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The Matter of Voice

Online ISBN:
9780823270033
Print ISBN:
9780823269990
Publisher:
Fordham University Press
Book

The Matter of Voice

Karmen MacKendrick
Karmen MacKendrick
Le Moyne College
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Published online:
22 September 2016
Published in print:
2 May 2016
Online ISBN:
9780823270033
Print ISBN:
9780823269990
Publisher:
Fordham University Press

Abstract

Though a new and more vibrant materialism has made its way into theory, the words we use to theorize are treated even now as abstractions, and not rematerialized themselves. We still pretend that meanings live beyond the sounds of words and the movements of flesh. But we give voice to these separations, and so we give the lie to them as well. Voices resonate among bodies, among texts, and across denotation and sound. They are material, somatic, and musical—all aspects that have unnerved theoreticians since the Pre-Socratics. Philosophers for millennia have tried to silence the physical musicality of voice in favor of the purity of ideas without matter, souls without bodies. Voices are made dangerous, belonging to monstrously beautiful Sirens and beautifully monstrous opera singers, but not to those whose medium is language. Voice belongs to women, but men’s voices readily speak over others. But voices are also meaningful—they give body to concepts that cannot exist in abstractions, essential to sense yet in excess of it too. They can be neither reduced to neurology nor silenced in abstraction. Through explorations of theology and philosophy, pedagogy, translation, and more, this book works toward reintegrating our thinking about both speaking and authorial voice as fleshy combinings of meaning and music.

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