Audio Book: Essays on Sound Technologies in Narrative FictionAudio Book deals with the ways in which the auditory--voices, sounds, noises--is represented in postphonograph narrative fiction. More specifically, it examines how the various technologies enabling the transmission or storing of sound and voice are figured in selected prose works. Drawing from contemporary American, British, French, and German literature, the author discusses these use of these technologies in Nicholson Baker's Vox, Michel Tournier's Tristan Vox, Heinrich B ll's Murke's Collected Silences, Don DeLillo's The Body Artist, Nick Hornby's High Fidelity, and Sylvia Brownrigg's The Metaphysical Touch. The texts foreground sound technologies (the telephone, radio, tape recorder, answering machine, record player, or, counterintuitively, e-mail) in their narration and manifest important aspects of audio in literature. In prior criticism, these texts have not been systematically read from media-technological perspectives. The sound technologies represented in the texts problematize the clear distinction between speech and writing, or between "natural" articulation and its technological reproduction. Audio Book suggests that literary writing is metaphorically conceivable as a transmitting and storing technology, as an audiobook of sorts, capable of recording (upon writing) and reproducing (upon reading) auditory information. The sound technologies proper have also bearing on the narrative structure, metaphorics, and style of each fictional work studied in Audio Book. In addition, themes such as identity, genre, the nature of literary representation, and the absence/presence problem are brought to the fore on account of the technologies depicted. |
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Abby actual amorous analogous answering appears articulation Audio auditory becomes body Body Artist Book Bur-Malottke cassette characters collection communication connection context conversation correspondence culture dead death device discourse e-mail electronic epistolary existence feel Félix fiction figure finds formats function ghost gives hand hear High Fidelity human idea identity JD's kind language Laura Lauren least letter listening literary literature live looking machine material means medium messages metaphor Metaphysical Touch mind Murke Murke's narrative nature noise notes novel original past performance person physical play possibility presence radio reading records refers relate relationship represented reproduction resembles Rey's rhetoric Rob's seems seen sense short story silence single sound speaking speech suggests takes tape telephone thought tion Tristan Vox turns Tuttle Tuttle's University Press vocal voice whereas writing