Description
Book SynopsisAudio Book deals with the ways in which the auditoryvoices, sounds, noisesis 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 Böll''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 proble
Trade ReviewWith Audio Book: Essays on Sound Technologies in Narrative Fiction, Mikko Keskinen makes an important contribution to an emerging acoustic turn in literary and cultural studies. This is sound scholarship in both senses of the term. Covering an impressively broad range of national traditions, Keskinen offers original readings of texts by Nick Hornby, Michel Tournier, Heinrich Böll, Sylvia Brownrigg, Don DeLillo, and others. His intelligent and compelling analyses of literary culture's negotiation ofsound reproduction open our ears to the modern acoustic world. I can highly recommend anyone interested in the interrelations between literature, technology, and aural culture to listen in... -- Philipp Schweighauser, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen
With Audio Book: Essays on Sound Technologies in Narrative Fiction, Mikko Keskinen makes an important contribution to an emerging acoustic turn in literary and cultural studies. This is sound scholarship in both senses of the term. Covering an impressively broad range of national traditions, Keskinen offers original readings of texts by Nick Hornby, Michel Tournier, Heinrich Böll, Sylvia Brownrigg, Don DeLillo, and others. His intelligent and compelling analyses of literary culture's negotiation of sound reproduction open our ears to the modern acoustic world. I can highly recommend anyone interested in the interrelations between literature, technology, and aural culture to listen in. -- Philipp Schweighauser, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen
Table of ContentsChapter 1 Dedication Chapter 2 Table of Contents Chapter 3 Acknowledgements Chapter 4 Introduction Chapter 5 1Voces Intimae: Electro-Erotic Speech in Nicholson Baker'sVox Chapter 6 2 Voices Doubles: Auditory Identities in Michel Tournier's Tristan Vox Chapter 7 3 The Cases of Radio Silence: Recorded Reticence and Revisory Declension in Heinrich Böll's "Doktor Murkes gesammeltes Schweigen" Chapter 8 4 Single, Long-Playing, and Compilation: The Formats of Audio and Amourousness in Nick Hornby's High Fidelity Chapter 9 5 The Ghost in the Tape Machine: Posthumous Voice and Residual Presence in Don DeLillo's The Body Artist Chapter 10 6 E-pistolarity and E-loquence: Sylvia Brownrigg's The Metaphysical Touch as a Novel of Letters and Voices in the Age of E-mail Communication Chapter 11 Bibliography Chapter 12 Index Chapter 13 About the Author
