Rhetoric scholar Andrew C. Hansen notes that early Americans, particularly during the nineteenth-century, were “more sonically oriented than we are.” Indeed, particularly in the nineteenth-century, United States citizens often understood themselves and their world through sound and sonic culture. One reason for this was the predominance of cultures and practices of oratory and eloquence, which were popularly represented and accessed through the Lyceum circuit, a touring lecture series wherein audiences would gather to receive public lectures for entertainment.

While our current culture is less orally situated that the nineteenth-century’s–thus often privileging the chirographic and/or typographic text over other rhetorical modes–our more popular forms of communication involve a great deal of multimodality. Think, for instance, of TikTok and its complex combinatory use of visual, aural, and recursive textuality.

Of course, one of the most popular (yet generally “high brow”) forms of communication is the podcast. As part of this class’s multimodal approach to analyzing, discussing, and forming arguments about literary texts, students in English 307: Survey of American Literature are given the option to produce podcasts with their fellow students (typically in groups of 3-5). Some basic requirements are that students’ podcasts run approximately 10-15 minutes in length without exceeding 30 minutes, and that each member of the group contribute to the podcast’s production and content.

For these projects, group members must work collectively to decide how their podcast should be organized and presented. Students often listen to other podcasts–especially ones dealing with literary subjects–as inspiration for their own. In some cases, students submit group-completed annotated bibliographies of all academic sources used and referenced for the production of their podcast project.