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

in chronological order and in a linear cause-and-effect fashion, all within an arch-realist three-walled set. In contrast, Salesman jumps in time and place, shifts to within the interior spaces of Willy's head, and resists the effects of a strict realism in favor of a more expressionist feel.²²

McConachie and Nellhaus admit that the influences of the dominant rather than minor forms of communication are easier to identify within the cultural manifestations of a particular society. They also imply that the rapid advances in electronic communication technologies in the twentieth century inhibit a critique of the individual influences a specific technology may have on anything but the dominant trends in cultural practice. Following the Toronto School, they also acknowledge that periods of epistemological crisis follow the introduction of new modes of communication into a society, for the new modes suggest different ways of viewing the world that displace existing ideologies supported by the dominant mode. Hence, beginning with the integration of the telephone and phonograph in the nineteenth century and continuing in the twentieth with radio, sound-synchronized film, television, and computer, the electronically mediated and broadcast voice, disembodied and omnidirectional, sounded from everywhere. The rapid incursion of new media created numerous and overlapping communication frameworks, whose cognitive dynamics relentlessly contested those of print and introduced deep schisms in forms of thought. Theories of voice in the philosophies and the sciences, as well as vocal practices in experimental theatre, arose to negotiate the changes; they therefore represent the causal effects of the presence of the new media. Although I do not conduct a historical analysis in the manner of McConachie and Nellhaus, I do consider the theories and practices as symptoms of a general shift in what McConachie calls the “dominant cognitive culture.”²³

The Voice, Mediation, and the Twentieth Century

In the light of the Toronto School, the conventional wisdom concerning the linguistic turn necessitates revision. Comte's and Frege's positivism, with its arch-visualist perspective, resulted as the inevitable