Dramatic Theories of Voice in the Twentieth Century By Andrew Ki ...

origins, engaged the most sustained and formal inquiry into the evolution of vocal anatomy and vocalized language. The empirical pursuit of the voice intersects with the concerns raised in the philosophies and human sciences, offers promising solutions to disputed issues, and provides strategies for further research into the interrelationship of being and speaking.

In comparison to the research on the voice in the philosophies and sciences, theatre criticism has had little to say, and this should strike us as odd given that vocalized speech constitutes one of the most recognizable aspects of theatre practice. Taking into account the immense influence the philosophies of language have had on criticism in the past century, it seems counterintuitive that the theatre, as a popular, public, and linguistic cultural practice, has not been able to volunteer a unique perspective to a discussion of the voice. Until recently, theatre scholarship focused almost exclusively on the visual artifact: the body, the mise-en-scène, and the dramatic text. A handful of articles on the voice serve as exceptions, but the exceptions tend to suffer because, as a discipline, we have yet to create a critical language adequate to address the voice. Also, prior to this work we have not had a book-length study that has attempted to supply an overview of the issues, historical context, or theoretical parameters. Given the challenges for beginning and sustaining a conversation about the voice, the goals of the present book are quite modest.

Dramatic Theories of Voice primarily aims to distill and articulate the theories of voice generated in twentieth-century philosophic and scientific discourses as well as in dramatic theory and theatre practice. The book seeks to demonstrate that common causal factors stimulate both the theories of voice generated in the linguistic turn and the theories of voice and vocal practices in twentieth-century experimental theatre and that similarities therefore exist across the disciplines. I limit the temporal scope of the book to the twentieth century, even though antecedents for the theories and practices exist in the nineteenth century and linguistic theories date back to the pre-Socratics. Admittedly, history is ignorant of the dates we impose on it, and the frame is, to a degree, arbitrary.