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Summary
This response to Derrida's critique of the spoken uses dozens of examples in four languages to explore the voice that is in writing.
Jacques Derrida has ably analyzed the writing that is in speaking, but this reply to his work analyzes the speaking that is in writing. This book defends and illustrates literary voice against modern philosophy's critique of the spoken, and in the light of Mikhail Bakhtin's dialogism and Henri Meschonnic's studies on subjectivity in rhythmic language. The authors find literary voice to be maximal in bardic speech, where the author speaks for the nation. This full voice stands between the two minimums of the body (grunts and sighs and birdsong), and the material text (loss of logic, narrative, and social tones in Nietzsche and in the American LANGUAGE poets).
"The work draws on poetry, on bardic traditions, on philosophy and linguistics, and on literary theory to develop a compelling argument for the value of 'literary voice.' ...the book stresses the social dimensions of literature, writing, and speaking. This emphasis carries political implications, especially for people whose voices have been ignored... So the book is about literary voice, about dialogues, about speaking subjects (historically situated), about 'exile,' and about the ethical implications of joining dialogues. Hence the importance of Jonah as a metaphor for resistance, language and dialogue." -- Lloyd Kramer, University of North Carolina
"The authors cover a huge field of literary criticism and related fields, past and present, relevant to their concern with literary 'voice' and person. Thoroughly at home in post-post-modern criticism and in deconstruction, they are aware of other scholarly work which makes it possible to assess these traditions from the outside and to identify some of their shortfalls. This book opens new and challenging perspectives."--Walter J. Ong, Saint Louis University
Donald Wesling is Professor of English Literature at the University of California, San Diego, and Tadeusz Sawek is Professor of English Literature and Critical Theory at the English Institute, University of Silesia in Poland.
Table of Contents
Preface
1.
Toward a Philosophy of Literary Voice
Person as Voice: Thinking about a Metaphor
Three Elements of a Comprehensive Philosophy of Literary Voice
A History/Theory of the Relation of Voice to Person
A Theory of Communicative Context
A Stylistics Based on Speech Orientation
The Speaking Subject: Our Most Comprehensive Premise as Derived from Emile Benveniste and Julia Kristeva
Dialogism, Speaking Subject, and the Critique of Existing Theory of Voice
Before Grammatology
After (and beyond) Grammatology
2.
Fish and Bird: Minimal Articulation
The Idea of the Call
Regional Intentionality
The Chasm of the Inarticulate
Birdsong
Exclamations, Cries, and Other Transgressions
Aa!!
3.
Early Modern Speaking Subjects
Grammatical and Legal Position of the Speaker: John Donne and René Descartes
Scenes of Parting: Donne and the Metaphysical Poets
4.
Bardic Voice: Vestiges of the Oral and the National
The Voice of the Living God in the Delphic Oracle and the Book of Jonah
Vestiges of the Oral and the National:Eighteenth-Century Origins of the Bardic in England
The Exiled Voice in Adam Mickiewicz's Pan Tadeusz
Phenomenology of Exile and Voice
Bardic Voice and the Exiled Epilogue
Silencing of Voice
Sociology of the Polish Fatherland
Vachel Lindsay and American Bardic
5.
De-tonation: Another Mode of the Minimal
De-Tonation in Nineteenth-Century Theory: Friedrich Nietzsche
