Book chapter
'SECONDARY VOCALITY' AND THE SOUND DEFECT
Sound Effects: The Object Voice in Fiction, pp.19-44
DQR Studies in Literature, Editions Rodopi B V
01/01/2015
DOI: 10.1163/9789004304406_003
Abstract
The place of the reader's rather than the author's voice, the sounding summoned by text in tapping the very nature of alphabetic and thus phonetic language, is a vocal spacing-out (and overlap) of writing that differs from Walter Ong's concept of "secondary orality" in that it is primary to reading itself, not just to recording and transmission. This phonetic mobilization of word forms is found programmatically activated in modern literary writing from Romanticism forward. Its effects, its "sound defects", are tested here with theoretically framed examples from Schiller to George Eliot, where mishearing becomes a productive re-shearing of word breaks in the generative slippage and drift of the "phonotext". Out of what Friedrich Kittler would call this Romantic "discourse network", or what Mladen Dolar might accept as this return of body to language from the outside in, emerges what Giorgio Agamben repeatedly stresses, in his poetics, as the keeping alive of language in what it articulates -or, in other terms borrowed from Agamben, the present "potential" of meaning otherwise. This is an "auralterity" often transacted by the object voice when desubjectified, detached from intention, and set free in the channels of subvocal activation, which is to say in the event of "evocalization".
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- 'SECONDARY VOCALITY' AND THE SOUND DEFECT
- Creators
- Garrett Stewart - University of Iowa
- Contributors
- J SacidoRomero (Editor)S Mieszkowski (Editor)
- Resource Type
- Book chapter
- Publication Details
- Sound Effects: The Object Voice in Fiction, pp.19-44
- Publisher
- Editions Rodopi B V; AMSTERDAM
- Series
- DQR Studies in Literature
- DOI
- 10.1163/9789004304406_003
- ISSN
- 0921-2507
- Number of pages
- 26
- Language
- English
- Date published
- 01/01/2015
- Academic Unit
- Cinematic Arts; English
- Record Identifier
- 9984398055802771
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