The Voice as Something More: Essays toward Materiality

Description

In the contemporary world, voices are caught up in fundamentally different realms of discourse, practice, and culture: between sounding and nonsounding, material and nonmaterial, literal and metaphorical. In The Voice as Something More, Martha Feldman and Judith T. Zeitlin tackle these paradoxes with a bold and rigorous collection of essays that look at voice as both object of desire and material object. Using Mladen Dolar’s influential A Voice and Nothing More as a reference point, The Voice as Something More reorients Dolar’s psychoanalytic analysis around the material dimensions of voices—their physicality and timbre, the fleshiness of their mechanisms, the veils that hide them, and the devices that enhance and distort them. Throughout, the essays put the body back in voice. Ending with a new essay by Dolar that offers reflections on these vocal aesthetics and paradoxes, this authoritative, multidisciplinary collection, ranging from Europe and the Americas to East Asia, from classics and music to film and literature, will serve as an essential entry point for scholars and students who are thinking toward materiality. Contents Preface List of Illustrations List of Musical Examples (Print) List of Website Examples (Audiovisual) Introduction The Clamor of Voices (Martha Feldman and Judith T. Zeitlin) Part I: Sound-Producing Voice 1. Speech and/in Song (Steven Rings) 2. From the Natural to the Instrumental: Chinese Theories of the Sounding Voice before the Modern Era (Judith T. Zeitlin) Part II: Limit Cases 3. Voice, Music, Modernism: The Case of Luigi Nono and Karlheinz Stockhausen (Marcelle Pierson) 4. Screamlines: On the Anatomy and Geology of Radio (Neil Verma) Part III: Vocal Owners and Borrowed Voices 5. It’s All by Someone Else (Robert Polito) 6. The Artist’s Impression: Ethel Waters as Mimic (Laurie Stras) 7. “I Am an Essentialist”: Against the Voice Itself (James Q. Davies) Part IV: Myth, Wound, and Gap 8. Is the Voice a Myth? A Rereading of Ovid (Shane Butler) 9. Voice Gap Crack Break (Martha Feldman) 10. The Gesamtkunstwerk and Its Discontents: The Wounded Voice in (and around) Alexander von Zemlinsky’s The Dwarf (David J. Levin) 11. There Is No Such Thing as the Composer’s Voice (Seth Brodsky) Part V: Interlude: The Gendered Voice 12. Vowels/Consonants: The Legend of a “Gendered” (Sexual) Difference Told by Cinema (Michel Chion, translated by Zakir Paul) Part VI: Technology, Difference, and the Uncanny 13. The Prosthetic Voice in Ancient Greece (Sarah Nooter) 14. The Duppy in the Machine: Voice and Technology in Jamaican Popular Music (Andrew F. Jones) 15. The Actor’s Absent Voice: Silent Cinema and the Archives of Kabuki in Prewar Japan (Jonathan Zwicker) 16. A Voice That Is Not Mine: Terror and the Mythology of the Technological Voice (Tom Gunning) Afterword Voices That Matter (Mladen Dolar) List of Contributors Index