Voicing the Text (PDF)

Why is voice so important to us? How does the concept of voice encompass such disparate practices as vocal sound, marks on a page, identity production and the execution of power? With these questions in mind, this book studies voice as both a textual and a bodily phenomenon. By using both drama and film, and by exploring the translation between the two, this study shows that voice can be placed in a grid where the subject, body, language and power interconnect in ways that question established ideas concerning voice - what it is and what it can do. The book investigates how voice, as an expression of the individual subject, is central in the fight for power in plays such as The Crucible by Arthur Miller, Amiri Baraka's Dutchman and Ntosake Shange's for colored girls who have considered suicide, where voice is seen as fundamental for political action. However, it also questions the seemingly failsafe connection between voice and the subject. In Eugene O'Neill's Strange Interlude, the relation between voice and thought is neither harmonious nor given, and thus voice becomes something other than an expression of subjective interiority. The discussion of Clare Booth's The Women highlights how voice in ironic discourse disrupts notions of intentionality, subjectivity and power in ways that destabilize preconceived notions of voice. Lastly, the chapter on David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross asks if voice really can empower the subject in an age where processes of reification have invaded the subject's consciousness, including the ability to communicate.