Voices and Silence in the Contemporary Novel in English

Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009

This volume examines the various processes at work in expressing silence and excessive speech in contemporary novels in English, covering the whole spectrum from effusiveness to muteness. Even if in the postmodern episteme language is deemed inadequate for speaking the unspeakable, contemporary authors still rely on voice as a mode of representation and a performative tool, and exploit silence not only as a sign of absence, block or withdrawal, but also as a token of presence and resistance. Logorrhoea and reticence are not necessarily antithetical as compulsive verbosity may work as a smokescreen to sidestep the real issues, while silences and gaps may reveal more than they hide. By submitting their texts to both expansion and retention, hypertrophy and aphasia, writers persistently test the limits of language and its ability to make sense of individual and collective stories. The present volume analyses the complex poetics of silence and speech in fiction from the 1960’s to the present, with special focus on Will Self, Graham Swift, John Fowles, Kazuo Ishiguro, Jenny Diski, Lionel Shriver, Michèle Roberts, Margaret Atwood, Jonathan Safran Foer, Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, Zadie Smith, Jamaica Kincaid, Ryhaan Shah and J.M. Coetzee.

O ur contemporary world, with its diverse and innovative means of communication, has created many new written and spoken genres and an abundance of texts. This challenges our thinking and raises many new questions such as: How does the emergence of endless written conversations in real time change the way we read and write literature? How does literature react to the contemporary clear awareness that any text is just a drop in a wide, vast field of written words? How can we rethink the ways in which speech was represented in the past in light of our contemporary thinking? How does our current world shape and reshape the dividing lines between our multifaceted verbal activities? What do the ethics of speech and the ethics of silence mean in these new contexts? And finally, what do listening, attention, and attentive or close reading mean today?

Fiction is simultaneously the most fascinating and the most challenging object of timbre analysis. This article analyses how polyphony, narrative shifts, semantic and syntactic parallelism and other means of the language create a unique aesthetics of each individual piece of artistic writing and generate a recognizable timbre or the voice of the author, where he or she does not want to be too explicit. E.M.Forster, for instance, in his A Room with a View sets the scene in Florence where the two ladies seem to be displeased about the room they have in a Pension. But the dialogue is delicately interspersed with lexical elements used in describing a theatrical performance. When a reader succeeds in observing this fact he begins to hear new timbres in the voices of the heroes and starts noticing the elements that were formerly beyond his or her attention, occupying the side line going parallel to the main narrative. The experience of 'hearing' this theatrical timbre in the reader's mind and perceiving the interplay of timbres related to scene-making discloses a new plane of cognition that is over and above a plain chain of events. Thus, the mental hearing of the text by the reader appears to be a totally new experience, when discovered, making the book the object of unfathomable attraction for the reader and a mental hold that makes a piece of writing totally unforgettable.

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2011

Jacques Rancière has continually unsettled political discourse, particularly through his questioning of aesthetic" distributions of the sensible," which configure the limits of what can be seen and said. Widely recognized as a seminal work in Rancière's corpus, the ...

Narrative, 2004

2011

This paper explores the idea that silences are an important defining element of art. When this concept is applied to literary art, readers can understand unwritten parts, or lack in information, as the "silences" of literature. These silences can be used to further EFL literature discussions, by requiring students to speculate and question about author's decisions to use "silences" in literature. The act of questioning is exercising critical thinking and furthering facilitation abilities, both crucial skills for students, teachers-in-training, and current teachers.

Paper given at 'Giving Life to Politics: The Work of Adriana Cavarero,' University of Brighton, 2017

's interrogation of the Derridean "thesis on metaphysical phonocentrism" (FMTOV: 222)-offered as the epilogue of For More Than One Voice (2005)-strikes, on first encounter, a somewhat, and perhaps surprisingly, discordant note. Coming to For More Than One Voice from a Derridean-Irigarayan background, Cavarero's central claim that "the inaugural act of metaphysics" (9) inheres in privileging semantic ideality over the "dangerously bodily" and "meaningless emissions" (13) of vocalic materiality, feels to me, deeply resonant. To read the history of philosophy as the tale of 'how logos lost its voice' chimes with a narrative about the metaphysical stakes of material erasure that feminist thinkers have articulated and rearticulated over the past half century, while also, importantly, excavating new resources for thinking the patriarchal imaginary otherwise. The "androcentric tradition," (6) Cavarero notes, is predominantly concerned with an "abstract and bodiless universality," (8) a contemplation of immaterial and immemorial ideas in which "speech…finds its home in thought" (9) and the "sense of the voice is entirely bound up with the role of vocalizing concepts." (34) Determining phone as an emissary of the ideality of the logos, of the realm of "mute, visible, present signfieds" (43) has led, Cavarero suggests, to a thoroughgoing reduction of the sonorous voice to nothing but "the superficial outside," "mere shell" (77) or "acoustic robe for the mental work of the concept." (43) The voice has thus, she writes, been progressively "forced to coincide…with the silence of thought," (43) while the material excess of speech has been "eliminated or flayed," (77) discarded as senseless noise