Acoustemology,” “On Documenting,” and “On Field Recording”) alongside the texts in Box II, the idea of acoustemology best encapsulates the goals of this chapter and its implications. The Keywords in Sound editors David Novak and Matt Sakakeeny cite Feld for coining this term referring to “a phenomenological approach to sound as a way of knowing” (4). In his entry, Feld further explains how acoustemology combines “acoustics” and “epistemology” to consider “what is knowable, and how it becomes known, through sounding and listening” (12). This process, like Solnit’s insistence on continually getting lost as a necessity to learning, is relational and accumulative: “Knowing through relations insists that one does not simply ‘acquire’ knowledge but, rather, that one knows through an ongoing cumulative and interactive process of participation and reflection” (13–14). While the sound projects cited above demonstrate this phenomenon through audio technology, acoustemological approaches are not limited to sonic media. The photography collections cited in Box II demonstrate how visuality is limited to the spatiality of only viewing one photograph at a time, but aurality allows us to understand these individual photographs as part of a larger narrative; acoustemology records our impressions and interpretations of each individual photograph and our sonic cognition maps these ideas onto temporality. We understand the full story of each collection through the “ongoing cumulative and interactive process” of viewing, interpreting, and remembering the photographs. We engage with visual archives, like Mann’s, Frank’s, and Ilf and Petrov’s photography collections, through sonic epistemologies as we hold on to and build upon our impressions and interpretations as we move 108 through the material, then we can begin to hear resonances between stories as we engage with multiple texts. Luiselli’s intentional method of intertextuality throughout the novel alongside her specific engagement with sound studies texts in Box II emphasizes that when one close reads Lost Children Archive, one must also listen closely for connections. Considering close listening alongside close reading expands the potential of literary analysis by recognizing what is metaphorically facilitated by sound as it is represented in words and received by readers. Acoustemology is one of several ways of knowing involved in how we can hear resonances within and between literatures. Whether we map visual impressions onto temporality in a way that lets us hold onto multiple memories at once, or we experience a literary text as a series of related sounds and accumulated relations among the thoughts they provoke, we are using sonic epistemologies to make meaning. In other words, our minds serve as archives, as valleys, in which past memories, present interpretations, and future thoughts reverberate, echo, and resonate; as sonic archives, novels likewise can emulate and facilitate this process. Just as Feld created an audible “editing dialogue” in Voices of the Rainforest, Luiselli demystifies the process of how readers participate in and reflect upon reading through her intentional citational practices. The texts cited specifically in Box II focus on the interplay of documentary modalities and the sonic principles that are involved in all modes of perception. Because sound works through multiplicity and simultaneity, attuning towards the sonic dimensions of texts helps open our ears and minds to the complexity of narratives. Within the context of Lost Children Archive, this attunement is especially important for developing an inclusive understanding of immigration, but it can also be relevant to other social justice issues that are often impacted by dominant and exclusionary narratives. 109 IV. RESONANCE AND TRANSNATIONALITY: LISTENING TO BORDERLANDS LITERATURES Box III (110) ● Four Notebooks (7 3/4’’ x 5’’) ○ “On Reading” ○ “On Listening” ○ “On Translating” ○ “On Time” ● Eleven Books ○ The Cantos, Ezra Pound ○ Lord of the Flies, William Golding ○ On the Road, Jack Kerouac ○ Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad ○ New Science, Giambattista Vico ○ Blood Meridian & All the Pretty Horses & Cities of the Plain, Cormac McCarthy ○ 2666, Roberto Bolaño ○ Untitled for Barbara Loden, Nathalie Léger ○ The New Oxford Annotated Bible, God? ● Folder (Musical Scores) ○ Metamorphosis, Philip Glass ○ Cantigas de Santa Maria (Alfonso el Sabio), Jordi Savall The enactment of resonance as methodology so far has considered and explored enclosed spaces: the walls of a car containing a family and their perspectives, the covers of a novel containing a narrative and its intertexts, and the boundaries of a nation defining a country and its stories. However, as the theory of resonance has broadened from personal to familial to national narratives, so too does it reach transnationally across geopolitical borders. Sound, in fact, is the ultimate border crosser because it does not stop at boundaries; sound is absorbed by and moves through physical barriers, including border walls. Conceptually, borders are defined by Gloria Anzaldúa as “dividing line[s]” that “are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them,” and are therefore 110 understood through vision; borderlands, however, which Anzaldúa describes as “vague and undetermined place[s] created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary,” are the spaces through which sound travels (3). Sound material can pass through walls or other physical barriers imposing borders, and sound-based metaphors help to conceptualize the movement of people and the mixing of cultures throughout borderlands. Sonic epistemologies, therefore, help to conceptualize the fluidity of borderlands spaces and their literatures. The mother in Lost Children Archive advocates for an understanding of migration that listens across geographies and learns across histories. She critiques the flattening ways that child refugees are often depicted by news media and, as a result, in everyday conversation: No one thinks of the children arriving here now as refugees of a hemispheric war that extends, at least, from these very mountains, down across the country into the southern US and northern Mexican deserts, sweeping across the Mexican sierras, forests, and southern rain forests into Guatemala, into el Salvador, and all the way to the Celaque Mountains in Honduras. No one thinks of the children as consequences of a historical war that goes back decades. (51) Although this reflection overgeneralizes a lack of awareness and advocacy, the mother recognizes that the dominant stories told about child refugees decontextualize their journeys across locations and histories. “These very mountains” she refers to are the Blue Ridge Mountains as the family is traversing Virginia then crossing into North Carolina. As their journey moves further southwest and closer to the borderlands spaces between Mexico and the United States, the reality of these “consequences of a historical war” becomes more apparent. The father remains committed to his work related to the 111 Chiricahua Apaches, but the mother starts questioning her intentions and purpose as a documentarian in these fluid spaces. The title of the novel’s third section, “Undocumented,” holds dual meanings related to both the mother’s political concerns regarding child migrant refugees as well as her aesthetic interests in archival practices. She wants to share the complex life stories of these children, inclusive of their individual identities, familial heritages, community traditions, and national cultures, within the larger contexts of transnational geopolitics and the forces that pushed or pulled them towards the United States. In other words, she wants to document the “undocumented” and use her art to change the stigma surrounding this label. However, she recognizes her positionality as a documentarian in relation to the subjects of her work and grapples with the inherent power differential: Ethical concern: And why would I even think that I can or should make art with someone else’s suffering? Pragmatic concern: Shouldn’t I simply document, like the serious journalist I was when I first started working in radio and sound production? Realistic concern: Maybe it is better to keep the children’s stories as far away from the media as possible, anyway, because the more attention a potentially controversial issue receives in the media, the more susceptible it is to becoming politicized…Constant concerns: Cultural appropriation, pissing all over someone else’s toilet seat, who am I to tell this story (79) These concerns are not without corresponding problematic examples in contemporary literature, such as Jeanine Cummins’s American Dirt, published just one year after Lost Children Archive. As a non-Mexican, white author writing about Mexican migrants, Cummins did use journalistic approaches to 112 interviewing people on either side of the border, but she fictionalized the migration experience to the point of fetishization in a way that critics described as “trauma porn.” In addition to questions of who gets to tell whose stories, the novel exemplifies differences between whose storytelling is and is not promoted, given that Cummins’s fiction received a rare six-figure advance when memoirs on migration written by writers of color rarely receive similar status and attention. The mother character in Lost Children Archive, therefore, wants to make sure that her storytelling achieves the balance of being informed, honest, and culturally responsive, while also being compelling and memorable enough for an audience to care and act upon. Audiences are not passive to works of art—literary or otherwise—nor naive to the circumstances surrounding their publication or promotion. Despite the issues of authorship and appropriation in Cummins’s novel, it was readers who brought these issues to public attention and fomented a movement in response to support writers of color and those who have experienced immigration firsthand. Luiselli seems aware of the role of her audience, trusting readers with her intertextual references and citational practices, making them active participants in the work and honoring the resonances they can create with it. My own sonically-attuned approach to reader-response theory and to the study of intertextuality works especially well for studying borderlands literatures like Luiselli’s because it cultivates empathy and global consciousness. Resonant reading is an act of listening with criticality and care in a way that lets borderlands literature be understood transnationally, which means blurring the lines of national literatures, raising awareness of how imperialism creates interrelated national histories, and recognizing the interconnections of peoples across national boundaries. While the second two tasks will be tackled more explicitly in the following 113 chapter, this chapter will define, develop, and demonstrate resonant reading through an analysis of Lost Children Archive in relation to Roberto Bolaño and Cormac McCarthy. Resonant reading can be engaged in any comparative analysis between multiple authors, but putting Luiselli in conversation with two contemporary authors who also write about the borderlands through intertextuality and sound underscores the importance of this methodology for transnational literatures and immigration narratives. Making this argument synthesizes the emerging fields of Transnational American Studies and Literary Sound Studies by crossing both national and disciplinary borders in its analysis. In her “Introduction” to The Cambridge Companion to Transnational American Literature, Yogita Goyal acknowledges that while the idea of transnationalism is still relatively new to literary study, which has historically defined texts within geographic and linguistic categories, it is borrowing from other fields that have already been understanding the impact of globalization upon how stories are shared (2). She explains that approaching literature through a transnational perspective “can unsettle nationalist myths of cultural purity, reveal through comparison the interconnectedness of various parts of the world and peoples, and offer an analysis of past and present imperialism” (6). Revisiting texts that have previously been canonized as classic American literature as well as seeking out texts from across the Americas that have not received the same recognition can unsettle the stories the United States unquestioningly tells about itself. While this approach offers powerful potential for achieving new insights through older works, David James also advocates in his chapter “Transnational Postmodern and Contemporary Literature” for the necessity of studying texts created and received within our contemporary era through a global 114 perspective. His description of what this perspective can offer resonates with much of Luiselli’s intertextual approaches to composition: Writers engaged with transnational concerns today inherit much that is dynamic and enabling from postmodern fiction: collagist arrangements of voices, genres, and settings; self-reflexive, metafictional references to the composition and reception of the written word across national frontiers; stylized alternations in perspective and idiom that foreground the process of fiction-making, often to interrogate the veracity of historiography itself; and interactive or collusive forms of narrative address that allow novelists, in Toni Morrison’s words, “to have the reader work with the author in the construction of the book.” (124–125) Lost Children Archive makes this work visible and audible through its multiple modes of intertextuality. Just as this dissertation lists the contents of the father’s boxes before each chapter, Luiselli’s interstitial inclusion of these boxes between chapters engages the reader in this work of questioning where the stories the U.S. tells itself about itself come from. As Lost Children Archive continually emphasizes, these lists are not just something to look at but voices to listen to in conversation together, participating in the new methodologies of Literary Sound Studies. Speaking to the field of Sound Studies broadly, Gavin Steingo and Jim Sykes’s book Remapping Sound Studies calls for “a remapping—and, indeed, a partial decolonization—of thinking and listening” (265). They recognize the unique challenges of twenty-first-century geopolitics, as Goyal and James likewise articulate, and advocate for sonic methodologies that offer new ways of listening to the world and its interconnections; to accomplish this remapping, they make three key 115 proposals: understanding “a shift from a focus on technology as a ‘modern’ Western practice that reproduces, isolates, and idealizes sound to an analysis of ‘constitutive technicity’” (11); questioning “sound as a relationship between listener and something listened to” (11); and conceptualizing “sonic history as nonlinear and saturated with friction” (12) . Anna Snaith responds to this call by proposing the literary text as a space in which sound is recorded and can be heard. Specifically in Sound and Literature, she suggests that “literary texts can serve as sonic archives” (5). In this way, then, Luiselli’s intertextual bibliographies can be perceived as contributing to the novel as an archive, holding together both the sounds of the present narrative at the surface as the family travels across the United States towards Mexico but also the sounds of the intertexts supporting the narration of this journey. Therefore, by analyzing Luiselli’s postmodern novel for its transnational and sonic qualities, this chapter contributes specifically to the subfield of Latin American Literary Sound Studies. In her 2023 review “Listening in/to Literature,” Tamara Mitchell affirms how six new monographs published in the last six years exemplify increased and ongoing interest in the topic. These studies by Jason Borge, Marílla Limbrandi, Francine R. Masiello, Luz María Sánchez Cardona, Sarah Finley, and Ren Ellis Neyra together emphasize how the representation of sound in literature “has served as a means to undermine colonial logic and affect structures of power in a region organized around the lettered city” (215). Anke Birkenmaier’s chapter on “Sound Studies and Literature in Latin America” in The Routledge Companion to Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Latin American Literary and Cultural Forms also augments literary critic Angel Rama’s idea of the “lettered city.” Whereas Rama’s 1984 Ciudad Letrada discusses the imperial power of the written word in forming Latin American societies, Birkenmaier considers how “the oral and popular culture of indigenous and Afro-descendant 116 minorities with less access to education and writing” also played an important role in cultivating Latin American identity (350). By destabilizing what constitutes literature, who can compose and read literature, and how literature can be engaged with, sound serves to amplify marginalized voices and attune readers to new ways of listening to literature from across the Americas. Analyzing Lost Children Archive, then, involves not only close reading of individual voices but also close listening to the resonances between the many stories held together in the novel as a sonic archive and its position among other transnational American literary texts; whereas previous chapters have demonstrated close listening as a practice for listening deeply within a text and its intertexts, in this chapter I also demonstrate close listening as an attunement to listening widely across multiple texts and their contexts. Approaching Luiselli’s novel through Latin American Literary Sound Studies also helps to bring attention to, call out, and work to soften the impact that a lack of sound studies scholarship concerning migrant narratives and borderlands studies specifically is having. Whereas most preceding scholarship focuses on sounds held within specific national or cultural contexts, an attunement towards resonance offers a way of listening across geo-political spaces and for their interconnections. Although the fictional family in Lost Children Archive does not immediately seem to be reading transnational texts, their engagements with literature demonstrate how reading and listening can happen simultaneously and are often interconnected in ways that create multiple kinds of resonances. Luiselli’s narration of their individual and shared reading experiences first relate to the themes of the father’s notebooks in Box III: “On Reading,” “On Listening,” “On Translating,” and “On Time.” Their experiences of simultaneously reading and listening, engaging with literature in translation, and questioning the nature of temporality in relation to their experience of their journey, 117 create resonances. From these amplified themes, the audience of Lost Children Archive learns how the novel expects itself to be read, listened to, and engaged with in a way that, I argue, engenders more inclusive interpretations of transnational American literature. The first kinds of resonances are created by overhearing a conversation about literature. As the family enter a bookstore while stopping in downtown Asheville, North Carolina, they notice a book club meeting is underway and “assume the silent, respectful role of spectators who have walked into a theater in the play’s second act” (83). The parents and their children quietly peruse the shelves, and the mother begins to eavesdrop on the club’s conversation. Although the book and author inspiring the discussion are not named, the ways in which the book club members ponder “the impossibility of fiction in the age of nonfiction” and how the book “presents truth-telling as a commodity” relate to the mother’s concerns about storytelling (84). She wants to create a compelling work of nonfiction without falling to exploitative practices. Overhearing this conversation demonstrates resonance at work—the mother has her own underlying thoughts continually developing in her mind, even if subconsciously, and hearing them articulated aloud in others’ voices amplifies the shared concerns. Although she does not necessarily find answers to her questions in their discussion, she finds reassurance in the connections that their conversation creates for her. The effects of resonance are also evident in the physical books she and her family members ultimately purchase. The mother decides upon an Emmet Gowin photography book. Viewing the photographs, she recalls reading once “that he used to say that in landscape photography, both the heart and the mind need time to find their proper place” (87). Again, this idea about the positionality of the documentarist as well as the timing of the documentation resonate with her ongoing concerns 118 for how to share someone else’s story. On the other hand, none of the books that the other family members purchase are identified by a specific creator. The father gets a book on the history of horses, both untitled and unattributed; the son selects an illustrated adaptation of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, but the illustrator is not named; and the daughter chooses The Book with No Pictures. This final book is written by B.J. Novak, but the author does not receive any credit within the narrative or the paratextual Works Cited of Luiselli’s novel, perhaps suggesting the possibility of distance between the writer and the work. Nonetheless, Luiselli shows how there can be intimacy that connects the readers and the work. On a rainy morning when it is too unsafe to drive, the family gets in bed in their motel room and reads The Book with No Pictures: “It’s a simple story, though it’s metafictional. It’s about reading a book with no pictures, and why that might be better than reading one with pictures” because it leaves space for the imagination (100). This time, the resonances are created not by strangers but within a family. Through this shared experience with a text, each family member is learning how to read and interpret stories. Whether it is the mother and father working on their professional sound projects, the daughter crafting her story about sharks shared in Chapter 1, or the son understanding how to be a photographer as further detailed below, their individual interests and motivations connect through the shared text. The family also engages in a shared reading experience through audiobooks in the car, and their decision-making process demonstrates the different purposes that reading holds for each family member along their journey, leading to individually unique resonances. With her smartphone in hand, the mother begins clicking through a selection of pre-downloaded titles, letting the first sentences 119 sound through the car’s speakers until they reach a consensus on what to listen to. For example, a man’s voice first speaks: “When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night…he’d reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him” (75). The mother’s first-person commentary then identifies the narrative of a parent and child journeying into the unknown as Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which she and her husband decide is too violent for their children. The next selection is the first sentence of Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo, a canonical Latin American text about the title character’s son venturing into the village of Comala to learn his father’s story; the mother, however, critiques the English translation she hears and clicks the skip button. She celebrates the next first line they hear: “I am an invisible man” (76). These words from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man are “a barren, perfect first sentence,” but she decides that this novel is not the story she wants to “glove itself upon the landscape” they are driving through (76). Similarly, the parents disagree about the next two potential audiobooks. The mother finds Carson McCuller’s The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter too close to their current marital struggles and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road too close to their present road trip. Regarding the latter, the father argues that “even if the children won’t get the meaning…we can all enjoy the rhythm of it as we drive,” suggesting that to listen to an audiobook together is a different sensory and sense-making experience than reading a written text in solitude (76). However, the mother insists that the family needs fiction, perhaps as a response to the Asheville book club’s conversation about fiction in a nonfiction world; she believes that in order for her children to make sense of their complicated reality, they need to learn through fictional representations, but she also wants to keep a safe distance between their reality and the representation. Furthermore, the fact that this conversation happens within a novel that Luiselli explicitly defines as a work of fiction, and not an autobiography despite its many 120 parallels with her lived experience, demonstrates how Luiselli anticipates her readers’ engagements with and responses to the text. While the family evaluates their own resonances between texts about different kinds of journeys—including post-apocalyptic, familial, personal, marital, or national—readers, too, can hear connections between the fictional narrative, the real social issues it tackles, and their own lived experiences. Ultimately, they settle on Lord of the Flies by William Golding, performed by the author himself, as striking the perfect resonant balance of connection and distance to accompany their journey: “Not a fiction that will separate us and the children from reality, but one that might help us, eventually, explain some of it to them” (77). Golding, notably, is the only author from their potential audiobook choices who is not from the Americas, and on its surface, the book seemingly has little to do with journeys that might help the children in Lost Children Archive make sense of their own trip or the movement of child migrants. Perhaps other options seem better fitting choices for helping them understand these realities. Juan Rulfo, for example, was a member of the Boom, a movement in the 1960s and 70s that included some of the first Latin American novels to be published in Europe and translated into English, creating global recognition of literature from the Global South. On the other hand, The Road takes place in a post-apocalyptic world where national boundaries no longer exist, underscoring the arbitrary nature of borderlines in the face of a global crisis. Nonetheless, by having the family select Lord of the Flies, Luiselli underscores the audience’s role in creating resonances; this is the book that, the parents decide, will best help their children specifically understand and empathize with the reality of the child migrant crisis. 121 Books, even fiction, do not exist separately from reality but instead give depth and texture to lived experience. Engaging with books through sound via audiobooks collectively, rather than silently as individuals, further helps the family give shape to a shared experience. As evidenced by the son’s desire to acquire the illustrated companion to the text, the children can connect with the book’s characters and learn from their story of isolation and desperation, asking questions to their parents as necessary. Unlike the nonfiction stories they hear on the radio and from their parents about the “lost children” at the border, the son and daughter can detach from the consequence of the characters’ actions in Lord of the Flies yet still learn, perhaps, about how children can be resilient and resourceful in the face of uncertainty. In the same way, encountering these intertextual references through the characters’ experiences teaches readers of Lost Children Archive how the novel invites careful reading and close listening; Lord of the Flies is just one example of a text that can create resonances with readers, depending on what they are bringing to the text and how they engage with it. Interestingly, only two of these intertexts cited so far appear in Box III, the interstitial bibliography connected with this section of the novel. Lord of the Flies and On the Road are sitting in the father’s box alongside the seven other books, including three by Cormac McCarthy but not The Road specifically. Luiselli does, however, include Pedro Páramo in her “Works Cited (Notes on Sources)” section at the end of the book, outlining how she alludes to specific quotes from the novel, retranslated by her from the Spanish original into English, in the Elegies for Lost Children, a book Luiselli invents and has characters read from within the narration—in other words, a piece of fiction within her fiction yet resonant with the non-fictitious context surrounding her writing and her characters’ journey. This practice resonates within the 122 tradition of Latin American literature to embed fiction within fiction, and by doing so, Luiselli positions herself as a writer situated in the United States but writing into the Global South literary tradition. Because the intertexts cited throughout this section are far-reaching across genres, literary movements, and geographies (in keeping with its transnational reach and purpose), and because previous chapters of this dissertation so far have performed more broad comparative analyses, in this chapter I will focus now more closely on the work of just two distinctly transnational authors Luiselli references in Box III: Roberto Bolaño and Cormac McCarthy. In doing so, I intentionally create space for a conversation among contemporaries and engage in a dialogue on Transnational American Studies. James recognizes how “within the broader rubric of transnational writing today…the specificity of contemporary writing can often be blurred when subsumed under theoretically large-scale generic or cultural-historical categories” (125). In other words, literary critics have a tendency to limit the study of postmodern writers by their genre and geography; while Bolaño and McCarthy are both prose novelists, they are conventionally categorized separately as Latin American and U.S. writers, respectively. Bolaño, who passed away in 2003, was characterized in the New York Times as “the most significant Latin American literary voice of his generation” (Rohter). Similarly, McCarthy, who also recently passed in 2023, was credited with writing the “Great American Novel” in Blood Meridian, a designation meaning that a book embodies the character and spirit of the United States. Not only is this label problematic given that the novel shares an exclusively male perspective and only includes women through their gaze, but it also limits the geopolitical reach of McCarthy’s writing. Both McCarthy and Bolaño composed stories with characters who move back-and-forth between 123 Latin America and the United States in the spaces where, as Gloria Anzaldúa describes in Borderlands/La Frontera, “the Third World grates against the first and bleeds” (3). In this seminal text of Chicana scholarship, Anzaldúa extends the metaphor to explain how “before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country–a border culture” (3). As the family in Lost Children Archive approaches the “border culture” of the U.S. Southwest, resonances with McCarthy and Bolaño’s novels help readers better understand the intersections and exchanges that happen at the Mexico-U.S. border. In addition to characters’ movements, the authors’ shared interest in blurring geographic boundary lines is also represented linguistically at times in their use of Spanish alongside English. Although I will cite from Natasha Wimmer’s 2008 translation of Bolaño’s 2666, there are certain phrases left in the original Spanish, and McCarthy, writing in English, similarly has words and phrases that characters speak in Spanish. Luiselli herself has published in both Spanish and English; Lost Children Archive was initially composed in English, and she collaborated with Daniel Saldaña to translate the novel into Spanish, published as Desierto sonoro. Interestingly, rather than a direct translation of “lost children archive” into something like “archivo de los niños perdidos,” the title of the Spanish edition has dual meanings. Translated back to English as “sound desert” or “sonorous desert,” Desierto sonoro also alludes to the Sonoran Desert, a borderlands geography essential to the narratives shared by Luiselli, Bolaño, and McCarthy. On a map, the area would be referred to as El desierto de sonora, but Luiselli maintains the term sonoro to underscore the importance of listening in these spaces. She, alongside these two borderlands authors she cites, uses language to document what it sounds like to move across borders. 124 Luiselli specifically cites Bolaño in her Zell Visiting Writers Series interview when asked why, among all the actual books she references, she also invents the imaginary Elegies for Lost Children. She explains that there is a long tradition in Latin American literature of composing fictional works within fiction, initiated perhaps by Jorge Luis Borges but most recently demonstrated in Bolaño’s posthumously published final work. At the center of the novel is a made-up, elusive German author, Benno von Archimboldi. 2666 is broken up into five sections focusing on the following interconnected characters: European literary critics whose search for Archimboldi leads them to the Mexican border town of Santa Teresa, a Chilean professor who has moved to Santa Teresa and fears his daughter will be the next victim of a femicide epidemic in the community, an African-American journalist who comes to the town to cover a boxing match but ends up investigating the murders, the lives of the one-hundred twelve victims of the femicide, and Archimboldi himself, whose life story provides, in a sense, an answer to the murder mystery motivating this expansive novel. The town of Santa Teresa and the mysterious onslaught of women being murdered is based upon Ciudad Juárez, a city near the U.S. border where between 1993 and 2005 over four-hundred women were mutilated, tortured, and raped (Monárrez Fragoso 78). Bolaño’s world-building demonstrates another way in which authors can create fictional spaces to grapple with reality. Conversely, in Cities of the Plain, All the Pretty Horses, and Blood Meridian, McCarthy uses real places, such as El Paso, Texas, United States, and Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico, to trace the journey of a fictional hero. Whereas McCarthy’s novels resonate with this dissertation chapter’s later focus on listening, a close analys is of Bolaño’s work will first be used to amplify the theme of reading and augment the possibility of reading resonantly. Together, these attunements to the sonic qualities and resonant possibilities of borderlands 125 literature demonstrate how blurring the lines of national literatures engenders more inclusive, transnational understandings of stories. Similar to how Luiselli’s fiction features characters engaging with literature both individually and collectively, 2666 opens with a character reading, which helps connect him with others. The fictional critic Jean-Claude Pelletier first reads a novel by Archimboldi and experiences “the wonder and admiration that the novel stirred in him” (3). The act of reading makes a discernible change in his worldview and life direction, leading him to seek out others who share this experience, including Piero Morini, an academic and translator of Archimboldi’s work. The introduction of the third critic, Manuel Espinoza, features another form of intertextual signaling: aside from Archimboldi, “the only German authors he was (barely) familiar with were three greats: Hölderin…; Goethe…; and Schiller” (6). By introducing a character by who, and not even what, he has read, Bolaño underscores the importance of hearing authors in conversation with each other. In contrast, the final critic, Liz Norton, has an entirely different perspective on reading as “directly linked to pleasure, not to knowledge or enigmas or constructions or verbal labyrinths, as Morini, Espinoza, and Pelletier believed it to be” (9). Nonetheless, their shared interest in an author’s oeuvre and mysterious biography brings them together in search of more knowledge than they could achieve individually. The critics’ experience with Archimboldi in Bolaño’s novel together with the family’s experiences with literature in Luiselli’s novel underscore three key relationships that emerge from resonant reading: reader to text, reader to reader, and text to text. The resonant connection between a reader and a text is the amplification of an individual’s thoughts and concerns as they develop on the page and in their mind simultaneously. It is the feeling of “wonder and admiration” that inspires 126 Pelletier and the sense of an afterglow that the mother in Lost Children Archive feels when she underlines other writers’ words. Bolaño’s and Luiselli’s novels also center on connections between readers; whether a cohort of critics analyzing a text in depth or a family using literature to help pass time, community is created through shared reading experiences. Furthermore, the resonances from text to text also help deepen awareness of reality. From mentioning other authors as inspirations in her interviews to meticulously and purposefully citing other works in her literature, Luiselli creates an intentional archive of intertexts beneath her primary narrative. While Bolaño utilizes a different approach to intertextuality, he represents characters tracing the literary lineages surrounding the reclusive and elusive Archimboldi. Reading resonantly, then, means honoring the connections created beneath and through the primary narrative, inclusive of all interrelations between readers and texts. To achieve resonant reading, then, means engaging sonic epistemologies to listen to the layers of intertextuality created among readers and texts. As the earlier scene with the daughter telling a story via a four-square story map demonstrated, literacy practices for young readers often involve comprehending a singular narrative voice that accumulates meaning word-by-word, sentence-by-sentence, page-by-page, or in the daughter’s case box-by-box, through the passage of time. However, in order to hear the complexity of young people’s stories as they play out among larger geographical and historical contexts, attuning reading practices to listening practices enables the ability to hear simultaneity and multiplicity. Although there is still only a singular narrative voice written on the page (or sounding through an audiobook performance), reading resonantly enables the unwritten or unsounded voices supporting the primary narrative to be heard in their connectedness. 127 Another way to conceptualize this relationship is through the idea of a leitmotif. Although typically credited to Richard Wagner, the concept first emerged in Beethoven’s only opera Fidelio, when he had dramatic ideas that could not be conveyed through vocals and instead needed to be communicated by instruments in the orchestra (DeVoto). For example, as two characters descend into a dungeon to converse in whispers, intermittent bursts of melody from the orchestra serve as alerts and reminders from inside the characters’ minds, which the audience would otherwise not be privy to. Wagner then developed this technique to emphasize certain themes and character types, playing upon the audience’s memory and the relationship between their knowledge and the characters’, often creating a kind of dramatic irony only achieved by the music. In the case of prose literature, there is only written language, and although words can represent multiple different voices, only one voice can speak at any given moment. As Luiselli and Bolaño demonstrate, it is the function of intertexts and allusions, then, to present the potential for connections to be made, and in this way, dramatic ideas or thematic concepts can be conveyed through voices beyond the text. Reading with attention to the multiplicities and interconnectedness of stories lends itself to the study of transnational literatures that play out across multiple, interconnected national contexts. The journalist character in 2666, for example, demonstrates this transnationality at work as he investigates a story local to Santa Teresa and tries to translate his findings for an audience back in the United States. The expectations of his anticipated readership resonate for him beneath his research, and Bolaño’s novel demonstrates how careful listening to the multiple, simultaneous storylines and national contexts can be heard together towards deeper meaning of complicated, transnational narratives. 128 McCarthy’s literature, on the other hand, demonstrates how, like Lost Children Archive, the ways in which characters listen represent how readers can engage with texts. I begin my analysis by focusing on the characters in Luiselli’s novel, then compare their experiences with the different kinds of listening represented in McCarthy’s fiction. Starting with Luiselli’s novel helps to establish how portions of McCarthy’s novels surface within the family’s discourse, which I then contrast with the ways McCarthy’s characters listen more to soundscapes than stories. In the third section of Lost Children Archive, the family engages with three different aural media: radio, audiobooks, and music. First, they listen to the radio: “My husband keeps his eyes steady on the road, which winds and curves higher into the mountains, and we all listen to the radio. A boy, maybe nine or ten, judging by the sound of his voice, is being interviewed by a reporter in a detention center in Nixon, Texas” (73). The mother translates the boy’s responses in Spanish into English for her family, and they notice how his voice begins as “calm and composed” but then begins “breaking, hesitating, trembling” as he describes how his brother fell off “the Bestia,” a term used to describe the tops of trains that refugees ride North (73). It is at this point, as the boy’s voice falters and the children in the backseat start asking unanswerable questions about how his story will end, that the parents realize how “the lost children’s stories are troubling our own children” (75). This phrase, “the lost children,” is the term they adopt into their family lexicon to refer to Latin American child refugees, but it also serves to characterize the boy and girl in the family as “lost” along their road trip, continually attempting to find themselves in space and time and to understand the familial, national, and transnational narratives surrounding them. In this sense, just as the boy and girl empathize with the characters in Lord of the Flies affected by British imperialism, the phrase “the lost children” also connects them with the migrant children. 129 However, because the connections the boy and girl make are troubling, the parents decide to turn from radio news to audiobooks and music. As already mentioned above, the mother first clicks through a series of audiobook choices, and by only listening to the first few lines of each text spoken aloud, the characters make judgments based on each book’s initial tone. The way the performer’s voice sounds, the rhythm of the opening phrases, and the imagery evoked by the language all offer the possibility of resonating with each individual character’s underlying and unspoken thoughts, but it is Lord of the Flies that brings them all together through one shared listening experience. While the thematic ties and transnational concerns that resonate between Luiselli’s and Golding’s characters are not explicitly addressed in the narrative, the affirmation that this fiction helps give shape to their reality underscores the connections the children are making via listening. Similarly, as the family nears Nashville, Tennessee, they listen to pop and rock music by taking turns picking out a song. The mother selects Odetta’s cover of Bob Dylan’s “With God on Our Side,” the father selects The Clash’s “Straight to Hell,” the son selects The Rolling Stones’s “Paint It Black,” and the daughter selects The Highwaymen’s “The Highwayman” (101). They put the daughter’s selection on repeat, “unraveling the lyrics as if we were dealing with Baroque poetry” (101). Each of the song’s four verses reveals a different incarnation of the same character—first as the titular highwayman riding along coach roads “with a sword and a pistol by my side,” then as a sailor, a dam builder, and a starship captain, each experiencing national or transnational journeys. The family’s discussion on the song’s meaning demonstrates again how despite a shared listening experience, interpretations will be unique, and each family member’s theory exemplifies resonances with their present concerns: the mother connects it with the power of fiction, the father suggests it deals with American history and guilt, and the son 130 reflects on how it portrays the progress of transportation technologies (101). None of these connect explicitly with transnationality, but each undergirds the issues of transnational literature, history, and progress. Although the girl does not yet have a solid theory, she asks questions about each line, demonstrating how interpretations develop through close reading and close listening. These experiences serve as reminders that although listening creates connection, it is also uniquely individual. Listening, like reading, can be both a shared and solitary experience. What distinguishes listening from reading, then, is how learning through aural media happens not just from the stories being told but also the voices that tell them. From the radio, they hear the first-person account of the boy, which also reminds the mother of the stories she heard while translating child testimonies in Immigration Court, but what most affects the family, and what is impossible to transcribe in written legal documents, is the timbre and tone of the boy’s voice. It is not just the boy’s story but the way in which it is delivered aloud that incites the parents to switch media. Through audiobooks too, however, they are listening not just to the stories being told for entertainment and time-passing purposes but to the voices sharing them; the mother criticizes how in the opening lines of The Road, “whoever is reading for this audiobook version is an actor acting—tries too hard, breathes too loud—instead of a person reading,” whereas hearing Golding’s voice reading his own work affirms their decision to keep listening (76). Similarly, their experience listening to pop and rock music involves both the stories of the songs as expressed through the lyrics and the voices of the singers as equally meaningful. The mother notes that she prefers Odetta’s cover to Dylan’s original, indicating that how a story is told is what compels an audience to listen, connect, and interpret. 131 These effects of stories and voices are evident not just in the audio media the family engages with but also in the ways in which they listen to and learn from each other. In another attempt to help pass time as they rest in a hotel room, the father tells stories about the Apaches: “We listen to him, silent. His voice rises and whirls around the room, carried across the thick hot air that the ceiling fan stirs” (106–107). This description underscores the physical properties of sound that enable those connections. Soundwaves are carried through the air and shared between the storyteller and their audience, but just like texts held in their bibliographic boxes, these stories are not lost the moment they are told; they are held and kept within each character, where they continue to modulate and resonate. These particular stories represent dangerous implications given that the mother doubts whether the father’s stories are wholly true and suspects that they are over-dramatized; as an analysis of the father’s Box IV in Chapter 5 will reveal, his limited research basis excludes Native voices and perpetuates non-Native entitlement over Apache stories and history. These dangers are shown through the children’s imaginative play. In the backseat, the boy and girl play pretend while the parents listen from the front: If we are forced to stop hunting wild game, we shall raid their ranches and steal their cows! Yeah, let’s steal the white cows, the white, the white-eyes’ cows! Be careful with bluecoats and the Border Patrol! We realize then that they have in fact been listening, more attentively than we thought, to the stories of Chief Nana, Chief Loco, Chihuahua, Geronimo—the last of the Chiricahuas—as well as to the story we are all following on the news, about the child refugees at the border (75) 132 Combining “bluecoats and the Border Patrol” brings together two different histories, two different threats, upon two different communities—Native Americans as members of First Nations and Latin Americans as migrants—which, in the children’s minds, connect, or resonate with one another. It is also important to note here that in addition to the children’s confusion, the mother also demonstrates ignorance. There are still living Chiricahua. Perhaps by “the last of the Chiricahuas,” a phrase already used in several variations, she is referring to the dramatic diminishing that occurred through the Apache Wars. At the start of Chief Cochise’s leadership in 1861, there were 1,200 Chiricahua Apache, but by the end of the war in 1886, there were approximately five-hundred; only 261 survived after twenty-seven years of imprisonment (“Post Apache Wars”). Today, however, there are over 850 living Chiricahua Apache, including descendants of Cochise and Geronimo. Who shares a story and how the story is shared, therefore, matters. The mother and father characters’ generalizations help their children to make sense of a complicated history, but readers of the novel must take the active responsibility to understand that through Luiselli’s intertexts, there is more to the story than what is written on the page through the voices of the characters. In fact, Luiselli’s writing seems to undermine itself in this regard as stories about Apaches are used in service of Latin American migrants without recognizing the irony of this reappropriation. The issues of cultural appropriation, silencing, and reenactment will be further explored in Chapter 5 by reading beyond Lost Children Archive, but this chapter will continue to read resonantly within the novel in order to explore the role of sound and the importance of listening within borderlands literatures. Whereas Luiselli’s novel emphasizes characters listening to stories, McCarthy narrates characters listening to and learning from soundscapes. Readers can likewise engage with literature by 133 listening not just to the text but through its contexts. Specifically in McCarthy’s Border Trilogy series, listening is sense-making and a way to navigate changing environments. All the Pretty Horses, the first book in the series, opens with the protagonist John Grady Cole coming in and out of his mother’s house, noticing the distant sounds outdoors and how “inside the house there was no sound save the ticking of the mantel clock in the front room” (3). The contrast between the dull quiet inside, aside from the rhythmic assurance of the passing of time, and the exciting sounds outside epitomize sixteen-year-old John Grady’s desire for a cowboy’s way of life. After his grandfather’s death and the selling of his Texas ranch, John Grady wants nothing more than to run away and explore the world on horseback. He chases this desire by taking off with his friend Rawlins and heading south from Texas, across the Rio Grande, and into Mexico. Along their journey, John Grady and Rawlins are always listening to and learning from their environment: “In the distance they heard a door slam. A voice called. A coyote that had been yammering somewhere in the hills to the south stopped. Then it began again” (26). The aspiring cowboys are able to hear multiple distant sounds simultaneously to anticipate what is beyond their immediate surroundings, and they become familiar with the sounds of their journey. Consequently, when they hear something new and unfamiliar, it is striking: “That night they heard what they’d none heard before, three long howls to the southwest and all afterwards a silence” (59–60). Not only are the howls troubling but so too is the silence that follows, and the consequent inability to locate the threat spatially via sound incites fear. Literature can uniquely capture sounds and silences alongside characters’ reactions to them through the same expressive language. Whereas audio-visual media like film might capture the complexity of sense-making by using music alongside dialogue, paired with body language and facial expressions, shaped by camera angles 134 and lighting, in literature, all writers have are words. Yet, just as a picture is worth a thousand words, words can also create endless resonances in themselves for careful and critical readers to hear. The emerging field of Literary Sound Studies has started to articulate how to listen in and to literature. For Snaith in Sound and Literature, “literary texts can serve as sonic archives” (5). In other words, by recording what characters hear, literature is a repository of sounds that have not been otherwise recorded via aural media; McCarthy’s work itself, therefore, is a kind of written soundmap of the American Southwest and its border with Mexico, of the state of Coahuila within Mexico, and thus of this entire contiguous space as a complex borderlands, specifically at a time that is almost exactly one century after the US-Mexico War brought Texas into the United States. In Hearing Things: The Work of Sound in Literature, Angela Leighton speaks further to the importance of sound not just as a mode of documentation but as “a passenger through time” because “to think about hearing is therefore to have to think without fixities and boundaries, in the flux of time that also runs through our very sentences for thinking” (5). It could be argued, however, that in the novel as a sonic archive, the representation of silence, such as that following the “three long howls” narrated above, could also be a meaningfully equal way of understanding place and time. In fact, a recent study on “The Perception of Silence” published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science took an empirical approach to the theoretical question of whether silence is perceived as an absence or a presence, and it concluded that silence is heard as sound. In other words, “silences elicited temporal distortions perfectly analogous to their sound-based counterparts” (1). Musicologists are addressing similar inquiries in music performance and reception, including Johannes Voit’s 2020 essay “Towards an Ontology of Silence in Music,” which analyzes John Cage’s music and theory to discuss the 135 significance of rests as time-objects with syntactic functions. Not all literary scholars, however, have considered the implications of what happens when silence is represented in literature, particularly in transnational literature. Further work is necessary in Literary Sound Studies to discuss how silence is also uniquely recorded and transmitted via literature. In McCarthy’s borderlands-focused work, silence does seem just as meaningful as sounds to navigate space and time, but it serves a different purpose—whereas sound creates connection, silence often signals distance and uncertainty. Blood Meridian exists in a separate world of characters from the Border Trilogy, instead following a fictional Tennessee teenager, referred to as “the kid,” journeying with a band of scalp hunters massacring Indigenous peoples in the borderlands. There are often “strange silence[s]” among the men when they do not know what to say (11). Silence is also represented in descriptions of the natural setting: The moon rose full over the canyon and there was stark silence in the little valley. It may be it was their own shadows kept the coyotes from abroad for there was no sound of them or wind or bird in that place but only the light rill of water running over the sand in the dark below their fires. (139–140) Just as John Grady and Rawlins could not place the threatening howl without a sonic context, silence here emphasizes the uncertainty of traversing unknown spaces. Furthermore, once the kid has abandoned the band and is out on his own, the silences of the natural world mirror his interpersonal disconnect. One night as he bivouacs in a small valley, “the wind was all but silent for there was nothing of resonance among those rocks” (314). The use of “resonance” here underscores not only the lack of connection but the lack of potential for connection. 136 There must be other material present in order for resonance to occur, and there must be purposeful listening in order for resonances to be heard. Leighton suggests that “learning to listen is what literature might teach, by a kind of shared activity between author and reader, pages and ear, sound and soundings, in a mutual or interactive work of apprehension” (28). The result of these interactions are resonances, or connections. The ways in which McCarthy’s characters navigate their world through sound and silence resonate with Luiselli’s narration of how the children and parents learn about themselves, each other, and their surroundings through listening. Making those connections empowers translation between modalities. Walter Benjamin’s seminal essay, “The Task of the Translator,” offers one perspective on how theories of translation broadly and literary translation specifically relate to how sound translates into sentiment through literature. Whereas in Chapter 2, transcriptions of Benjamin’s radio plays, intended for audiences to hear, were analyzed to develop the vocabulary of archival practices necessary for a methodology of resonance, his ideas about literary translations, intended for audiences to read, likewise evidence attention to sound. By succinctly stating that “the task of the translator consists in finding the particular intention toward the target language which produces in that language the echo of the original,” Benjamin presents translation as an inherently sonic phenomenon (258). The translation should not be a reproduction of the original but rather an “echo,” perhaps fainter in volume but still ringing with the same sentiments. Benjamin goes on to explain that hearing these echoes is possible because “both the original and the translation [are] recognizable as fragments of a greater language” (260). This idea of a “greater language” speaks to the ways in which resonances are heard in the novel as a sonic archive. Fragments of intertextual references, or echoes of one text heard 137 in another, are heard together simultaneously with the primary narrative, resonating together with a greater language of human emotions and experiences underlying all stories. In the endless palimpsest of modernity, continually layering the past upon itself through the stories that cultures tell and retell about themselves, translation through different languages and media empowers the fragments to be heard as resonances with each other. The mother engages in multiple kinds of translation that take place in this section of Lost Children Archive. In the previously cited scene, as the family listens to the radio interview, the mother translates the interviewee’s Spanish into English for her family (73). The mother also speaks to translation not just of language for communication but in literature, critiquing the “mistranslation of the first line of Pedro Páramo” as the family selects an audiobook. She thinks that the opening line, “Vine a Comala porque me dijeron que acá vivía mi padre, un tal Pedro Páramo,” should have been expressed not as “I came to Comala because I had been told that my father, a man named Pedro Páramo, lived there” but as “because they told me” (76); although vague, she seeks the subject “they” giving agency to the message compelling the protagonist’s actions, which brings up issues of literary translation between languages. Her reflections remind us that literary translation, as it is represented here and as it is enacted in her, Bolaño’s, and McCarthy’s work, is not just a matter of vocabulary and word-by-word correlations but involves nuances of temporality and cultural context. Translation also involves challenges of organization and anticipation. The mother in Lost Children Archive was also tasked with translating testimony as an interpreter in Immigration Court, a role that Luiselli represents in fiction based on her own lived experiences. In this setting, the interpreter is working between languages—from Spanish to English—and is also translating the 138 narratives shared specifically by children into the lexicon of adults in a court of law. This position brings unique challenges, though, as the translator must rearrange and reinterpret the migrants’ stories, often shared in fragments, for a legal audience: “I trusted that I would eventually come to understand how to arrange all the pieces of what I was recording and tell a meaningful story” (78). A politician character in 2666 does not hold the same kind of trust in the process and instead feels frustration as she tries to make sense of the onslaught of stories about women being victimized in Santa Teresa: As I learned about other cases, however, as I heard other voices, my rage began to assume what you might call mass stature, my rage became collective or the expression of something collective, my rage, when it allowed itself to show, saw itself as the instrument of vengeance of thousands of victims. Honestly, I think I was losing my mind. Those voices I heard (voices, never faces or shapes) came from the desert. (626) It is not just the number of stories she hears but the intensity of the inhumanity they share in common that affects her. Rather than meaningful resonances, where one “wavelength” from one story overlaps with one “wavelength” from another to create a new understanding between the two stories, instead she only hears a cacophony of entirely overlapping atrocities reverberating in her head. She cannot find a way to organize and contextualize the stories in a way that could be better understood and acted upon by others. Translation, not just between languages but more broadly across modalities, also presents challenges of untranslatability. For example, as the mother describes how Martha Graham translated Aaron Copland’s orchestrated music into danced choreography, she acknowledges how “her phrases are so impeccably danced that they seem to spell out a clear meaning, even if when you try to translate 139 them back into words, that meaning immediately fades away again—as usually happens when anyone tries to explain dance or music” (81). Graham mediates the resonances she feels with the music through her body, creating a visual translation of the work, but, as the narrator describes, translating those movements back into language will never share the same sentiment. A similar phenomenon of untranslatability happens in McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses; imprisoned in a Mexican jail, John Grady dreams of moving freely among horses: “they moved all of them in a resonance that was like a music among them and they were none of them afraid neither horse nor colt nor mare and they ran in that resonance which is the world itself and which cannot be spoken but only praised” (162). The freedom he craves demonstrates another instance of irony as McCarthy plays upon a stereotyping trope of Americans ending up in jail when they cross into the Mexican border, but this scene might also be replaying stereotyping tropes of Mexico as a risky and irrational place. In either case, the use of the abstract term “resonance” is significant. To name the connection between the man and the horses concretely and specifically is impossible. Any attempts would only ever be an “echo of the original,” as Benjamin describes. Resonances are ephemeral but powerful. Although there is no perfect language or other media for translating connections, echoes still function as fragments that let us listen across geographies and learn across histories. Where McCarthy demonstrates the power of listening deeply within a context, Bolaño demonstrates the power of listening broadly across contexts. In composing her own borderlands narrative, Luiselli cites these two transnational American writers to underscore the possibility of reading alongside close and critical listening to make sense of these “vague and undetermined place[s]”. As her mother character strives to tell stories in response to her ethical, 140 pragmatic, realistic concerns, alongside her commitment to avoiding cultural appropriation, these texts teach her how to leave space for multiplicity. Readers of Lost Children Archive, in turn, engage with the novel openly and with the understanding that while a single text will never be able to tell a fully inclusive narrative, resonant reading lets multiple stories be heard beneath and beyond the narrative voice. Luiselli’s references to other texts, both within the character’s experiences and through their interstitial bibliographies, demonstrates the efficacy of resonance as a methodology for reading intentionally and critically through listening practices, which is especially important for interpreting transnational literature that crosses geopolitical borders. This methodology contributes to what Mitchell identifies as the work of Latin American Literary Sound Studies to “undermine colonial logic and affect structures of power” by attuning towards sonic epistemologies. Attention to sound in the borderlands, and listening to these sounds through literature, challenges the meaning of borders by emphasizing the fluidity of borderlands. 141 V. RESONANCE AND TRANSHISTORICITY: UNDERSTANDING NARRATIVES OF DISPLACEMENT AND MIGRATION Box IV (148–149) ● Four Notebooks (73/4” x 5”) ○ “On Mapping” ○ “On History” ○ “On Reenactment” ○ “On Erasing” ● Eight Books ○ The North American Indian, Edward S. Curtis ○ From Cochise to Geronimo: The Chiricahua Apaches, 1874–1866, Edwin R. Sweeney ○ Lt. Charles Gatewood & His Apache Wars Memoir, Charles Gatewood (Louis Kraft, ed.) ○ Geronimo: His Own Story. The Autobiography of a Great Patriot Warrior, Geronimo and S. M. Barrett ○ Mangas Coloradas: Chief of the Chiricahua Apaches, Edwin R. Sweeney ○ A Clash of Cultures, Robert M. Utley ○ The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze–Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World, David W. Anthony ○ Cochise, Chiricahua Apache Chief, Edwin R. Sweeney ● One Brochure ○ “Desert Adaptations (The Sonoran Desert Species),” National Park Service ● Four Maps ○ New Mexico ○ Arizona ○ Sonora ○ Chihuahua ● One Tape ○ Hands in Our Names, Karima Walker ● One Compact Disc ○ Echo Canyon, James Newton ● Folder (5 Stereographs / Copies) ○ Postcard (!) of five men, ankles chained, H. D. Corbett Stationery Co. ○ Two young men, chained ○ San Carlos Reservation, seven people outside adobe house ○ Geronimo holding rifle ○ Geronimo and fellow prisoners on their way to Florida by train, September 10, 1886 142 In addition to expanding a theory of resonance from personal to familial then national to transnational stories, the concept can also be extended across time periods. Coined in the curatorial practices of art historians, the term transhistoricity refers to the coexistence of the new and the old within a shared exhibit. Whereas museums conventionally categorize and separate works by their time period and artistic movement, transhistorical approaches group pieces thematically or stylistically, offering new perspectives on similarities and differences across various moments in history. For example, “The Shape of Time” exhibition on display at Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna in 2018 displayed the work of diverse modern artists next to the work of the Old Masters—namely, white male European realist painters of the Renaissance era. Kerry James Marshall hung next to Tintoretto, Peter Doig next to Bruegal, Franz West next to Caravaggio, and Felix Gonzalex-Torres next to Tullio Lombardo. The collection was intended as “a series of encounters between old and new to suggest continuities throughout the history of art” (Sharp and Haag). Rather than guiding visitors through a chronological sequence, then, the exhibit empowered viewers to make their own interpretations and find their own connections between pieces. This curatorial philosophy lends itself to a methodology of resonance as it connects not only places but also time periods represented in a literary text. Studying literature through resonance means recognizing how there are always stories vibrating beneath the primary narrative of a text that can be heard through careful and critical close listening. In Lost Children Archive, there is the surface-level story of a family traveling across the United States, but resonating beneath are many other voices Luiselli explicitly acknowledges via her multiple modes of intertextuality, as this dissertation has already explored. Studying the relationship between resonance and transhistoricity in literature, then, lets us recognize how the multiple stories 143 vibrating beneath the primary narrative and amplifying its themes can represent different moments in time. Like the curators of “The Shape of Time” exhibit, Luiselli brings together contemporary issues and historical events through her narration of characters’ actions, thoughts, and conversations. However, whereas the visual art in a museum is understood spatially, the stories shared in a book are received temporally—these stories do not appear side-by-side but rather are layered upon each other in the sequencing of narrative development. J. Martin Daughtry refers to this phenomenon as the “acoustic palimpsest” through which we can listen to the layers of history. Also borrowing the concept from archival and curatorial practices, Daughtry first reviews the history of the palimpsest as a material practice for studying the layers of a text on vellum or other types of parchment, partially erased then written and rewritten over (4). As natural oxidation occurred and scholars were encouraged to develop new chemical techniques for uncovering the “lost” layers of a text, the material practice turned into “a rich, interdisciplinary metaphor for the fundamentally interconnected, multiply situated, discursive nature of human experience” (5). In relation to acoustic practices specifically, then, Daughtry proposes the neologism “to foreground the multiple acts of erasure, effacement, occupation, displacement, collaboration, and reinscription that are embedded in music composition, performance, and recording, as well as in acoustic experience more broadly” (9). His 2013 essay “Acoustic Palimpsests and the Politics of Listening” invites the possibility of expanding this concept to literature as an acoustic experience. Through reading for resonance, we can hear multiple layers of history sounding simultaneously, amplifying important thematic and stylistic similarities in literature. 144 One of the texts in the father’s final bibliographic box, however, would also argue that words themselves—the building blocks of literature—carry transhistorical resonances. David W. Anthony’s The Horse, The Wheel, and Language is a far-reaching and widely encompassing study of how the domestication of horses and the use of the wheel spread language and shaped civilization. He studies the lifetime and evolution of Proto-Indo-European language until its death, which he dates as 2500 BCE, alongside emerging technologies and migrating cultures (58). Anthony claims that “our language contains a great many fossils that are remnants of surprisingly ancient speakers,” which can help to teach us about “the preliterate past” before there were written accounts of history (5). Just as a single note played on the piano contains within it overtones vibrating below our threshold of conscious hearing, a single word holds a history of cultural developments that makes its meaning possible. Anthony’s socio-linguistic study seems to contrast the rest of the texts in Box IV, which are all in some way related to Native American history, yet it holds significant resonances with the father’s research and storytelling. On one level, Anthony’s study seems to feed into the father’s obsession with horse culture. For example, in the earlier description of Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring, he emphasized the role of cowboys, the “bad guys” who went west on their horses, “marrying, reproducing, conquering new land, and then driving Indians out of that land” (80). His book selection at the shop in North Carolina was also an unnamed “book on the history of horses,” which, in the context of the bibliographic boxes, could be referring to Anthony’s text or perhaps to McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses. In either case, the father demonstrates keen attention to the cultural significance and historical role of horses in American history. As the mother’s narrative voice reflects upon, one of the tales he tells the son and daughter repeatedly is the story of the Apache leader Geronimo’s death: 145 In 1909, Geronimo fell off his horse and died. Of all the things my husband tells the children about him, this fact is the one that both torments and fascinates the children most. Especially the girl. Ever since she heard the story, she brings it back up—now and then, unexpectedly and unprompted, as if it were a casual conversation starter. So, Geronimo fell off his horse and died, right? Or: You know how Geronimo died? He fell off his horse! Or: So Geronimo never died, but one day, he died, because he fell off his horse. (117) Whereas the actual cause of Geronimo’s death was the pneumonia he contracted after falling off a horse while out riding alone and waiting to be found, this moment underscores that who tells a story and who receives it impacts how history is recorded and remembered. These considerations are important to keep in mind when studying the role of Box IV within the larger context of the novel, including its transnational concerns and its transhistorical resonances. The history texts in Box IV are each problematic and limited, and the ways in which the father engages with them romanticizes and simplifies a more complex history of Native American displacement. The first book listed, The North American Indian by Edward S. Curtis, exemplifies the problems of attempting to record Native American culture for a non-Native audience, by a non-Native documentarian. Curtis’s goal was to “systematically, both in words and in pictures” record the language, social and political organization, living conditions, food acquisition and preparation, geographical environments, games, music, dance, clothes, weights and measures, and rituals and 146 traditions of all living Native American cultures from 1895 to 1928 (13). Hans Christian Adam, the author of the book’s “Introduction,” characterizes Curtis’s photography as having “an impressionistic, picturesque atmosphere that could be interpreted universally, in contrast to documentary photography which is bound to time and place” (21). However, as contemporary Native American studies scholar Gerald Vizenor points out in his essay “Socioacupuncture,” Curtis’s own interpretations were far too loose and misleading. Vizenor details how “Curtis retouched tribal images; he, or his darkroom assistants, removed hats, labels, suspenders, parasols, from photographic prints” in order to de-modernize how Native American culture would be perceived by his non-Native audience (412). Whereas Adam celebrates the timelessness of Curtis’s work, Curtis literally removed the image of an alarm clock between two tribal men in one of his shots. Vizenor concludes that the “photographs of tribal people, therefore, are not connections to the traditional past; these images are discontinuous artifacts in a colonial road show” (413). The father seems to buy into the falsified versions of Native American history, however, and shares these stories with his children as their road trip continues and reaches closer to the Chiricahua Apache land. The father’s stories idolize the three leaders featured in the trilogy of scholarship by Edwin R. Sweeney held in Box IV: Cochise (1922), Mangas Coloradas (1998), and From Geronimo to Cochise (2010). Through a study of primary source documents regarding the individual leaders and their involvement in the larger history of U.S. occupation and relocation, Sweeney summarizes the story of the Apaches as “a heartbreaking story of a people who in about ten years lost nearly everything they valued” (4). This reductive claim, however, ignores a much longer history of Apache contact with Europeans and Euro-Americans, focusing only on the hostilities that followed from the Bascom Affair 147 in 1861. Sweeney’s own background as an accountant-turned-hobbyist-historian relates to the father’s limited knowledge of and experience with historiography. Trained as a journalist, the father seems captivated by action-packed, story-driven narratives. As the family drives to Fort Sill, where Geronimo is buried, the father starts trembling: “He’s not sure if it’s the Dunkin’ Donuts coffee or pure excitement” (134). He seems thrilled by the legacy of Geronimo as a fighter but unaffected by the grave injustices against which Geronimo fought. Some of this injustice is described in another text in Box IV, Geronimo, His Own Story, As Told to S.M. Barrett, but the motives behind this record are important to question as well. This book shares a transcription and translation of Geronimo’s life story, which he dedicates to President Theodore Roosevelt: “Because he has given me permission to tell my story; because he has read that story and knows I try to speak the truth; because I believe that he is fair-minded and will cause my people to receive justice in the future; and because he is a chief of great people” (vi). The translator S.M. Barrett initially served as an interpreter for Geronimo and claims that their relationship developed through their shared aversion for Mexicans (39). When Barrett asked to publish some of the stories Geronimo had told him, the leader initially objected, “saying, however, that if I would pay him, and if the officers in charge did not object, he would tell me the whole story of his life” (40). Permissions were denied by the lieutenant in charge of the camp, so instead Barrett reached out directly to President Roosevelt and received the approval noted in the Dedicatory. Editor Frederick Turner calls the resulting book an “authentic record of the private life of the Apache Indians” (1). However, remembering that Geronimo’s initial motive for sharing his stories was to receive compensation calls into question whether he really believed that sharing his story would make change toward justice; it is unclear in 148 Turner’s explanation whether Geronimo sought payment for personal profit or to share with others imprisoned at Fort Sill, but this context reminds us that there were multiple factors impacting the production and reception of Geronimo’s stories. This authenticity is further problematized by issues of translation and mediation. For example, Geronimo refused to have a stenographer present and instead trusted that Barrett would remember everything he said in Apache, then translate it perfectly into English—Barrett openly admits his own limitations and inconsistencies. Furthermore, Barrett also adds occasional commentary that complicates Geronimo’s story as an “authentic record.” In his Introduction, Barrett points to specific moments in the text where Geronimo criticizes U.S. officials’ behaviors, but then Barrett immediately excuses their actions, emphasizing that Geronimo’s views do not reflect those of the President or the Department of War sponsoring the book. Occasional footnotes further undermine Geronimo’s own authority over his own story. For example, upon concluding Geronimo’s recollection of a fight against Mexican troops, Barrett includes a footnote that reads: It is impossible to get Geronimo to understand that these troops served the general government instead of any particular town. He still thinks each town independent and each city a separate tribe. He cannot understand the relation of cities to the general government. (104) Rather than exploring the cultural nuances between different ways of perceiving municipal and federal relations, Barrett disregards Geronimo’s interpretation and infantilizes his worldview. The father character in Lost Children Archive does something similar as he translates these historical texts from Box IV into a storytelling language for his children. He explains how when the 149 Apache soldiers looted, “They’d ride onto ranches and steal cows, grain, whiskey, and children. Especially whiskey and children” (135). The boy and the girl ask for clarification about what they would do with the children and why, according to their father, the children would not run away but instead accept their new lives with the tribe: Because children’s lives then weren’t the same as they are today. Children worked all day on the farm, they were always hungry, they had no time to play. With the Apaches, life was hard, too, but it was also more exciting. They rode horses, they hunted, they participated in ceremonies. They were trained to become warriors. On the farm with their parents, all they did was work in the field and with the animals, all day, every day the same thing. Even when they were sick. (135) Characterizing Apache life as “more exciting” than the repetitiveness of farm labor underscores how the father glorifies and romanticizes Native American culture without full contextualization. There also seems to be a gender dynamic in how the children respond. At one point, the father checks to make sure they are still listening; the daughter admits, “I just want to say that I’m getting bored of your Apache stories, but no offense,” while the son encouragingly tells him, “I want to hear more” (134). The son seems swayed by the adventure tales the father translates from his reading of these books into a storytelling language his children can understand, while the daughter becomes less and less entertained or interested. At one point, she asks about the role of cowgirls, but the father’s stories remain centered on male historical figures, filtered through male historian perspectives. As another example, Lt. Charles Gatewood & His Apache Wars Memoir demonstrates additional layers of simplification and mediation. Like Barrett, Lt. Charles Gatewood was involved 150 with Geronimo and the Chiricahua Apaches, and finding his own story to be unique and captivating, he began drafting a memoir. In a letter to his wife, he explains: I must begin work on a memoir. My life has been more full of incident & adventure than that of any other l[ieutenan]t in the Army. I realize that more every day, ... scenes and incidents … come back to my memory, ... & soon I must begin to jot them down in a book, ...when we are all together again. (xxxiv) However, Gatewood passed away before he was able to finish the memoir, so instead, historian Louis Kraft reassembled and contextualized Gatewood’s drafts. Gatewood had no formal training in ethnography and was simply writing through his own experience, so Kraft had to make decisions about how to order and edit the drafts and when, like Barrett, to insert his own contextualizing notes. Published in 2009, this book demonstrates a distancing through both time and multiple layers of mediation—Kraft is working from primary source material, but he is interpreting Gatewood’s interpretation of a culture in which he was not involved. The final book in Box IV, then, exemplifies perhaps the most removed perspective in the collection; A Clash of Cultures presents a secondary account not of people but of place. Published by the National Parks Service in 1977, Robert M. Utley’s book traces how boundaries changed through encounters between Chiricahua Apaches, Mexicans, and European-Americans from the sixteenth century through the twentieth century. Whereas other writers cited in this box include some acknowledgement of the method through which the stories were acquired, Utley shares no citations and uses an authoritative, depersonalized tone. Perhaps part of the father’s goal, then, is to reanimate this history through sound. As they approach Fort Sill, the mother realizes how his intention for an 151 “inventory of echoes” is not to capture presences but rather absences: “When a bird sings or wind blows through the branches of cedars in the cemetery where Geronimo was buried, that bird and those branches illuminate an area of a map, a soundscape, in which Geronimo once was” (141). The father, therefore, is trying to hear resonances with the stories he reads from the past through his present experience across the landscape. The problem, of course, is that the set of texts the father carries with him is not inclusive of all the potential stories related to the people and the place he could be learning from and sharing with his children. Most significantly, there are no accounts representing an Apache perspective nor any Native historians or experts in contemporary Native American scholarship. One of the potential limitations of a methodology of resonance for studying literature is taking the intertexts referenced within a work as the only possible material for connections. With the exception of the contemporary scholarship from sound studies, literary theory, and literacy pedagogy surrounding my analysis, this dissertation has worked exclusively from the father’s four bibliographies. However, as my reading of the texts in Box IV has demonstrated, reading for resonance requires critically engaging the material by asking whose stories are being heard, whose are being silenced, and whose are not present at all. For example, the inclusion of this set of history texts and the exclusion of any others within Lost Children Archive seems to be an intentional commentary on how not to engage in limited approaches to history. The fact that these books are accompanied by notebooks titled “On Mapping,” “On History,” “On Reenactment,” and “On Erasing” suggests how Luiselli intends for her readers to consider the perspectives being romanticized and recorded at the expense of others being covered up or erased in the acoustic palimpsest. While Luiselli’s characters do not necessarily make this critique within the world of the narrative, Luiselli herself articulates these concerns in her other work. 152 Therefore, this final methodological variation on the theme of resonance brings in work from beyond this novel to further underscore how she is creating transhistorical resonances across her larger oeuvre grappling with the past of imperialism and the present of border crossing. Luiselli’s 2015 short story “Shakespeare, New Mexico,” features a town referenced only in passing during the trip narrated in Lost Children Archive and resonates with many of the same dynamics between a family and their heritage playing out upon a larger cultural past. The story opens with children asking similar questions to those posed at the beginning of the novel: “When will we get there?” and “How much longer?” However, in this re-fictionalization of the family road trip, instead of a son and daughter, the children are both boys, and instead of sound artists, the parents are both dancers. Similar to the father character in the novel, the father in the short story passes time by telling stories, but the mother claims that she does not know how to tell stories, seemingly shyer and more soft-spoken than the mother in Lost Children Archive. Furthermore, she is nervous about their reason for traveling from the Midwest to the Southwest: to chase a performance opportunity with a reenactment company in New Mexico. She remembers how her only acting experience as a young girl was auditioning for the role of Lady Macbeth but then being cast as a tree instead. Reflecting on her fear of acting in comparison to the comforts of dancing, she claims, “[I] had never opened my mouth on stage, except to brighten up the tapping of my heels with a polite smile.” Nonetheless, the expectations for their new roles in Shakespeare, New Mexico, are unconventional and compel the characters to fully embody their new roles. 153 In contrast to other better established reenactment sites in the Southwest, Shakespeare does not have set performance times or spaces but instead keeps its actors continuously reliving the past. The mother explains further: In practice, that meant the actors in Shakespeare lived right there on-site, wore period costumes every day, and were permanently in character, so that when any tourists turned up in the town, they would have the impression that they were voyeurs in a real place, and not the audience in some artificial, ephemeral tourist trap. Although she and her husband initially auditioned for the well-known characters of Billy the Kid, Wyatt Earp, Big Nose Kate, or Doc Holliday, they and their sons were cast instead as Juan, Juana, Teresio, and Victor Baca, “considering we were Mexicans,” and the husband also doubles as the unnamed “Mexican Outlaw, Mexican Smuggler, and Mexican Bandit.” From these positions, the family waits for key scenes to develop spontaneously, prompted by other actors’ words and actions. The mother embraces her new lifestyle and learns to love her persona as the minor character Juana. However, one particularly involved scene reenacts the occasional visit of Billy the Kid busting into a cabin and asking for Doc Holliday, then, furious that he isn’t there, tying up Juan Baca, taking her into the hotel, and sexually assaulting her: “The rape, of course, wouldn’t happen, and our scene together ended when he pushed me, or sometimes dragged me by the hair, into what served as one of our prop rooms in the hotel.” Through this setting and these themes, the story seems to comment on what it means for history to repeat itself by showing the past being literally embodied in the present. Although this embodiment has its limits beyond the eyes of any visitors to Shakespeare, Luiselli shows how the perpetuation of ethnic and gender violence is not just actors reenacting history. 154 The family earns a combined salary of $20,000 and are only ever in minor roles, where they are victimized or otherwise made to support the hero-narratives of the cast’s notorious stars coming into town and asserting their power. However, the conclusion of Luiselli’s short story challenges yet perpetuates this cycle of violence. The mother becomes more interested in the actor who plays Billy the Kid and begins “to await his irruption into our cabin with nervous anticipation.” She concocts a plan to extend their time together by initiating a resequencing of scenes “long enough for us to consummate our—until-then unfinished—act together. It was a scheme more complicated than complex, but it was possible.” Her plan succeeds in getting her alone in the room with the actor as the scenes unfold outside the hotel to an unusually large crowd, but when she breaks from her character and attempts to seduce him, the actor only responds in Billy the Kid quotes. Gunshots signal their cue to return outside, but she suddenly knocks him out and rapes him. She drags him back into the lobby naked, recites the Lady Macbeth monologue to the gathered audience, then publicly shoots Billy the Kid with his pistol. The narration does not specify whether the gun is real or a prop, but the audience bursts into applause in response to the killing of the character and, potentially, the actor. This unsettling ending blurs the lines between characters and reality through the guise of historical reenactment. Luiselli represents how echoes from the past can resonate in the present, but while certain echoes are amplified and celebrated—such as the heroic acts of men entering towns to establish law and order—there are underlying stories of gendered and racialized violence that continue resonating beneath; these resonances, Luiselli’s story argues, need to be recognized, listened to, and learned from in order to end the perpetuation of unjust violence. 155 While the ending of the short story only further enacts violence and leaves the reader to deal with the moral and emotional implications of the mother’s choices, Luiselli addresses this issue of disrupting cycles of injustice specifically in her nonfiction essay in The New Yorker, titled “Staging the Frontier: The Wild West Meets the Southern Border.” Published in 2019, the same year as Lost Children Archive, the essay opens with details from the actual trip she took with her family that connect with their fictional counterparts as she, her husband, their daughter, and her two stepsons visited Shakespeare, New Mexico, as well as Tombstone, Arizona, another reenactment site. They visit these towns in search of family-friendly entertainment to break up the monotony of their research trip to the Southwest. Upon finding out that Shakespeare is no longer in operation but instead serves only as a training space, they continue to Tombstone: It was like walking onto the set of an old Western. The streets were lined with haunted brothels and restored saloons, little museums and souvenir shops. On corners, frugal cowboys smoked cigarettes down to the butt, and announced the next gunfight in loud, hoarse voices. Horse-drawn stagecoaches passed by, their mostly senior passengers gazing abstractly out the window toward an invisible but vivid past. These initial observations clearly inform her imagination in the short story of what Shakespeare could have been, but Luiselli’s actual encounter with two Doc Hollidays, smoking and conversing together, leads her to reflect on how the town “existed not only in a loop of embodied repetitions of odd historical moments but also in a kind of cut-and-paste of the same people.” She questions, however, why certain people and their stories are celebrated while others are ignored and forgotten. 156 Upon returning to Tombstone again without her family to pursue further research, Luiselli raises these questions of representation and historical memory specifically in oral interviews with guides and actors from the site and citizens in the surrounding area. She first asks a woman selling t-shirts why there are no women in the reenactments: “She tells me that women do appear, but only on special weekends, and, and explains that, in the Old West, ‘women were either housewives or prostitutes. Not visible.’” This citizen’s perception of women is clearly limited and not inclusive to the multiple public roles Native American women played in the agriculture, fur trading, and mining industries as outlined by Lucy Eldersveld Murphy in her 2000 book A Gathering of Rivers. Luiselli also challenges the invisibility of non-white ethnicities within these scenes and asks a retired town historian why there are no Mexican or Native American characters in the reenactments as either protagonists or antagonists: He stumbles a little, searching for the right words: “Mexicans were an accepted part of the problem here. They were part of the population here. Part of the civilization we had here.” “Yes, but you know how we have Doc Holliday, Wyatt Earp, the Clantons—are there any reënactments in town where there is a Mexican character?” “Well, we had Mexican characters in our show.” “Like who?” “Hard to say. You have to take them as a whole. They were in our group.” “Can you remember any Mexican characters?” “Well, there was a Mexican here in town. He cooked the best beef in the world.” 157 Interestingly, Luiselli lets the conversation focus only on Mexican characters and does not bring it back to her original question about Native American representation. This absence seems due at least in part to the ways her interviewees, including the t-shirt seller and the retired town historian, keep bringing the conversation back to their immediate concerns about the U.S.-Mexico border. For example, she continues noticing this same sense of erasure and dehumanization of Latin American migrants in the ways they discuss non-white individuals in the world beyond the reenactments. On a tour of the area, a guide mentions spotting footprints as evidence of coyotes and mules passing through the area; Luiselli, of course, knows he is using these animalistic terms in a demeaning way to refer to those guiding migrants and those carrying drugs across the border, but she is struck by his refusal to acknowledge their humanity when she asks, “But they could just be people migrating, right?” The identities of Latin American migrants are reduced only to perceived threats, equal to rattlesnakes and other wild species in the area, but the vigilante response to immigration is what especially strikes Luiselli and echoes with the resonances beneath Lost Children Archive. The citizens she speaks to feel responsible for protecting the land and their communities against the dangers they think that Latin American migrants bring as invaders, and yet they seem incapable of recognizing how the land and their communities came to be through a history of invasion and displacement through imperialistic ideals. Luiselli makes this critique yet misses opportunities to fully explore its implications. In her conclusion to the New Yorker essay, Luiselli considers how the citizens of Tombstone are unwittingly involved in a reenactment of hatred; history has taught them entitlement and that they should distrust any perceived threats to their way of life. Luiselli suggests that “just as fictions about the Wild West have spilled over into real spaces like Tombstone, the fiction, 158 repeated endlessly in reenactments, could somehow spill back into reality, be performed back into existence.” She represents this spillage through the rape and murder in “Shakespeare, New Mexico,” and considers how it continues to impact perceptions of Latin American migrants. Nonetheless, Luiselli never ultimately explicitly articulates the history of Native American displacement resonating beneath the stories portrayed and perpetuated in Shakespeare and Tombstone. While this essay and short story bring her closer to the Apache land than the simplified stories shared in Lost Children Archive by the father, she misses opportunities to engage with the history of how invasions of this region, first by Spanish Mexico and then by the United States, gave rise to these towns and displaced the people of the region’s indigenous nations. In other words, Luiselli hears the resonances in Latin American migration but chooses to focus her auditory attention on these present narratives rather than listening to the underlying vibrations of past Native American displacement and present ramifications. In this way, Luiselli’s writing does not tell a complete story. Whether inadvertently or otherwise, her writing falls into the same pitfalls that the mother character in Lost Children Archive fears: the impossibility of any text to ever share a fully inclusive story. However, it nevertheless offers readers techniques through which they can continue listening beyond her work towards more inclusive understandings. These techniques are demonstrated through the rest of the novel’s narration from the children’s point of view as well as the two audio sources in Box IV. Whereas each of the father’s boxes appear within Part I: Family Soundscape, Part II is titled Reenactment, followed by Part III: Apacheria and Part IV: Lost Children Archive. At this point in the novel, the narration breaks from the mother’s first-person voice and is shared instead through the son’s voice, interspersed by the 159 fictional narration from Elegies for Lost Children as well as the contents of the mother’s, son’s, and daughter’s boxes. Although a close analysis of this perspective of the journey is beyond the scope of this dissertation, understanding how the latter half of the novel works in conversation with the first half demonstrates how Lost Children Archive offers new and inclusive ways of listening to stories and engaging with literature to fight against the inequities left behind by imperialism and continuing to resonate through issues of immigration. The son’s narration begins with the technique that Luiselli attributes to Virginia Woolf as the narration shifts through a shared sighting in the sky. Part I ends with the mother looking up at a plane, then Part II begins with the son watching it until it disappears. His narrative voice explains to his sister, “What happened that day is not called a departure or a removal. It’s called deportation. And we documented it” (192). The subheadings Luiselli uses throughout this chapter likewise appear in the same order as the first chapter of the mother’s narration, beginning with “Departure,” then “Family Lexicon,” “Family Plot,” and “Inventory.” The son’s narration does not cover the same moments in time as the mother’s. In the first half of the novel, “Departure” referred to leaving their home in New York City, but in the son’s section, it refers to watching the plane take off from the desert in the Southwest. Through this technique of layering, Luiselli represents how the son is developing his own interpretation of the sights and sounds of their trip through his own unique perspective. Thematically, then, these structural choices show how children reinterpret and reenact the familial, transnational, and transhistorical stories that are shared with them. This danger of reenactment is further underscored when the son and daughter leave their parents in search of Manuela’s daughters, convinced that they know enough about the area and about the migrant children to find them. Their 160 backseat pretend games turn into reality as they venture out into the desert alone and become lost children themselves. Through Parts III and IV, the narration then shifts back and forth between the mother, the son, and Elegies for Lost Children. The morning the son and daughter disappear, the mother notices they are not in their beds but assumes they have gone outside to play: I felt a kind of electric vacuum in my chest, and I should have listened to these early signals. But many mornings I had woken up with a similar feeling, and I interpreted those undercurrents of doubt and unease running through me as just a slight variation on an older, deeper anxiety. (299) The character’s regret for not listening to the “undercurrents of doubt and unease” seems to mimic the way Luiselli’s writing encourages her audience to listen for underlying resonances. The mother wishes that she had honored and trusted her intuition earlier before the children were so far away; similarly, Luiselli’s fiction and nonfiction guide readers to hear and respond to transhistorical resonances—rather than letting history repeat itself, or let individuals reenact histories of violence and injustice. This metaphorical call to listen is further supported by the two material, musical intertexts cited in Box IV. In Echo Canyon (1984), Black American flutist James Newton records himself playing solo against the soundscape of the Echo Amphitheater at Carson National Forest near Abiquiu, New Mexico. Rather than an orchestral concerto where the percussion, winds, and strings would accompany his melody with dictated rhythms and harmonies, this setting brings Newton’s flute into conversation with the soundscape as it develops around him. The sounds of the amphitheater tell their own sonic story of solitude and stillness at night with only crickets and an occasional wind. Audibly 161 emphasizing the space in which the recording takes place is like visualizing the substrate beneath a palimpsest. The musical qualities coming from Newton’s flute, including the tempo of its rhythms, the dynamic contrast between loud and soft, and the rise and fall of melodic lines, then work together to tell a story on the surface of this composition. Each track has its own unique character yet retains the continuance of the soundscape beneath. Furthermore, this intimate yet spacious recording lets Newton’s audience hear not just the timbre of the flute but also his inhale and exhale as breath enters the instrument and exits as music echoing around the natural space. The multilayered listening his album requires represents the kind of transhistorical listening Luiselli compels in her literature as a present voice creates a soundscape against a past landscape. Karima Walker’s 2017 album Hands in Our Names offers another way of thinking about the process of historiography through music composition. Like Newton’s album, her work likewise represents the U.S. Southwest from her home in Tucson, Arizona. As an experimental musician, she mixes drone, folk, psychedelia, field recordings, and tape loops into what the album’s liner notes define as a kind of “half-remembered travelogue” (“Hands in Our Names”). Similar to Newton’s flute melodies developing above and across the natural soundscape, some tracks feature Walker’s singing voice pushing the narrative of the album forward through language, whereas others have no lyrics nor instrumental melodic lines. Instead, these tracks combine recordings of natural soundscapes and technologically-produced sounds to submerge the listener in a sonic environment. Similar to the layering of historical perspectives represented through the other intertexts in Box IV, Walker’s album demonstrates how multiple narrative modes can be equally meaningful in relation to each other and powerful when listened to in conversation together. While Walker’s mixing style emulates something 162 closer to multimodality, Luiselli engages these musical techniques via literature in Lost Children Archive, but structurally and thematically towards transhistoricity. She wants her audience to hear the primary narrative of the family traveling across the United States, but she also lets that story resonate against a wider geography and a deeper history. She makes this layering visible through her multiple modes of intertextuality and the inclusion of multiple narrative voices, as well as the presence of artifacts themselves in the narrative. However, within the context of Box IV, it is also important to note that neither of these albums counter the lack of Native voices and perspectives. Thinking beyond the scope of intertexts cited in Luiselli’s novel as archive, it is important to consider the possibility of listening transhistorically to these Southwest spaces in a way that is inclusive of both Native American and Latin American histories. In addition to the limited voices Luiselli includes within her novel as archive, a limitation of this dissertation is that it has privileged sound over sight and focused primarily on the textual and audio references, rather than the visual artifacts. Part of this limitation is due to the uncertainty and inconsistency of citations; when Luiselli lists “Postcard (!) of five men, ankles chained, H. D. Corbett Stationery Co.” and “Two young men, chained,” there is no further information given to identify where these images could be found so readers can see them, but the reference to “Geronimo and fellow prisoners on their way to Florida by train, September 10, 1886” is reprinted on page 255 as part of the mother’s Box V. Furthermore, the last twenty-two pages of the novel consist entirely of Polaroid pictures held in the son’s Box VII, available for the reader to see and read alongside the written narrative. Further work exploring the son and daughter’s journey and their own documentary practices as reenactments and reinventions of their parents’ work could contribute additional 163 intergenerational layers to the study of this novel. The daughter’s Box VI holds transcriptions of the echoes she hears, such as “Car Echoes: Cow, horse, feather, arrow, ow, ow, us playing / No no no, yes yes yes, us fighting” (342). Comparing how she documents these echoes in words to how the son captures echoes via photography could further develop the methodology, extending its multimodal implications. Nonetheless, the curatorial practice of transhistoricity is just that: curatorial. Focused listening can happen across histories through a careful selection of stories to consider together, and critical curation lets voices that have historically not been amplified be heard in relation to others. With this responsibility of inclusion, though, comes the danger of exclusion. The intertexts referenced in Box IV certainly do not tell a complete story of Native American history, nor do each of the bibliographic boxes spread across Lost Children Archive share the full history of transnational migration narratives through the Americas. While the mother character questions the veracity of the father’s stories about Apaches and Luiselli herself hints at parallels between Native American displacement and Latin American migration, the novel undermines itself at times by not explicitly engaging with these issues in detail. Readers could be left with the false impression that there are no living Chiricahua Apaches, and the narrative relies on assumptions about Native American history broadly in relation to Latin American stories specifically. Part of this imbalance is due to Luiselli’s own identity and advocacy for Hispanics in the United States, but she seems to unwittingly use Native Americans at the service of Latin Americans, perpetuating appropriative narratives. Luiselli’s literary techniques, however, demonstrate the possibility of continuing this work beyond already curated collections of texts. I chose to contain my analysis largely within the archive of Part I and the father’s bibliographic boxes because 164 these intertexts and their resonances in the narrative helped to articulate the possibility of this methodology for listening to transnational and transhistorical narratives. Resonance, as I define and use it in this dissertation, is an attunement—a way of reconceptualizing and rehearsing our literacy practices towards openness and inclusivity. Resonance lets us hold multiple complicated stories together at once across time and place then listen for the new narratives that emerge. 165 VI. CONCLUSION: A PEDAGOGY OF RESONANCE Why do we have to read this? What am I supposed to learn from it? How does any of this matter? While variations on the theme of these questions are nothing new to any teachers of literature, my high school students’ honest inquiries felt especially pressing upon returning to the classroom following periods of remote learning during the coronavirus pandemic. Within our school community, we were grappling with data showing “learning loss” and increased instances of mental health concerns, while beyond our classroom walls, the world witnessed social injustices and political unrest. We were told these times were unprecedented, and yet, I knew it was my responsibility to help my students find connections. Nodding at a student’s earbuds, I asked, “Why are you listening to that? What are you learning from it? How does it matter to you?” Music is often touted as a universal language, and while this claim is easily disputed by evidence of how music is understood differently depending on cultural context, there is truth that music, and the acoustic principles underlying it, creates connections. By bringing a pedagogy of resonance into my classroom, I created opportunities for my students to find connections and feel connected. This dissertation opened with a personal narrative and reflection on how I have always been a listener, inspired by my family story and intrigued by the ways it develops in relation to larger contexts of movement and migration. As an educator, I cultivate this same curiosity and criticality in my students by creating the conditions in which they can explore the complex relationships between their own identity, their peers’ stories, their community’s narratives, and their nation’s history in a globalizing world. Attuning my students to the sonic principle of resonance allowed them to find 166 meaning through multiple stories simultaneously, rather than giving into what Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie cautions as “the dangers of a single story.” The chapter that follows brings the arguments of my dissertation together by demonstrating how students can engage with resonance through archival practices. By both creating their own personal archives and listening into existing collections of primary source material, students can hear meaningful connections across stories. The two projects I share in this chapter were first developed and implemented within the context of a dual-credit Expository Writing course taught at a high school and credited through a local community college in Central Illinois. I had sixty students across three sections of the course, forty-two of whom consented to share writing samples to support my teacher-research. When asked why they registered for this course, some students shared that they were hoping to complete a first-year writing requirement that they could transfer to a four-year university they planned to attend the following year, while others were already enrolled in trades programs and were tackling general education requirements needed to obtain their Associates degree. For many, taking Expository Writing was simply a perceived assumption of honors-level coursework that they would end their senior year with this course, whether that expectation was imposed by their parents, their counselors, their peers, or themselves. Given my students’ various reasons for being in my classroom, I was excited to rethink my approaches through a pedagogy inspired by archival theory and practice that would give all students a meaningful learning experience. As a dual-credit instructor, I had the joy of getting to know most of my students across multiple years of high school while also helping them transition between their secondary and college experiences. However, from this perspective, I started noticing how their writing seemed to be stalling; 167 in their personal writing, they were repeating stories they had already shared in previous courses, and their academic writing was likewise not progressing towards college-level expectations. Through the opportunity of my teaching internship, I redesigned my course curriculum to challenge students for further depth in and ownership of their work. Whereas in the past, I had followed a three-unit model that progressed students from narrative to analytical then argumentative writing, defining each as separate and distinct genres, my redesigned course emphasized the interrelations and overlaps between these modes of writing. Students still learned how to write in narrative, analytical, and argumentative modes, but they learned that these are three potential voices, rather than three separate genres, that they have the agency to utilize in response to different rhetorical tasks, especially as they advance into and beyond college. This redesign developed over the course of two semesters, first by replacing a narrative writing unit with a semester-long project (MeSearch/WeSearch), then by replacing an analytical research paper with a primary source analysis (Artivism Reviewed). In the final iterations of this course design, students’ learning traced the following progression of writing assignments alongside readings from mentor texts: ● Week 1: What is Writing?—an expository paragraph that identifies and develops a metaphor for writing, guided by excerpts from Louise DeSalvo’s Writing as a Way of Healing. This book contextualizes the power of writing within psychological research and prompts students to consider the role writing has or could have in their own lives. ● Weeks 2–4: Literacy Narrative—a reflective essay that explores the roles of reading and writing across students’ lives and towards their future ambitions, guided by Sherman Alexie’s 168 personal essay “Superman and Me,” Kwame Alexander’s podcast interview “How to Get Hooked on Books,” and Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche’s TED Talk “The Dangers of a Single Story.” Each of these texts shares writers’ experiences learning to read and finding their voice as an author. ● Week 5: Quote Explication—a small-group presentation analyzing a short excerpt from Swing by Kwame Alexander. This young adult novel-in-verse provides an opportunity for students to practice close reading techniques and share individual interpretations towards a collaborative analysis. ● Weeks 6–8: Artivism Reviewed—a review-style essay interpreting and evaluating a primary source representing an artist or activist found in the Library of Congress digital archives, guided by Steve Dumcombe and Steve Lambert’s The Art of Activism and John Green’s The Anthropocene Reviewed. These books are described in further depth later in this chapter. ● Weeks 9–10: MeSearch Memoir—a personal essay, podcast, or video sharing a story about the person students have been, are in the present, and want to become in the future, inspired by Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive. The weekly writing assignments leading into this project will be described in further depth later in this chapter. ● Weeks 11–12: Copyright Case Study—a small-group presentation studying a contemporary copyright case and presenting their argument to a jury of peers, working from Larry Lessig’s TED Talk “Laws That Choke Creativity.” This activity helps students review argumentative elements and techniques while learning about copyright law and remix culture. 169 ● Weeks 13–16: Argumentative Remix—a multi-step project that includes an annotated bibliography, graphic organizer, written component, audio component, and visual component as students move through multiple stages of remix to develop and present an argument. ● Week 17: WeSearch Community Exhibition—a culminating exhibition of students’ personal and academic writing throughout the semester. The multiple components of this project will be described in further depth later in this chapter. The combination of individual and collaborative activities helped students explore their identities as writers within a community, as evidenced by Reflection Memos submitted alongside each writing assignment. In these letters to me, students describe their process, request specific feedback, and reflect on what they have learned, providing me with opportunities to witness how students’ perceptions and practices of writing changed throughout the semester. The intentional sequencing of assignments and readings cultivated ongoing conversations across the semester, through which meaningful resonances could be heard. Like Luiselli’s multiple modes of intertextuality integrating actual literary references into her characters’ fictional world, bringing mentor texts into the course design created opportunities for students to hear connections within and beyond our classroom. The power of these resonances is best demonstrated through the MeSearch/WeSearch and Artivism Reviewed projects. Just as resonance works as a methodology for studying intertextuality, transmodality, transnationality, and transhistoricity in literature, so too does it work as a pedagogy for teaching reading and writing in new, inclusive ways. Like understanding the novel as a sonic archive, the classroom can also be perceived as an archive of voices and perspectives coming together in a shared space. The sonic epistemologies used to then study transmodality 170 encourage new literacies for sharing and receiving stories. Whereas the methodological portion of this dissertation used a comparative analysis to listen to literature across borders, resonance can also break down binaries and complicate simplicity in how we define our own identities. Approaching this work transhistorically, then, lets students see themselves as part of larger contexts and longer narratives beyond their lifetimes. In response to the ways today’s students are uniquely experiencing isolation and disconnection, the two projects detailed in this chapter provide students with opportunities to come together as a classroom community. The pedagogy of resonance at the core of either project encourages connections through the different interrelated strands of English Studies. The MeSearch/WeSearch project approaches composition through archival practices, guiding students to develop and interrogate their own individual and then communal archives across the course of the semester. The Artivism Reviewed project then fits within literary and cultural studies by engaging students with digital archives and helping them to understand how historical artifacts are collected from the past and are resonant in the present. Like the methodology used to study literature, these approaches use sound as the means rather than as the object. Listening to stories means embracing the multiplicity and simultaneity that can emerge through the stories we tell about ourselves and the stories we learn about the contexts surrounding us. The MeSearch/WeSearch Project The MeSearch/WeSearch project emerged from a desire to hear students’ stories and to help students listen to each other’s voices. I was inspired by the archival practices represented in Luiselli’s novel Lost Children Archive and intrigued by the kind of “systematic research into myself” that Sontag 171 demonstrated. I first developed and implemented this project in Expository Writing, a dual-credit first-year writing course taught at a high school and credited through a local community college in Central Illinois. As a dual-credit instructor, I had the joy of getting to know many of my students across multiple years of high school while also helping them transition between their secondary and college experiences. However, from this perspective, I also started noticing how my senior students’ narrative writing often repeated the same stories they had already shared about themselves in previous courses. It was especially interesting to notice how after viewing Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TED Talk, “The Danger of a Single Story,” students could recognize that as readers we must avoid stereotyping others and minimizing complex human experiences into one generalized identity. When it came to writing, however, students were often telling single stories about themselves. I needed to find a way for students to listen more deeply and hear resonances across their complex life experiences and identities. Some of these single stories perhaps emerged from the perceived racial and linguistic homogeneity of our suburban community. With a total enrollment of 1,009 at the time of this teacher-research, the school’s student population was 90.7% white in comparison to 46.7% statewide, according to the 2021 Illinois State Report Card; the minority student population was reported as 1.7% Black, 3.6% Hispanic, 1.6% Asian, 0% American Indian, 0% Pacific Islander, and 2.2% two or more races/ethnicities. The most recent data on English Language Learners from 2020 indicated that less than 1% of students needed ELL support. In comparison, the student data for the three public high schools in the closest neighboring city, Peoria, Illinois, for the same year showed 9.9%, 42%, and 10% white; 65.5%, 30.5%, and 68.2% Black; 14.5%, 10.6%, and 17% Hispanic; 0%, 4.2%, and 0% Asian; 0%, 0%, and and 0% American Indian; 0%, 0%, and 0% Pacific Islander, and 9.3%, 12.4%, and 4.7% two 172 or more races/ethnicities, with 5.5%, 2.9%, and 5.5% of students receiving ELL support. Given the town’s proximity to Peoria, Illinois, and its history as a white-flight community where Caterpillar Incorporated executives often lived away from their blue-collar employees in the city before the company moved its headquarters to Texas, the community’s demographics are even more evident in its teachers’ racial identities: 97% white, 2.5% Hispanic, and 0.5% American Indian. However, as an alumna of the school in which I was teaching, it was not until later into my career and graduate work that I began to recognize how whiteness masked other marginalized identities in my hometown school community, including socioeconomic status and ability. 17.4% of the student population was categorized as coming from low-income households, and 11% of students received Individualized Education Plans (IEPs). Furthermore, as I wanted my students to recognize, there are unique and important elements of their identities that are neither immediately perceptible nor quantifiable. Just like Isamu Noguchi, analyzed in Chapter 2, sculpting through stone to make visible the voices and stories he heard resonating through the material, I challenged my students through a pedagogy of resonance to see beyond the facade of homogeneity across our community and to listen for the diversity within and beyond these statistics. I created this structure and guidance by crafting the MeSearch/WeSearch project, a semester-long personal narrative writing experience. This ongoing project invited students to collect, document, interpret, analyze, synthesize, curate, and share artifacts that collectively represented their senior year of high school and informed the always-changing perspectives they carry with them beyond the contexts of our classroom, school, and hometown community. Students submitted weekly Artifact Analysis paragraphs guided by specific prompts detailed below; at the midterm they went back 173 through their artifacts to compose a MeSearch Memoir, then, for their final, they synthesized their archives to curate a Community Exhibition. By bringing together literacy theory, archival practices, and composition studies, the research informing this project addresses the pedagogical issues of individual and collective identity development alongside a progressive approach to writing as archivists in the composition classroom. The MeSearch/WeSearch project is informed by foundational education theorists who emphasize criticality and transformative literacy practices. In his seminal 1968 Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire rejects the oppressive banking model of education where students “accept the passive role imposed on them” and “adapt to the world as it is” (73). Instead, Freire welcomes a pedagogy that recognizes the continual exchange of communication between students and teachers that generates meaningful learning (77). bell hooks takes up this call in her 1994 Teaching to Transgress by articulating how “engaged pedagogy recognize[s] that strategies must be constantly changed, invented, reconceptualized to address each new teaching experience” (10–11). The Reflection Memo accompanying students’ Literacy Narrative evidenced how in previous English Language Arts classes, teachers expected them to use a linear narrative progression to structure their personal writing: first this happened, then something changed, and then I became who I still am today! However, through the MeSearch/WeSearch project, I wanted to change, reinvent, and reconceptualize my teaching strategies to foster an ongoing, active dialogue between students. Rather than defaulting to the stories they had previously told about themselves, I wanted students to uncover new stories through the processes of continually documenting and interpreting artifacts. With each new addition into their archive, students needed to reconceptualize the overall story being told by their artifacts as 174 they accumulated, keeping their audience of peers in mind; then, upon synthesizing personal archives into a collective archive, students were tasked with curating a new community identity together to present to a larger outside audience. The framework of this project ensures that every student writer is led to tell a new story, and every class community develops an entirely unique experience through purposeful communication and meaningful collaboration. At every stage of the process, students are guided to hear new resonances emerging through the material they are curating. Contemporary education scholars are continuing to work from Freire’s and hooks’s calls for transformative learning to offer research and theory that empower classroom practices. Ken Macrorie, for example, suggested the I-Search Paper in 1988 as a method for inquiry-driven writing where students select topics that interest them and include their reflections on the research process as part of the final product. Macrorie’s method encourages students to use first-person pronouns in their academic writing, breaking a long-taught rule that even students in the 2020s still think they need to abide by. However, whereas Macrorie invites writers to position themselves alongside the topic of their research in the I-Search Paper, in the MeSearch/WeSearch project, the writer and their writing community become their own subjects of inquiry. There are no secondary or tertiary sources for students to consult; instead, students are actively creating their own primary sources to then study and analyze in relation to each other. Students’ writing about the artifacts takes the form of written paragraphs, but the artifacts themselves span across a wide range of modalities, including print, audio, visual, and digital, or exist entirely intangibly as memories. Therefore, this project embraces the theory of multiliteracies first introduced by the New London Group in 1996; their pedagogy productively broadens the definition of what a text can be by recognizing the different ways that students both read 175 and write through the changing technologies of the digital age in a globalizing world. Their personal archives are likewise always changing and developing as the semester progresses. Antero Garcia and Cindy O’Donnell-Allen cite these thinkers in the “Introduction” of Pose, Wobble, Flow (2015) to justify a culturally proactive approach to literacy instruction that considers the different poses a teacher can take in the classroom to facilitate powerful communication and meaningful learning. One of their poses, “Teacher as Curator,” empowers teachers to interrogate and rethink the texts they share with students to engage multiliteracies and represent diverse identities. After referring to the etymological core of “care” in the verb “curate,” Garcia and O’Donnell-Allen explain: Caring curators: ● research relevant content on a particular subject they care about; ● select the best of those materials for sharing with others; ● organize the content so it’s easily accessible to users; ● contextualize the content for users by annotating it, adding information, providing commentary, evaluating the information’s usefulness, and so forth; and ● share their collection with users, sometimes via digital means. (89) While they use these actions to discuss teachers’ responsibilities in curating reading curriculum for students, they also emphasize that the same steps apply to students’ own roles as writers. The MeSearch/WeSearch project invites students to direct that same kind of care toward themselves and their communities through a praxis of archiving and curation as a literacy performance. 176 Although none have explored in depth what happens when students take on these roles, in the field of composition, for example, previous scholars have started synthesizing composition studies with archival practices. For example, in her article, “Archival Research in Composition Studies,” Kelly Ritter argues that scholars of composition studies should approach their own disciplinary history as archival ethnographers; rather than seeking a clear, chronological “master” narrative to explain the discipline’s relatively young history, they should, she argues, recognize the “noisy” and “multivocal” truths of its development (462). She cites John Brereton’s 1995 The Origins of Composition Studies in the American College, 1875–1923: A Documentary History as a model of what this work could continue to look and sound like in the future. After setting out a historical overview of the discipline, Brereton presents the rest of the book as a kind of “documentary” that brings together excerpts from textbooks, writing from students, reports from committees, and treatises from departments on rhetoric and composition. Readers are left to understand these artifacts as evidence of how the discipline developed, empowered with the responsibility of interpretation within the given disciplinary context and through the provided artifacts. Inviting students to approach personal narratives through this kind of documentary practice broadens their awareness that their own stories might be “noisy,” are not always chronologically logical, and involve multiple levels of interpretation. The MeSearch Memoir and WeSearch Community Exhibition, then, provide opportunities for students to listen through the noise to find the meaningful resonances that they want to share with an audience. Other teacher-researchers have documented their own ideas for merging archival practices and composition studies in the context of first-year writing courses. Kyle Jensen, for 177 example, in his article “The Panoptic Portfolio” and his subsequent monograph Reimagining Process, critiques the power dynamics of the portfolio tradition and instead offers the model of online writing archives; by uploading their work to a digital space at various stages in the writing process, students are able to see multiple layers of drafts and revisions together at once in order to learn not just how the writing process develops but also what the process entails. Michael Bernard-Donals responds to and furthers Jensen’s ideas in a response article published in the Journal of Advanced Composition, arguing that whereas the portfolio offers the illusion of student-choice, it still constrains the writing that students are able to submit, limiting different ways of knowing and different ways of showing knowledge beyond the traditional written essay. In other words, while students are able to make decisions about which drafts to include within their portfolio to best demonstrate their progress and process, those drafts are still constrained by their instructors’ expectations; the digital portfolio might show how the journey looks different for different students, but the destination is the same. Citing Jensen alongside Derrida and Badiou, among other philosophers who have tackled the metaphor of the archive, Bernard-Donals asserts: The point of writing in the archive is to work against the pedagogically-produced illusion which soothes the mind, and to orient us and our students instead toward a future that challenges not only “existing approaches” to writing (Jensen 133), but also our integrity as subjects, forcing us to engage with one another. (716) Jensen and Bernard-Donals ultimately call for a reconceptualization of the portfolio method through the metaphor of the archive, which is open to all potential materials that a student might share to show their learning throughout a course, rather than just written drafts adhering to an instructor’s criteria. 178 The MeSearch/WeSearch project is not necessarily an alternative to the portfolio method of collecting student work, but it does seek to engage and empower students through archival and curatorial practices toward generative thinking and meaningful writing. The closest available comparison to this project comes from a blog post by Sritama Chatterjee as she describes how she brought her first-year writing students into digital archives. During their research unit, she guided students through collections online to think about “how principles of selection, organization and exclusion govern the logic of an archive.” They then collaboratively analyzed artifacts in depth. Chatterjee next used this new experience to guide her students’ conversations about research methods with which they were already familiar. For example, when writing a research paper, students are similarly selecting, organizing, and excluding sources, although they may not have previously recognized the logic governing their decisions. As the Artivism Reviewed project detailed later in this chapter demonstrates, the skills and mindsets fostered through the MeSearch/WeSearch project similarly transfer between different kinds of research and writing tasks. Reflection Memos evidenced how students were using the same critical questioning they used to interpret their personal artifacts to collect, document, interpret, synthesize, and curate outside information to support their research writing. Therefore, this memory- and sense-making is a process supported by the conceptual framework of the archive and a practical application of curation. In their article “Archives, Records, and Power,” Joan M. Schwartz and Terry Cook acknowledge the allure that this metaphor of the archive offers across disciplines, including composition studies, but they caution against using the framework without full recognition of the institutional impact archives make upon “collective 179 memory and human identity” (2). The significance of memory, however, is precisely the impetus and importance of the MeSearch/WeSearch project—through their artifacts and interpretations, my students determined how they wanted to remember their senior year and how they wanted to share that experience, not only with their peers and school population but also for their future selves. Having digitally documented their archive and exhibition, students could feasibly return to their artifacts months or years later with a matured and changed perspective on the sights and sounds of their senior year. More importantly, however, their multiple literacies developed through the process and set the conditions for future growth; students not only became more critical thinkers and careful interpreters, but they gained visual literacy, sonic literacy, and digital literacy through the curation and publication process. The completion of a first-year writing course is certainly not considered an endpoint for successful skill attainment. Instead, it is simply a moment to commemorate a milestone in the ongoing journey of being a writer, continually transitioning out of one community and into another context. The ways in which Luiselli represents this sense of ongoing growth through continually changing contexts is part of what inspired me to adapt ideas from Lost Children Archive into an approach to teaching. As I imagined new ways of helping my students learn about themselves while also creating new connections through writing, I was especially struck by the mother’s reflections on the power and purpose of documentary practices as a way of “collect[ing] the present for posterity” (103). She shares this idea with her ten year-old son while he is fiddling with his Polaroid camera in the backseat, trying to figure out how to know when to click the shutter button and asking: “So what does it mean, Ma, to document stuff?” (102). She answers that “documenting just means to collect the 180 present for posterity,” which she then defines as “for later” (103). However, she grapples with her own simple definition: I’m not sure, though, what “for later” means anymore. Something changed in the world. Not too long ago, it changed, and we know it. We don’t know how to explain it yet, but I think we can all feel it, somewhere deep in our gut and in our brain circuits. We feel time differently. No one has quite been able to capture what is happening or say why. Perhaps it’s just that we sense an absence of future, because the present has become too overwhelming, so the future has become unimaginable. And without future, time feels like only an accumulation. An accumulation of months, days, natural disasters, television series, terrorist attacks, divorces, mass migrations, birthdays, photographs, sunrises. We haven’t understood the exact way we are now experiencing time. (103) She ultimately resolves, “perhaps if we found new ways to document [the world], we might begin to understand this new way we experience space and time” (103). This reflection on feeling overwhelmed by the accumulation of events and uncertain how to navigate the changing way we sense time felt particularly resonant with my students’ and my own experiences through the Covid-19 pandemic. Recognizing that the consequences of this global event were not short-lived and would continue to affect our lives far beyond the immediate future, I hoped that by designing the course around a long-term project, I could create new ways of helping my students document and make sense of space and time by fostering a continual attunement toward resonance. 181 In order to study the successes of the MeSearch/WeSearch project, I collected writing samples from final drafts as well as Reflection Memos to hear how students were processing each major assignment. These insights from students’ own words are shared throughout in italics and identified by randomized numbers assigned to the forty-one students who consented to be included in this study, whereas my assignment descriptions and instructions are shared in bolded text. For example, the first Reflection Memo, which accompanied the Literacy Narrative assigned early in the semester, invited students to reflect on previous experiences with and perspectives towards narrative writing: Describe any previous experiences with narrative writing. What has this genre looked like and felt like for you in the past? What stories have you told about yourself? What did you enjoy about narrative writing? What did you dislike? In relation to the contexts and purposes for writing, students referred to school assignments, ranging from grade school memories to previous semesters’ classes as well as college admissions essays. One student even recounted: Writing narratives has taken over most of my writing in my senior year. I’ve written narratives in previous years, but never as much as the past 6 months. College applications consumed my winter and a major portion of my application required at least one narrative essay. I feel I’ve definitely improved my narrative writing skills over the past couple of months. I enjoy writing narratives because they take part of yourself that is familiar and understandable to you and express it in words. Writing narratives can get boring because I don’t always enjoy writing about myself and experiences because it can sometimes feel unimportant or vulnerable. (36) 182 In addition to emphasizing the rhetorical task of college admissions essays, this student’s response also resonates with what many students noted about the topics they have written on. While their topics might be familiar and comfortable, they often seem boring or insignificant, although another peer noted: in past narrative writing experiences I have mainly told stories that are life-changing or somewhat tragic (13). This impulse to share significant, engaging stories was evident in the specific topics students recalled from previous assignments: going on vacations, moving states and towns, getting new siblings or pets, competing in athletic or music events, or experiencing parents’ divorces. While these stories were certainly integral elements of students’ individual identities and compelling stories to tell, they were largely situated in the students’ distant pasts and did not offer space for changing identities to be recognized or reckoned with. I needed to find ways for my students to cultivate new material through which they might be able to hear different resonances. Through the MeSearch/WeSearch project, I wanted my students to acknowledge the past, be aware of the present, and anticipate the future through their many intersectional identities while also responding to the “dislikes” voiced in their initial Reflection Memos. Echoing the reluctance to share as voiced by the student quoted above, another student also admitted: I enjoy that this genre allows me to express myself but I also dislike the idea of being vulnerable (7). Students explained how they were hesitant to share parts of themselves with their teacher and peers, felt discomfort when focusing on themselves, and struggled with the genre because I view myself as leading a pretty normal life that wouldn’t seem interesting to most (4). Furthermore, several students also mentioned the negativity that typically surrounds their expectations for this genre. Two students specifically recalled times when 183 they had used narrative writing to revisit the pain of recalling a major loss, yet they also both recognized the productive power that narrative writing afforded them: It was a hard narrative to write because it made me reflect on my feelings. Overall it helped me process the loss. (12) I think of me sitting there and not knowing what part of my life I want to write about. I think of more of the not so good memories when I look back...But what I really like about narrative writing is you get to express yourself. (31) This act of expression and processing was articulated by almost every student in one way or another, but there was also a tendency in the Reflection Memos to explain how difficult it often felt to organize a messy life and make sense of personal experiences for an audience. One student described how it was hard to organize my thoughts into a ‘story’ because the ideas would flood my head (8). A classmate explained how they struggle specifically with where to begin a story (17), while another peer never knew where to end their stories because I found I had so much to share (34). By writing through the archival practices of collecting, interpreting, analyzing, and synthesizing artifacts, the MeSearch/WeSearch project introduced an ongoing organizational structure; through this structure, students were tasked with continually reflecting on the many interconnected parts of themselves, which included both big, life-changing events alongside tiny, everyday observations. As several students noted, nobody knows the writer better than they know themselves: I enjoy writing narratives because there is no real research you have to do and you know your own story (1). Narrative writing implies space for that self-awareness, but I also wanted to build my students’ confidence and comfortability sharing those vulnerable parts of themselves with others as well, which, although it 184 might not look like “real research,” does involve many of the same analysis and synthesis skills used in other conventional research writing genres. The principles Chatterjee outlines in relation to research writing—selecting, organizing, and excluding information—are similarly utilized in narrative writing as students make critical decisions about which stories to share and how. To introduce the project and explain its objectives, I guided my students to define key archival terms through a close reading exercise. I shared the excerpt cited above from Lost Children Archive and first asked my students how they would respond to the son’s question: “So what does it mean…to document stuff?” Through a think/pair/share activity, students built upon their individual definitions in small groups to consider: Who can document? What can be documented? Where are documented things held? When are documented things used? Why is documenting important? Depending on students’ interests and career goals, their responses ranged across a wide range of professions and purposes, ultimately reaching the very broad conclusion that pretty much anyone can document pretty much anything. To help ground our discussion, I then introduced the following terms and worked with students to collectively define each in relation to the other words: ● to document: to record something that can be read, seen, and/or heard later ● artifact: the thing being documented ● archive: the place where documented artifacts are held ● to archive: the act of intentionally saving documented artifacts ● archivist: the person who documents artifacts ● to interpret: to explain the meaning of an artifact or archive ● to curate: to select, organize, and present artifacts from an archive 185 I finished our discussion by sharing the etymology of a few key terms and prompting students to reflect on their relevance. I explained how “artifact” derives from the classical Latin arte and recognizes an object created by “human workmanship,” which could be an individual or collective product; it is the public space of the “archive,” as it relates to the Greek ἀρχεῖον (arkheîos) as a “magisterial residence, public office,” which implies that these pieces of art are held together and intended for a public audience—in other words, artifacts in an archive are meant to be shared. The difference between an archive and an exhibition, then, is the role of a curator who intentionally brings these artifacts together in a way that engenders a meaningful story about and from the art; the earliest uses of the title curator referred specifically to a priest or someone who has the “spiritual charge” of a congregation (Oxford English Dictionary). Merriam-Webster also details how the term curator comes from the Latin verb cūrāre, meaning “to watch over, attend.” Taken together, I emphasized to students that the archival practices they would be emulating through the MeSearch/WeSearch project would require care and careful attention as they considered how best to share their artifacts with an audience. To practice what this care and community felt like, I guided students to complete their first Artifact Analysis through an in-class activity. Their first prompt was to find “something you are carrying,” which I facilitated as a quick in-class scavenger hunt. I listed prompts on the board, such as: something you are proud of, something purple, something you are borrowing, something that reminds you of someone you love, and something else. Students had five minutes to rummage around in their pockets and backpacks to find artifacts that fit each of the prompts, then share them with the three to four peers seated nearby. I arranged my classroom into desk clusters, which I referred to as “cohorts,” an intentional grouping of students that served as mini-communities within the larger class context. In 186 addition to introducing the MeSearch/WeSearch project, this scavenger hunt served as a low-stakes, get-to-know-you activity. Although most students were already at least familiar, if not close with, the peers in their cohort, this activity created new ways of introducing themselves through the objects they were carrying that day. It also demonstrates how I intentionally scaffolded students’ speaking and listening skills; rather than expecting students to immediately share out individually, I created an opportunity for students to first discuss within their cohorts before sharing out with the class. We built upon this practice throughout the semester as students continually returned to these cohorts for discussions, group projects, and peer review sessions. At the end of the semester, students voiced feeling comfortable within their cohort, which helped them feel more confident sharing out their work among the whole class at the Community Exhibition. This initial activity concluded by giving students the individual responsibility of selecting which “something you are carrying” they found most meaningful and worth including in their personal archive. I then guided students through the Artifact Analysis prompts they would continue to return to throughout the semester. With their selected artifact in mind, students brainstormed individual responses to the following questions: ● Who are you in relation to the artifact? Identify the roles you hold that make this artifact meaningful. ● What is the artifact? Use your best descriptive language to provide sensory details. ● Where did you find the artifact? When did you find the artifact? 187 You may consider where/when you originally discovered this artifact or where/when you found it around you today. ● Why is this artifact significant to your personal archive? Explain how it represents your unique identity, roles, values, and/or experiences in this time, at this place. ● How does this artifact contribute to our community archive? Reflect upon what others may have in common with this artifact as well as what they can learn about/from you through this artifact. Students had time to draft responses to these questions in class, then for homework, they revised their ideas into a paragraph to submit the next day. I explained how moving forward, I would give a new Artifact Analysis assignment every week; I posted the prompts on Mondays, required submissions by Wednesdays, and returned feedback on Fridays. At one level, this habitual practice served as a weekly check-in with students’ expository writing skills as I offered targeted feedback early in the semester to establish our class’s expectations for a quality paragraph. However, I also witnessed deep analytical work happening in these weekly writings as students developed criticality about the sights and sounds around them as well as the memories within them. An analysis of students’ Artifact Analysis #1 submissions showcases this criticality. In response to the first question, many students considered their literal role in relation to the object: creator, designer, maker, owner, user, and consumer. Others listed interpersonal roles related to the artifact, including both family relations, such as a son, daughter, granddaughter, great-grandson, cousin, and chosen family member, as well as in friendly and romantic relationships, as a loyal friend, 188 boyfriend, girlfriend, or partner. Other students listed roles that identified their responsibilities and activities, such as musician, athlete, singer, student pilot, shopper, and barista. Interestingly, some students responded to the first question by listing qualities and characteristics, including healthy, an avid reader, shoe person, perfectionist, indecisive, artistic, and a person who loves the little things. I began with this question in the Artifact Analysis prompts because it centers the individual, not the artifact, and challenges students to continually consider their multiple simultaneous and dynamic identities. Then, the second question asks students to identify and describe the artifact itself. As we progressed through the semester, I encouraged students to use this opportunity to try out different writing techniques we were developing, such as using sensory details and finding analytical depth, but already in these initial responses, students were shaping stories around the “what,” leading into the “where” and “when.” For example, whereas three students wrote about necklaces they were wearing, each carried its own unique origin story; one was a mint green half heart from a friend, another was a small gold heart purchased at a local boutique, and the other was a dainty, shiny cross necklace being borrowed. Each writer then launched into a deeper reflection when answering the “why” question, such as: My heart is my favorite thing about myself; I wear it proudly on my sleeve. I feel like this heart represents that I display my heart to everyone I meet (22). Other students also selected pieces of jewelry they were wearing that day, like rings, bracelets, earrings, and a lanyard, or different wearables like running shoes, a state basketball championship sweatshirt, and Princess Tiana socks. Some writers focused on their role as a student through notebooks, pencil cases, an eraser with drawings from a long-distance boyfriend, and a calculator readily charged for a test the next hour, while several artifacts, such 189 as those I share below, were uncategorizable, unique representations of the student in that classroom, during that class period. Responses to this first Artifact Analysis prompt, like its inspiration from Tim O’Brien’s Vietnam memoir The Things They Carried, offered a glimpse into the lives of high school seniors through the intangibles they carry alongside tangible objects. The “why” and “how” questions illuminated the significances of these seemingly random objects with honesty and insight. For example, a singer wrote about her Yeti water bottle: My sister, who is in the navy, got me this water bottle and it feels like I am taking her with me on every adventure. This artifact is significant to me, because it shows the health struggles I have been through and motivates me to drink water to achieve my water goal. (20) A trumpet player in the marching band recalled a specific moment captured and saved as the wallpaper image on their phone: This artifact is significant because it shows something I was proud about. Our senior season was full of unbelievable moments, from beating school records to nearly beating top national bands. The performance at Lucas Oil was an accurate representation of the total hard work and dedication we put in the marching band show... everyone who is involved in sports, activities, clubs, and teams is going to experience a “last” moment. The last game, the last huddle, the last gathering, or the last day of school. Our community as seniors have, are, and will continue to experience their “last” moment in each of our 190 individual high school experiences. That is something our community has in common with my artifact. (6) A third student opened by self-identifying as autistic then explained why they were carrying a blanket with them that day: My entire identity isn’t being autistic but I’m not carrying much and as a life experience having something to be a comfort object is nice. I grew up not interacting with people much and used to cry if I had to talk to a stranger so that’s why I’ve always had a comfort object...I imagine maybe some people can relate to having something that helps them calm down or relax. (39) These excerpted responses and their varying styles also exemplify how there were no set length requirements on the Artifact Analysis paragraphs. I told students that the minimum expectation was answering each of the questions, but the more thoughtful reflection they provided in their response, the more it would help them with the later steps of the project. These artifacts accumulated over the course of the semester into robust personal archives, providing students with a variety of potentially resonant material through which to compose their MeSearch Memoirs and curate their WeSearch Exhibition. We ended the semester with the following set of prompts: ● Artifact Analysis #1: something you are carrying ● Artifact Analysis #2: something that represents where you’re from ● Artifact Analysis #3: something that you enjoy listening to ● Artifact Analysis #4: a quote that you love 191 ● Artifact Analysis #5: something that you give one star ● Artifact Analysis #6: something that you give five stars ● Artifact Analysis #7: something that reflects your perspective on the world ● Artifact Analysis #8: something/one that makes you feel supported ● Artifact Analysis #9: something that represents your senior year Often the prompt had to do with the texts we were reading in class, such as the one- and five-star artifacts inspired by John Green’s review-style essays in The Anthropocene Reviewed, a text that will be further discussed in the Artivism Reviewed section below. Other prompts were used to practice skills in preparation for other assignments, like quote integration with Artifact Analysis #4, which led into the Quote Explication, and argumentative topics with Artifact Analysis #7, which led into the Argumentative Remix. These connections were made to cultivate a sense of cohesion and flow as students committed to the long-term process this project required and helped them continually be listening for resonances as they started sensing these connections. At the midterm, then, it was time to pause and reflect back through their archival work so far through the MeSearch Personal Memoir. With six artifacts in their personal archives already, students received the following prompt: Throughout the semester so far, you have been collecting and interpreting artifacts, then storing them in your personal archive. It is now time to revisit this space and look/listen for the stories that stand out and resonate. Consider any themes or insights that emerge in relation to who you are as a unique 192 individual in this place and at this time. What do these artifacts say about the person you have been before, are right now, and want to become in the future? Students not only had choice about which artifacts they wanted to focus on for their 750–1000 word or 4–7 minute memoir, but they also chose which modality they would use, guided by mentor texts we had read and analyzed in previous weeks: ● curating a multimodal video in the style of Valeria Luiselli ● recording a TED Talk in the style of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie ● collaborating to create a podcast in the style of Kwame Alexander ● writing a personal essay in the style of Sherman Alexie ● elaborating on the one- or five-star review in the style of John Green I encouraged students to select the mentor text and modality that worked best for the story they wanted to tell and the audience they needed to share it with. Writing samples from the Reflection Memos that accompanied students’ MeSearch Memoirs, then, demonstrate how students approached the previously-stated challenges of vulnerability, negativity, and making sense of oneself in this assignment. Students’ reflections were guided by the following question set: ● What were your key writing processes? ● Describe the overall archiving and curation process. How did your weekly writings contribute towards the narrative? 193 ● What would you like to change about your process, if anything, in the second half of the semester leading into our Community Exhibition? Understanding that writing, and especially personal writing, is an inherently vulnerable act, students demonstrated having gained confidence through agency with the writing. One student noted: My weekly writings...helped me focus on myself more and write more personal writings about myself...I was able to get in the mindset of talking about myself and express myself in my memoir (3). Even the use of a possessive determiner “my” shows a sense of ownership and pride; it is not “the memoir assignment” but rather this student’s unique and personal composition. Another student shared how the act of revisiting earlier writings, then deciding how to remix them, [gave] me some more control over the final product (27). This sense of “control” seems to relate to the many choices students had to make for this project, including both how to tell the story and what story to tell. These careful decisions also developed students’ analysis and synthesis skills. Rather than leaning into the negativity or relying on the major life events that fed into previous expectations for a “good” narrative, students had an archive of moments and memories already ready to shape into a story to answer the question: What do these artifacts say about the person you have been before, are right now, and will be in the future? One student recalled this process in detail: I read my artifact analysis I was comparing and tried to think of an important theme in my life that I could connect. Then, I recalled several stories of me being labeled a “people pleaser” and decided to turn my memoir into an analytical approach of my “people pleaser”ness. I made sure to connect the story I told in my artifact analysis, and then I 194 used other stories to make the artifact analysis more relevant and to strengthen my paper. I want to continue making these connections through the rest of the semester. (19) This student’s work of synthesizing artifacts towards a connecting theme was also evident in another peer’s Reflection Memo, but they found a different organizational strategy: When I first started writing, I ranked my artifacts from most important to least important. I then focused my paper on the most important one, and brought up the others as I went. I looked for themes in the artifacts that I should be using to describe me as a person. The weekly writings were helpful in already analyzing each artifact. In the future, I plan to continue how I’ve been writing, but potentially with more analysis. (22) The structure provided by the archiving process seemed to cultivate this confidence with organizing and making sense of their stories. One student summarized how My archive writing set a foundation for my writing (3), whereas another student who had chosen to focus on just one artifact for their memoir, rather than synthesizing multiple, described the process as mapping out my thoughts on the artifact (38). The reliance on spatial metaphors in these notes on process indicate how writing as archivists enabled students to make sense of themselves through their artifacts with a guiding but flexible structure. Creating an archive provided the contained space necessary to listen closely and focused to their own multiple, interrelated stories without feeling entirely overwhelmed by the possibilities. By the end of the semester, then, students were well-practiced in their processes and ready to tackle the final assignment as a community of writers. Progressing from individuals into a collective required continual intentional opportunities to connect and converse informally in their cohorts and 195 as a class before formalizing the community with the WeSearch Exhibition. The description of the assignment itself reminds students of their commitment across the semester and emphasizes the dynamic changes that may have occurred over the course of sixteen weeks: Throughout the semester, you have been collecting and interpreting artifacts, then storing them in your personal archive; at midterm, you wrote a personal memoir that synthesized these materials and shared a story about who you were as an individual. You are, however, no longer in that moment in time, and you are not only an individual. You have grown and developed as an integral contributor to our community of writers. To conclude our semester together, we will synthesize your personal archives to curate a digital exhibition about who we are as a community of writers based on the artifacts in our archives. How can we bring these elements together to tell a story about your senior year of high school? What similarities and differences can we find in your artifacts and analyses that demonstrate our diversity and talents as a community of writers? This framing also reaffirms that each student is an integral member of the community with well-developed writerly agency, analysis and synthesis skills, and organizational strategies necessary to curate this final exhibition. 196 To facilitate the process, I guided students through a series of tasks that engaged them with their own artifacts and their peers’ archives. First, they created a Personal Curation page that shared five to seven of their favorite Artifact Analysis paragraphs. After hearing several students voice confusion about the purpose of the task, I offered this reframing: Imagine you work at a museum. You are tasked with curating a collection of artifacts that best represent you—who you are as a writer and complex human being. Think about what would best show you off to an audience who doesn’t know you, or even an audience who does know you—who is obsessed with you, in fact—and wants to learn more. What can you share with them from the archive you have been growing all semester? Once students felt comfortable and confident with their curation of artifacts, they shared it with a partner. I told them to engage with Personal Curations as if they were researching their partner, and I asked them to consider both what they can learn explicitly from what their partner had written as well as what they can infer about their partner’s interests, personality, relationships, and worldview based on the artifacts. After students performed this archival research of their partner, they then had the opportunity to sit down one-on-one for an interview. Students prepared two close-ended and three open-ended questions to follow up on their partner’s artifacts and find out more. These insights then informed a one-paragraph blurb they wrote about their partner. Again, the use of cohorts to scaffold speaking and listening skills alongside students’ reading and writing facilitated authentic and engaged conversations to culminate the semester. 197 The next steps were then to decide collectively how best to showcase their work through a Community Exhibition. I explained that my only requirement was that there needed to be a blurb about each student and a writing sample from each student; it was their responsibility to decide what kind of modality would best facilitate a cohesive exhibition of how they remembered their senior year and how they wanted to be remembered for years to come. I emphasized how by “community” I was referring both to the classroom community this exhibition would showcase as well as the larger school community the exhibition would be shared with. Students took this real-world context seriously and made careful, collective decisions. Each class had to choose what writing they would share alongside the blurbs as well as what presentation media they wanted to use to put it all together. For example, one class determined they would each use Artifact Analysis #9 to underscore the theme of memories from their senior year, which they published through Emaze, an online presentation platform similar to PowerPoint, Google Slides, or Prezi but with interactive features and unique designs, such as the gallery template my students chose; they each created a slide that shared their blurbs and excerpts in a virtual exhibition space. As we clicked through each slide, it appeared as if we were moving through a gallery, helping to visualize the metaphorical space students had created through their writing. Another class chose to create a physical exhibition via a collage on a canvas. One particularly talented student sketched portraits of each of her peers and myself, then pasted them onto the canvas. She collected inside jokes and throwback quotes from the semester, then graffitied them around the portraits. At the center is the sketch of me beneath the title, “Ms. Plevka’s K.I.D.S.: kickin incredibly dope students.” This visual tribute to my semester with these “dope students” epitomizes how one individual found her unique 198 role within our community through the intentional curating process. Although I did not receive permissions to include the artwork in this study, it is now an integral artifact in my own archive and a site of inspiration as I contemplate the implications of this project and how their work continues to resonate beyond this semester-long study. The first pedagogical question this teacher-research raises is the impact of a dual-credit context. The potential for identity development has been well-documented in first-year writing courses, where young adults are welcomed onto a college campus for their freshman year and have an opportunity to reshape their identities and awarenesses among new peers. However, that dynamic is different when seventeen and eighteen year-olds are taking a course for college credit at their high school, especially at this school with its low mobility rate of 5.5% of students transferring once or more in their school career (IL Report Card). Almost all of my students already knew each other. In relation to the community identity pursuits of this course design, the setting can be a strength—a lot of rapport was already established from previous classes, activities, or interactions, and we shared a lot of common experiences in this small town community. However, the dual-credit context also feels like a limiting factor at times. With this course design’s focus on identities and experiences through archival practices, students enter the room with previous perceptions of how they understand themselves in relation to their peers, and they carry with them memories of feeling shame and embarrassment, being bullied or made fun of, and thinking that they are lesser because of who and how they are in comparison to others. Although sometimes these painful recollections came out in students’ individual writing, they were still reluctant to share their full selves and full stories with each other. Students were defensive at times and hesitant to be as open with each other as they were with me. Their writing and sharing 199 entailed navigating multiple levels of risk that were not explicitly evaluated in this teacher-research but worth considering in future iterations of this project. I do think the structure leading into the WeSearch Community Exhibition fostered accountability, trust, and respect, but I wonder about the further possibilities for deepening the identity work that would happen through this project in a first-year writing class on a college campus where the students would not already know each other and the instructor would not already know the students. Nonetheless, this project did still make an impact in addressing my initial concerns regarding individual and community identity development within the dual-credit context as students returned from lockdown and looked ahead to college. Responses collected from the WeSearch Community Exhibition demonstrate the successes that this semester-long project and surrounding course design entailed. One student offered a particularly insightful and compelling reflection in response to the questions: How was your community writing experience? and How did this project compare to other writing we have done within this class and other narrative writing experiences you had before this class?: This class has taught me so much about writing in general, writing about myself, others, and the world around us. Expository Writing has opened my eyes about writing in an entirely different direction. Before I came into this class, I expected that I would just have to frequently write papers that I would not enjoy. Luckily my expectations were subverted positively, because the papers and projects for this class have been anything but unenjoyable. They were thought-provoking, argumentative, controversial, reflective, personal, vulnerable, and meaningful. 200 Each week housed a new journey where we would evolve our writing from the previous week into a new direction. We wrote many artifacts about ourselves, and wrote about many “writing into the week” prompts about ourselves but also the world around us. Projects like the Literacy Narrative, Argumentative Remix, MeSearch Memoir, and the Analytical Paper all took our writing basics and took them in a separate direction to exemplify how our writing has evolved. I am very grateful for taking this class now before college since I can use what I have learned in this class and apply it for the rest of my life. (40) In addition to offering a thoughtful overview of the class procedures and practices, this student also opens by acknowledging how writing was used to learn both about the individual and their community of writers, which was echoed by many other students as well. One writer characterized the course as kind of like therapy, but cheaper, and also spoke to the impact of their growth beyond the context of the class, noting: I might keep this writing style up (27). This impact, then, not only affected their knowledge of self but also their awarenesses of others. Multiple students mentioned how the best part of the final project was getting to know their classmates through their writing and conversations in ways they had never been able to before, best epitomized by this reflection: I thought the curation idea was very fun and at the end of our senior year, you would think we would know everything about each other, but we continue to learn new things about each other in the final days (6). Although students had also mentioned “getting to know you” prompts in their initial Reflection Memos about their previous experiences with narrative writing, this project seemed to leave a different impact because of 201 the criticality, commitment, and confidence required for this community of writers to move through the process of writing as archivists. Through this work, students were able to hear new and unexpected resonances emerge from their stories. I was curious, then, to consider how this writing process could transfer into students’ reading and research practices as well. Given their ability to understand themselves as unique members of a community, I wondered how I could integrate that same mindset and build upon that sense of empathy to help students study other identities and histories beyond those represented in our classroom, school, and town. Like the interrelated levels of narratives developing together in Lost Children Archive, my students’ lives likewise held resonances with larger transnational and transhistorical stories that I wanted to help them learn to listen to. The Artivism Reviewed Project Witnessing students’ attunement towards connections across multiple narratives, I was inspired to continue integrating archival practices into my Expository Writing course as I continued redesigning the curriculum the following semester. I was curious how I could transfer the foundational skills of collecting, identifying, analyzing, and synthesizing personal artifacts into students’ research writing, and I found an opportunity to explore this inquiry through the New Perspectives on Primary Sources fellowship, co-sponsored by the National Council for Teachers of English (NCTE) and the Library of Congress (LoC). With this group, I learned more about the digital collections available through the LoC and brainstormed possible ways of getting my students to critically engage with the primary source materials. The resulting project, which I titled Artivism Reviewed, challenged students to bring the same levels of curiosity and criticality they demonstrated in 202 the MeSearch/WeSearch project into primary source research. The overarching goal was for students to continue hearing resonances between their own identities and those represented in historical archives. Despite being well into the MeSearch/WeSearch project by the time I introduced this assignment, students struggled to understand what I meant when I initially invited them to analyze a primary source from the LoC digital archives. “So what, it’s like a bunch of laws and stuff? Isn’t that what Congress does?” one student innocently asked. Fortunately, through the NPPS fellowship, I had gained the knowledge and confidence to explain to my students how the LoC is a repository for “the raw material of history” (“Getting Started with Primary Sources”). I told them that this digital archive holds primary sources that give us a firsthand account of what it was like to be a specific person in a specific place and at a specific time, and I challenged them to find one meaningful artifact, analyze it in depth, then make personal connections with it. I quickly realized, however, that students would need much more careful guidance and specific direction in order to navigate the vast possibilities of the digital archive; similar to the initial stages of the MeSearch/WeSearch project, students could only hear the noise and were not yet ready to listen for resonances between their personal story and the national history documented in the digital collections. If I wanted students to transfer the same criticality and care they developed through their narrative writing into their informative and argumentative writing voices, then I would need to take more intentional steps in introducing them to archival practices. My overarching goal was to help students understand the practicality of archives in the same beautiful way that Luiselli’s fiction describes the theory of an archive as “a kind of valley in which your thoughts can bounce back to you, 203 transformed” (42). I knew, however, that I would need to find student-friendly language in order to achieve these objectives. I found solutions to these interrelated concerns through the nonfiction style of John Green and the advocacy articulated by Steve Duncombe and Steve Lambert. As I read John Green’s 2021 The Anthropocene Reviewed and listened to the podcast that preceded the book, I found an inspiring style through which to motivate my students’ research writing. In each essay and episode, Green reviews a feature of the Anthropocene—something created, felt, experienced, and/or witnessed by humans—on a five-star scale. He ends every essay with a succinct statement, such as, “I give Halley’s Comet four and a half stars” (28), “I give Diet Dr. Pepper four stars” (50), or “I give viral meningitis one star” (203). The body of each essay supports these claims through an exemplary blend of narrative, informative, and argumentative writing style, which would not only lend itself to my objectives for engaging students with archival practices but also relates to several of the tenets outlined in the NCTE’s “Professional Knowledge for the Teaching of Writing” statement: Writing is a process, writing is a tool of thinking, and writing and reading are related. By scaffolding student learning through discussions of mentor texts, guided practice, drafting sessions, peer review, and publication, this assignment would embrace the writing process defined by the NCTE as a way of thinking about the end product while incorporating a variety of strategies for achieving it. As the NCTE states, “If one is going to write in a genre, it is very helpful to have read in that genre first.” Therefore, a close reading and careful listening exercise with one of Green’s essays and accompanying podcast would help students consider how the structure and style of his writing could inform their own analyses of primary sources. 204 To open this three-week unit, I introduced students to Green’s essays as a model for the kind of writing they would be encouraged to compose. The lesson began with students free-writing in response to a piece of advice relayed in the “Introduction” of Green’s book: “Pay attention to what you pay attention to” (6). I simply prompted students to write about what they had found themselves thinking about lately, hoping they would start identifying social issues or intellectual interests that could carry into the primary source analysis. However, after our ten minutes of writing time were up, my usually participatory class was uncharacteristically quiet when I asked if anyone wanted to share what they had written. Sensing something, I then asked, “How many of you wrote about college applications?” Hands shot up with incredulous eyes. Giggles and glances were exchanged. I acknowledged the stress of this moment in my senior students’ lives, and we discussed how they were feeling overwhelmed but excited thinking about the uncertainty of their lives soon ahead beyond our hometown. Although the writing prompt had not elicited exactly the kinds of responses I was expecting, it reminded me of my own motivations for pursuing this work. I wanted my students to engage with primary sources and bring their full range of emotions and experiences to learning about the past while connecting with their present and anticipating the future. Green’s work was an exemplary model of what this writing could look and sound like. We first read his “Introduction” to get a sense of what his book and podcast were about, pausing to discuss what he meant by “The Anthropocene” as our current geological age. Students found John Green’s paraphrasing of his brother Hank Green especially helpful for defining the term: 205 As a person, he told me, your biggest problem is other people. You are vulnerable to people and reliant upon them. But then imagine instead that you are a twenty-first-century river, or desert, or polar bear. Your biggest problem is still people. You are still vulnerable to them, and reliant upon them. (5) To connect this term with Green’s review-style writing, I explained John Green’s reasoning that because he is writing about human activity, and because he is a human himself, he must also include himself in the writing. His wife helps him to recognize how “in the Anthropocene, there are no disinterested observers; there are only participants” (5). Furthermore, the review-essay genre functions as “a kind of memoir—here’s what my experience was eating at this restaurant or getting my hair cut at this barbershop” (6). I previewed for students that they would likewise be writing about human history and culture, they were encouraged to bring their full selves to this primary source analysis project, welcoming a first-person voice and personal perspective just like Green’s. The next day, students read his chapter “You’ll Never Walk Alone” while listening to the accompanying podcast episode. During this reading/listening, students held three different colored highlighters—one for narrative voice, one for informative voice, and one for argumentative voice—and were instructed to highlight every single word on the page, making decisions about when Green shifted from one voice to another. After students shared and compared their highlights on Green’s essay in small groups, I then asked, “What is the claim of this essay? If you had to identify a one-sentence thesis statement, what would it be?” After scanning back through the text, students identified four different potential claims. I noted to the class that none of their choices were the last sentence of the first paragraph, where students have traditionally been taught to place their thesis statements, and 206 they discussed how Green seemed to be subverting that convention and using a different structure for his essay. Ultimately, after defining what successful claims do to make a succinct statement supported by the rest of the essay, we reached a class consensus that Green’s very last sentence, “I give ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ four and a half stars,” serves as the claim (12). We noticed how the entire essay preceding this statement traces the history of the song and the many different ways it has recurred throughout the author’s life, and we agreed that if he had led with the claim instead, our experience of this essay would have been very different. Looking back through students’ highlighting, then, we discussed how Green’s style of making personal connections to the song, performing a close reading of the song’s lyrics, and reflecting on why the song matters leant itself to this inversion of the traditional writing structure. By literally visualizing how he leads to his claim by shifting naturally between narrative, informative, and argumentative writing voices, I wanted my students to feel empowered to make similar moves in their writing. As the brainmapping activity shared later will underscore, reading a model for moving between writing voices—maintaining a professional tone while still making personal connections—was key to the way my students ultimately connected with their primary sources and articulated the resonances they felt. From students’ initial responses to the prompt about what they have been paying attention to, however, I realized I would need to provide a little more structure and guidance to help bring students into the digital archives with focus and direction to find a specific primary source to analyze. A solution to this concern came from The Art of Activism by Stephen Duncombe and Steve Lambert. An artist and an activist respectively, Duncombe and Lambert synthesize their work through the idea of artistic activism, which they characterize as “raising questions, opening spaces, and providing 207 perspectives” (42). Exploring the work of artists and activists housed in the LoC, then, would relate to the NCTE Definition of Literacy in a Digital Age. The statement’s call to “determine how and to what extent texts and tools amplify one’s own and others’ narratives as well as counter unproductive narratives” brought up questions of representation and inclusion in relation to the digital archives. The NCTE specifically defines “unproductive narratives” as those that are “aimed at justifying exclusionary practices and policies that disproportionately impact nondominant communities.” Accordingly, I challenged my students to not only notice inequities between which races, ethnicities, genders, sexualities, or abilities were represented in the LoC, but to interrogate why. In response to the NCTE’s question, “Do learners share and critically analyze narratives they produce and consume in digital spaces?” I guided my students to consider the process of how someone’s story becomes documented, archived, and digitized. I needed to make sure they understood that the photographs, letters, and other artifacts they would find in the LoC were not just happenstance items that appeared online but part of an institutional process of selection, preservation, and promotion, which likewise entails elimination and erasure. Within a theory of resonance, this question meant identifying and critiquing potential absences of resonant material. In order for students to make meaningful connections, there must be material present with which they can connect. With the inspiration of Green’s essays, the advocacy of Duncombe and Lambert’s work, and the objectives of the NCTE statements, I produced the following assignment page for the Artivism Reviewed project, a primary source analysis focused on artists and activists. I shared the following description with students: 208 We are living in complicated and tumultuous times. As writers, we are curious and committed to learning about the past in order to make sense of the present and create the futures we desire. John Green reminds us in The Anthropocene Reviewed to “pay attention to what you pay attention to.” With this advice in mind, you will compose a primary source analysis that incorporates your narrative, informational, and argumentative writing voices. When we think about the Anthropocene as the current geological age dominated by human activity, it helps to focus on specific individuals and their contributions to larger communities and societies. As Steve Duncombe and Steve Lambert explain in The Art of Activism, these contributions might come from artists, who express their ideas through creative works like literature, visual arts, music, dance, animation, film, and architecture, or from activists, who work against social issues through active efforts like letter writing, political campaigning, boycotting, and demonstrating; sometimes, art and activism are even combined powerfully together into what we call artivism. 209 For your Analytical Paper, you will focus on the work of one artist or activist by analyzing a primary source found in the Library of Congress digital archives and evaluating how inspirational, influential, or impactful they were based on that artifact. I encourage you to seek out individuals with identities different from your own to provide diverse perspectives on our nation’s history. Your overarching goal is to explore how and why the primary source resonates with you. Through this assignment, I intended for students to develop three key skills essential to success in the course and in future college classes: understanding how to navigate databases like the LoC to find primary sources, analyzing primary sources through observations, questions, and reflections, and applying writing skills to make and support a claim about primary sources. This reframing and refocusing, moving from simply the open-ended prompt to “analyze a primary source” into a specifically guided process with key skills articulated helped my students approach the digital archives with more confidence and motivation. Their minds were becoming more attuned to the possibilities of resonances they could hear. I developed this process even further by listing out the specific steps students would need to take in order to complete the assignment: TASKS: 1. Find a primary source in the Library of Congress that relates to an artist and/or activist from the United States. We will first practice 210 search strategies together for navigating the digital archives. You may then select any format of primary source, including: ● Audio Recording ● Photo, Print, Drawing ● Newspaper ● Notated Music ● Film, Video ● Book/Printed Material ● Map ● Periodical 2. Perform a primary source analysis to observe, question, and reflect upon the artifact. You will complete a graphic organizer specific to your primary source format to begin considering how your artist’s or activist’s work is reflected in the artifact. 3. Respond to further focused questioning to make an analytical claim. Based on your primary source analysis, you will consider how inspirational, influential, or impactful your artist or activist was. In the style of John Green, you will complete the prompt: I give [artist or activist] [#] stars. 4. Draft a 1000–1500 word essay that supports your claim through critical analysis and personal connections. We will use the John Green 211 essay/podcast as a mentor text to guide our choices for this genre. Consider how he balances between narrative, informative, and argumentative writing voices to develop his analysis. 5. Revise your essay in response to peer-review critiques. You will bring a full first draft to class, then give and receive feedback with your classmates. 6. Share your essay with our community of writers. Together we will curate a collection called “Artivism Reviewed” to share at our Publishing Party at the end of the unit! The framing of this assignment was still quite complex and overwhelming, but I promised students that by breaking it down step-by-step, we would engage together in the struggle with an open and inquiry-driven mindset to reach rewarding outcomes. I reminded them of the long-term commitment they were making to the work of the MeSearch/WeSearch project and explained that even though this project would be more condensed into a series of weeks, rather than stretched across the semester, they would benefit from continual commitment to the work. To prepare students for the first task, I led a two-day lesson intended to guide students through the complex search features of the LoC digital archives. Before pulling up loc.gov, however, we first spent time defining and describing primary sources with the following discussion questions, intended to help students understand exactly what we would be looking for when we got there: ● In your own words and experience, define “primary source.” ● List any examples of primary sources that come to mind. 212 ● What is the purpose of engaging with primary sources? Most students were already able to explain how a primary source is an original account or documentation of an event from someone who was there to witness it, but when they were listing examples, I challenged them to think beyond broad categories — such as photographs, audio recordings, and diary entries — and come up with specific examples. Students listed texts they remembered reading in a previous American Literature course, including Abigail Adams’s “Remember the Ladies” letter to her husband and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” but then I asked them to think of even more recent examples of primary sources closer to home. I wanted to make sure they understood that primary sources are not just found in textbooks and archives but instead can be found all around us. Students are constantly consuming and creating texts that could be considered primary sources. Which ones make it into textbooks, archives, and other institutional spaces, however, is a question that would continue to guide our critical conversations as the lesson progressed. Finally, a student who played on the football team offered that he had been interviewed recently on the local news, and with a slightly sarcastic lilt, he added, “So that’s probably a pretty important primary source.” “YES!” I exclaimed, then continued to work with his example to talk about why engaging with primary sources matters, imagining that someone fifty years from now wants to know what it was like to be a high school athlete “back in the day.” Assuming that the local news channel maintains an archive of all recorded episodes, this hypothetical researcher could turn to my student’s firsthand account to learn what his experience was like as well as to analyze specific features of the interview, such as the student’s fashion choices or aspects of his dialect and slang. 213 Through this example, I effectively previewed for my students the kinds of questions we can ask when engaging with primary sources. Rather than perceiving primary sources as simply artifacts from the past, I needed to present the LoC as a living repository of history through which we can bring all of our curiosities and experiences to make meaningful connections, echoing the NCTE Definition of Literacy statement’s reminders that all writers write with intention and purpose for specific audiences. To model this mindset even further, I told students that I would be doing a think-aloud as I navigated the search process. Although some of my students indicated that they had tried using the digital archives for previous classes before, they shared that their experiences were largely frustrating and confusing; it sounded like they had tried to use it for secondary research and did not know how to sift through the sources their searches produced. I empathized that it can be a complex and challenging site to navigate but promised that it is ultimately rewarding to find unique and compelling primary sources that resonate with your own values and experiences, making you want to keep learning more. I started with the same reflection question students had responded to earlier in the week — What have you been paying attention to lately? — and shared that because I am a clarinetist who performs a lot of symphonic band literature, I have been paying attention to the music of Aaron Copland. “I am curious to learn more about his inspirations, influences, and impacts upon music in the United States. I am hoping to find a variety of primary sources that help me understand this artist more so I can evaluate how effective his work was.” I emphasized that I was pursuing this search by focusing on a specific artist to meet the requirements of the assignment, but I acknowledged that my students may not have a specific figure in mind and previewed how I would also be suggesting a variety of ways to enter the search process. 214 To model my approach, I prepared a think-aloud through the Primary Source Analysis Tool published by Teaching with Primary Sources (TPS), an online collective that works with the LoC to engage more students with primary sources. The three prompts on the tool are to 1) Observe: “Have students identify and note details,” 2) Reflect: “Encourage students to generate and test hypotheses about the source,” and 3) Question: “Have students ask questions that lead to more observations and reflections.” Follow-up questions are offered beneath each category depending on the type of primary source students are analyzing. For example, to make observations about a photograph, a student might consider, “Describe what you see.” and “What people and objects are shown?” Reflections, while phrased on the tool as hypotheses, ask for any evidence of students thinking beyond the primary source itself through follow-up questions like, “What can you learn from examining this source?” and “If someone made this today, what would be different?” The question section then prompts students to explore what they wonder in relation to who, what, where, when, why, and/or how. As the Teacher’s Guide emphasizes, the prompts are meant to work in relation to each other; students need not follow a linear progression from one to the next but instead are encouraged to go back and forth between observations, reflections, and questions. My think-aloud, therefore, used the Primary Source Analysis Tool to guide my discussion of the initial search process. I began by typing “Aaron Copland” into the search bar and noticing all of the different formats that appeared on the first page of results, including photo/print/drawing, biography, web archive, collection, and manuscript/mixed material. I shared the following aloud: 215 Observe: “There are a lot of visual and textual artifacts here. The photographs and correspondences can show me a lot about his influences and impacts through who he was writing to and working with.” Reflect: “I find it interesting that even though he was a composer, there are no recordings or sheet music manuscripts that come up as top hits for my search.” Question: “Will a curated collection be easier to navigate than this huge search result?” The answer, of course, is yes. I chose this artist specifically because the LoC hosts a full digital collection of 982 Copland-related materials; I wanted to demonstrate to students that there are certainly exciting advantages to exploring the unknown of the archives at large, but there are also benefits to focusing a search within an existing curated collection. I previewed for students several other collections they might find interesting, such as the Alexander Hamilton papers, the Amazing Grace collection, the Baseball Cards collection, and the Children’s Book selections. If they didn’t yet have a specific artist or activist in mind, they could scroll through the Digital Collections. Students could use the search filters to narrow down topics, like American History, Performing Arts, and Science & Technology, or they could search by format, like Manuscript, Audio Recording, or Notated Music, depending on what they were hoping to find. Upon opening up the Aaron Copland collection specifically, I again worked through the TPS protocol to model critical thinking as I narrowed my search for a specific primary source: Observe: “When I click About this Collection, there is helpful background both on the kinds of primary sources I can find here as well as an Introduction to the composer himself.” 216 Reflect: “The list of Copland’s influences seems super interesting, but I need to remember that my task is to find an actual primary source that will give me something to analyze and evaluate.” Question: “How can I use the tabs along the left-hand side to help narrow my search further?” I then had students help me make decisions about where to look and what to click to help limit my search, ensuring that they understood my objective for finding a primary source for this project. For example, after clicking “Articles and Essays,” we came across informational texts about Copland; I asked if any of these would work as primary sources for this project, and students successfully answered, “No,” these were secondary, not primary, sources. Upon realizing that there were still 982 primary sources to choose from within the Collection Items, we navigated back to the “About this Collection” page and viewed the featured content along the top. I found a photograph that particularly caught my attention and piqued my interest as a musician: Aaron Copland with Marian Anderson, rehearsing “Lincoln Portrait.” Having performed “Lincoln Portrait” once before in a college wind ensemble and holding a little bit of background knowledge about the singer Marian Anderson, I announced to students that I had found a primary source that I knew would sustain my curiosity throughout the project. I found it interesting that Anderson, a Black female operatic singer, had the honor of performing the speaking role in Copland’s piece, which quotes excerpts from speeches by Abraham Lincoln. Considering the multiple personal connections I could make to either individual featured in the photo, I knew that I could successfully integrate my own narrative voice while analyzing this artifact and making an argument about how it shows artistic influence and 217 collaboration. I made sure to save the URL so I could return to it later, again modeling for them the ways to find and curate their own information sources, as outlined in the NCTE Definition of Literacy in a Digital Age. Students then had time to start searching through the LoC digital archives, knowing that they would have even more time the next day to continue narrowing their searches and determine a primary source on which they would focus their attention. I took the time to circulate the room, take questions, and get a sense of how their search experience was going. One particular question struck me: “Mrs. Plevka-Jones, I looked up Nina Simone because I know she was a very important artist as well as an activist. I thought there would be a lot from her, but I can hardly find anything.” I told this student that what she was noticing was something I was planning to bring up the next day, so I challenged her to think about why that might be. “Why does a composer like Aaron Copland have an entire curated collection,” I asked, “whereas a performer like Nina Simone receives hardly any attention in the digital archives?” I prompted her to think about it and promised to return to those questions in the following day’s lesson. In a way, her question reminded me of Luiselli’s curatorial intentions through her intertextuality; the references Luiselli makes in Lost Children Archive are not limited by a particular literary movement or geographic region. Instead, she reaches across a wide range of material to bring as many resonant voices together into the conversation. My student wanted to hear Nina Simone’s voice but was surprised that she was not already included in the LoC digital collections. 218 Accordingly, I started the next class by announcing that I wanted to share a few more considerations when searching in the Library of Congress before students would have the rest of the hour to find a primary source. I used the TPS protocol again to get the conversation started: Observe: “I found this photograph of Aaron Copland and Marian Anderson yesterday as featured content in a curated collection.” Reflect: “I wonder what is so significant about this primary source that a curator decided to feature it amidst all of the other artifacts by and about Aaron Copland.” Question: “Can I find other primary sources featuring Marian Anderson that might help me understand this relationship further? I started by looking to see if there was a Digital Collection already created for Anderson as well, but there was not. I then compared this to the student’s experience searching for Nina Simone and asked the class why that might be. “Well, to put it simply,” one student offered, “Copland is a White male and Anderson is a Black woman.” I nodded approvingly and thoughtfully, then encouraged the class to think about it even further: “Now, beyond what we know to historically be the power differences between races and genders in the United States, let’s consider why we are seeing those imbalances reflected in the Library of Congress.” Students took a moment to contemplate and gradually come to terms with the material reality of whose artifacts are documented and saved over time; they also considered the intellectual prestige that comes with being a composer in comparison with performers, then further reinforced by race and gender. “This isn’t to say that Marian Anderson and Nina Simone weren’t also being photographed or corresponding with other artists,” I explained, “but rather, it is a question of who thought those pictures and letters were worth hanging onto and sending to an archive 219 to preserve and share with the public.” In relation to Luiselli’s theory of an archive as a valley for hearing thoughts bounce back transformed, this limitation means recognizing that the walls of the archive may not contain the kind of resonant material necessary to create the echoes the researcher anticipates. Alongside the objectives of the MeSearch/WeSearch project, this conversation served to reinforce the importance of creating our own artifacts that represent our unique identities and perspectives. Although the Artivism Reviewed project limited students to a particular repository that may not include the voices they were anticipating hearing, conversations like these assured me that the takeaways from this project would extend far beyond my classroom and continue to motivate students as critical and inclusive researchers. With this critical mindset at work, I did another “Everything” search for “Marian Anderson” in the LoC. First, I noticed how there were 25,021 items available online, compared to 25,261 items total, and made sure students understood the difference between the digital archives and the physical building in Washington, D.C. I also observed that the search results included a few blogs and web pages; while these internet spaces could be considered primary sources for some projects, I explained that for the purposes of this assignment — analyzing and evaluating the impacts of artists and activists — these would not work because they were not directly connected to Anderson’s life and work but instead created in retrospect. Finally, I clicked on a newspaper link, thinking that it might provide an interesting written account, contextualizing Anderson’s legacy or reputation, but we soon realized that almost all of the quarter-million search hits were for a newspaper called The Anderson Intelligencer, which had nothing to do with the performer and instead simply shared the last name. I reminded students that we were working with a vast and complex digital archive, so the search process was 220 bound to be messy and complicated. I encouraged them to keep an optimistic — yet critical — mindset, not just settling for a primary source because it was easy to find, but searching for an artifact that truly resonated and would keep them engaged and interested for the next two weeks of the unit. Students then had the rest of the class period to find their primary source and email me a URL. Throughout the hour, as I received links, I hollered out enthusiastically at students, “This is so interesting! I’m so excited to learn more about this from you.” The majority of students’ choices were visual artifacts, such as a photograph of a Frank Lloyd Wright house, a sketch of choreography for a ballet called “Demons,” and a comic book cover featuring Jackie Robinson; others found audio artifacts, such as interviews with David Bowie and Elton John; and a few students chose written artifacts, like a handwritten letter from Mahatma Gandhi that took us several minutes to slowly read and decipher. Some students still struggled to find a primary source that would meet the assignment expectations and match their own interests. One of the most common concerns I heard was, “It’s cool, but I have no idea how I’ll write a whole paper about this.” I reminded them of the adage that a picture is worth a thousand words and reassured them that I would be sharing specific strategies for getting into a close reading, listening, and/or viewing of their primary sources. I reemphasized that being interested and curious was truly the first priority and the rest would come later as we worked through the steps. The week ended with a demonstration of the TPS Primary Source Analysis Tool. I explained how I had been using this model for observing, reflecting, and questioning to guide my thinking earlier in the week when finding my own primary source, so they were already a little familiar with the process and would be transferring that knowledge to their analysis. Depending on the type of artifact they 221 selected, whether print, video, audio, or audio-visual, I distributed the corresponding handouts available from the LoC website under the Education tab; through the umbrella of observations, questions, and reflections, each handout lists a series of genre-specific questions to guide students’ inquiry. I emphasized that the process is meant to be cyclical, not linear, as observations, reflections, and questions lead one into another, and I explained that they were not required to answer every single guiding question on their handout. “Instead,” I emphasized, “these questions are simply a guide to get you in the critical mindset of making observations about your primary source, reflecting on its significance, and asking questions for further investigation.” The tool was intended as a way of starting to listen for some of the resonances they might ultimately bring into their review essay. To further model these questions in practice, I brought back up the photograph of Aaron Copland with Marian Anderson rehearsing “Lincoln Portrait” on the projector and encouraged students to open it up on their devices so they could zoom in and out to notice the tiniest of details. I challenged them to find the most intricate features that no one else in the room would observe, to pose unique reflections that only they could have, and to ask questions that would require further outside research to answer. Using a think-pair-share protocol, I posted the Observe questions for Photographs/Prints, including, “Describe what you see. What do you notice first? What people and objects are shown?” Students shared the following initial noticings: Observe: “There is a man and a woman in focus,” “The man is smiling,” “The man is looking at the camera,” “The woman’s shirt or jacket has a cool pattern,” “The woman’s hand is on a music stand but there is no music,” “That is definitely a cello scroll in the background,” “I can see the backs of the musicians,” “The musicians seem to be wearing 222 the same yellow shirts, so maybe it is before a concert,” and “There are microphones attached to the music stand, so the woman probably has a singing or speaking role.” I paused to note that the last two observations also included inferences that led us naturally to start reflecting on the purpose and significance of the photo. Again, my students were not necessarily making hypotheses at this stage, but they were critically exploring their observations further: Reflect: “It seems like the man was aware that the photograph is being taken, but he also looks genuinely happy, not just posed,” “The woman appears calm and confident,” “The title says that the man is Aaron Copland and the woman is Marian Anderson, who Mrs. Plevka-Jones already told us about, but I wonder why they are rehearsing this piece together,” “I see some natural light and greenery in the background, so I wonder if this is an outdoor concert space,” “I wish I could see more of the musicians and their instruments,” and “If this photograph were taken today, it would probably be a lot more clear and a lot less backlit.” Finally, I invited students to build from these observations and reflections to ask questions that could lead to further research and analysis: Question: “What was the relationship between Copland and Anderson?” “Where was this rehearsal at?” “When did this rehearsal take place? Was it indoors or outdoors?” “Who were the musicians in the orchestra?” and “Why was there a photographer taking pictures of the rehearsal?” I responded enthusiastically that together we had — much to my students’ surprise — come up with more than enough material to shape into an essay, and I added that if I were writing this from my own 223 unique perspective, I would be able to add in personal connections from my memories of performing this piece. Students seemed much more confident, then, as they moved through the next days’ brainstorming, brainmapping, drafting, peer reviewing, and revising days, working towards final drafts that demonstrated critical thinking and insightful connections. While they were initially overwhelmed by the chaotic noise of the digital archive, their focused attunement was beginning to let them hear meaningful sounds, and I promised that if they continued committing to the listening process, they would begin to find resonance. As students’ work became more independent and individualized, I gradually released control and simply enjoyed learning with and from the connections they were making. Students started performing their own primary source analyses using the Analyzing Primary Sources handout, and I referred to this lesson as our brainstorming day, an opportunity for students to get down every possible thought they could have related to the primary source. Then, the next day was for brainmapping: making sense of their ideas and anticipating how they could use multiple writing voices when composing their essays. I shared the following prompts to ensure that students were prepared to meet each of the requirements for this essay: STEP ONE: Write a claim (argumentative voice). Consider the following criteria, adapted from page 46 of The Art of Activism by Steve Duncombe and Steve Lambert, when making your judgment: ARTISTS ACTIVISTS …are expressive. …are instrumental. …use tactics. …use strategy. 224 …make cultural change. …make material change. …focus on relationships. …focus on outcomes. …act as individuals. …act as collectives. …create timeless work. …create timely work. …value esoteric work. …value accessible work. …cause affect. …cause effect. Circle the statements that relate to your artist or activist, and jot down any notes. Then, write your claim. Remember this will be the final sentence of your essay: I give _________________________ ____________ stars. name of artist or activist # out of 5 STEP TWO: Make personal connections (narrative voice). Respond to the prompts below to generate potential ideas. ● Consider why you chose your primary source. What drew you to the artist/activist or their work? ● In what ways are the artist’s/activist’s identities and experiences similar to your own?…different from your own? ● What other connections could you make to your primary source? STEP THREE: Outline how you will support your claim (informational voice). 225 Reference your primary source analysis tool and consider how you could organize your essay. Remember, the bulk of your essay should be focused on your primary source, but you may also use outside research to contextualize it and answer any of your questions. By the end of the brainmapping session, some students were fully prepared and ready to start drafting, whereas others needed more one-on-one time to talk through their ideas and anticipate what they would be writing. Just as the NCTE Professional Knowledge for the Teaching of Writing guidelines assert, writing is a process and a tool of thinking that takes time. Allowing for multiple days of drafting and conferencing, followed by peer review and revision sessions, ensured that all students were able to fully engage in the work and tackle the productive challenges of analyzing primary sources and making personal connections. Perhaps the most challenging part of this approach to teaching with primary sources from my perspective as the teacher was feeling overwhelmed by the variety of artifacts students found and my own lack of knowledge about the materials they were analyzing, but with this came excitement, intrigue, and a release of control as well. While some students chose artists and activists they had heard of and learned about in school before, such as the painter Georgia O’Keefe, the pilot Amelia Earhart, and the boxer Muhammad Ali, other students selected figures they claimed to be less familiar with, including the gay rights activist Frank Kameny, the women’s health advocate Margaret Sanger, and the founder of the National Council of Negro Women Mary McLeod Bethune. When these students were making personal connections to their primary sources, I prompted the latter group with questions inspired by the NCTE Definition of Literacy in a Digital Age. I asked, “Why haven’t we 226 heard of these folks before? Why aren’t these artists and activists included in textbooks?” Their responses especially resonated with the statement’s prompting for learners to “analyze narratives to address accuracy, power dynamics, equity, monolithic notions of race, ethnicity, culture, gender, sexuality, or ability.” I was impressed by their critical thinking and encouraged to continue this project in the future, feeling less daunted by my own lack of knowledge and excited to learn alongside my students. It would also be interesting to adapt this project for non-digital archives and special collections as well, helping students further understand the material reality of primary sources. In this iteration, however, my students successfully learned that the Library of Congress is much more than a repository for legal documents. I am confident that they now understand it to be a living archive of human experience, made of artifacts left behind by artists and activists, collected and curated with care, then made available for individuals to learn from and connect with. Approaching this work through inspiration from Green’s essays and motivation from Duncombe and Lambert’s book provided my students and me with a clear, productive focus. We pursued this work with a curious and critical mindset, continually learning what it means to be a writer by engaging with the stories told by primary sources. Ultimately, we were able to recognize differences in whose stories are represented and overcome difficulties in accessing those stories in the digital archives. Taken together, the MeSearch/WeSearch and Artivism Reviewed projects demonstrated how a pedagogy of resonance empowered students toward careful and critical listening to their own stories and to others’, letting them hear important connections. Students’ personal artifacts gave them an opportunity to generate new material from their own unique identities and experiences not yet represented in “official” archives, while analyzing primary sources in the LoC helped them to 227 understand how they can learn from artists and activists who came before them. In the context of the coronavirus pandemic and students’ experiences of “unprecedented” isolation, this work reminded them that they are never alone and they can always learn from those who came before them. They can find connection, community, and consolation through curiosity and criticality. While this dissertation has demonstrated the potential for a methodology of resonance to hear connections intertextually, transmodally, transnationally, and transhistorically through literature toward social justice, working with this theory pedagogically in relation to students’ writing and research further helped me consider the psychological potential of resonance as well. By calling resonance an attunement, I am referring to a practiced way of listening and being open and aware, but in relation to developmental psychology, attunement also refers to a sense of connection and mutual understanding between individuals and across communities. Although beyond the scope of this dissertation, further study could consider the overlap of psychology alongside literary theory and literacy pedagogy when audiences are attuned to sonic ways of knowing. As Luiselli’s novel exemplifies and emulates, careful listening creates meaningful connections. 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