Matter of Voice

Karmen Mackendrick

Description

Philosophers for millennia have tried to silence the physical musicality of voice in favor of the purity of ideas without matter, souls without bodies. Nevertheless, voices resonate among bodies, among texts, and across denotation and sound; they are singular, as unique as fingerprints, but irreducibly collective too. They are material, somatic, and musical. But voices are also meaningful-they give body to concepts that cannot exist in abstractions, essential to sense yet in excess of it. They can be neither reduced to neurology nor silenced in abstraction. They complicate the logos of the beginning and emphasize the enfleshing of all words. Through explorations of theology and philosophy, pedagogy, translation, and semiotics, all interwoven with song, The Matter of Voice works toward reintegrating our thinking about both speaking and authorial voice as fleshy combinings of meaning and music.

Sujets

• Philosophy of mind
• Literary theory
• Philosophy of religion

Informations

• Publié par: Fordham University Press
• Date de parution: 02 mai 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780823270026
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

T h e M a t t e r o f Vo i c e

This page intentionally left blank

The Matter of Voice Sensual Soundings

Karmen MacKendrick

f o r d h a m u n i v e r s i t y p r e s s New York 2016

Copyright © 2016 Fordham University Press

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Visit us online at www.fordhampress.com.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available online at catalog.loc.gov.

Printed in the United States of America 18 17 16 5 4 3 2 1 First edition

To the memory of Helen Tartar

In the manner of those who, as Nelle Morton wrote, “hear each other to speech,” Helen read me to writing. Her ear was poetically perfect — for content, context, style, and their ultimate inseparability. Her trust in my work finally gave me that bit of faith needed to get through the misery and fear and failure of it. I wrote for her. It is harder to write with her gone. But the memory of her reading still draws me out, and I hope this is a book that would have sounded good to her, and that there may still be more.

This page intentionally left blank

c o n t e n t s

 Introduction: Hearing Voices 1. The Matter of Voice 2. Speaking to Learn to Listen 3. Thou Art Translated! 4. The Voice in the Mirror 5. OriginBarleath 6. The Meaning in the Music

Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index

vii

1 13 37 62 78 96 117

139 141 175 189

This page intentionally left blank

Not for all the tea in China Not if I could sing like a bird Not for all North Carolina Not for all my little words

—The Magnetic Fields, “All My Little Words”