For those who select books in the humanities--  the author is a professor at the University of Kentucky.

Dramatic Theories

of Voice in the

Twentieth Century

Andrew Kimbrough

ISBN: 9781604977301 6 x 9” Hardcover Level: College & Faculty

332 pages December 2010 US$114.99 / £67.99

Description

The problem of language constituted the most contentious subject of the philosophies

and human sciences in the twentieth-century and drove what came

to be known as the “linguistic turn” to Western thought. Phenomenology, linguistics,

analytic philosophy, speech act theory, anthropology, psychology,

poststructuralism, media studies, and ordinary language philosophy—all addressed

language as the primary vehicle of human thought and communication,

and queried whether any accurate linguistic representation of reality were

possible. The sound of the human voice lay at the center of the debate. The

central question raised by Husserl’s phenomenology and de Saussure’s linguistics,

and discussed throughout the century, concerned whether the sounds

of the voice were intrinsic to meaning or were simply relative. In a related phenomenon,

vocal experimentation marked the twentieth-century avant garde,

which included the nonsense verbal texts of Dada; the electronic mediations of

Samuel Beckett and Peter Handke; and the playful, ironic, and confrontational

performances of Laurie Anderson, Karen Finley, and the Wooster Group. The

experiments mirrored the fixation with voice and language as expressed in the

philosophies and sciences.

Yet despite the centrality of the voice for the philosophy of language, linguistic

study, and performance, no book-length study before now has focused

solely on vocal expression. The voice ranks with gesture as one of two media

of communication available to every fully able-bodied human being, and yet

theatre studies tends to take a visual approach to its objects of critique: the

body, the dramatic text, and the mise-en-scène.

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Meg Shaw
Art & Theater Librarian
Lucille Little Fine Arts Library
University of Kentucky
160 Patterson Dr.
Lexington, KY 40506
859-257-4908

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