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

of books and writing within educational systems, introduces new cognitive logics that resemble but do not duplicate primary orality—hence the label secondary orality. The sciences and the philosophies now readily eschew a strict visualism and refashion empiricism to take into consideration synesthesia and embodiment. Intuition has regained validity. In the arts and performance, McLuhan detected the cognitive effects of secondary orality early in the twentieth century in the rejection of the “single descriptive and narrative plane of the printed word” evident in the works of “Paul Klee, Picasso, Braque, Eisenstein, the Marx Brothers, and James Joyce.”³¹ Ong identified Pirandello's plays, the so-called “absurdist” dramaturgy, and the communal theatres of the United States in the 1960s as collapsing the boundaries of performance, breaking with notions of linear time and the sanctity of the text, and, in the last example, hearkening to an oral and dialogical theatrical experience by inviting audience participation.³² As we shall see in later chapters, practitioners of a “theatre of presence”—for example, Artaud and Grotowski and those whom they inspired—as well as performers identified as postmodern deliberately fashion vocal styles that reflect the cognitive reality effects generated by electronic media and indicative of an age of secondary orality.

In summary, this book traverses a number of disciplines in the attempt to articulate the theories of voice expressed or implied in the twentieth century and to relate those theories to theatre practices. The disciplines range from those of the sciences that make up paleoanthropology to those in the philosophies and social sciences that contribute to the linguistic turn to those engaged with philosophies of technology and media. Linguistic theory throughout the twentieth century raised the perplexing question of what exactly we hear when we hear a human voice. Besides simply examining the theories and theatre practices that arose in response, this book aims to settle on some definitive answers by searching for meaning in both the sonorous as well as the linguistic dimensions of the voice. This book also aims to account for the germination and development of the renewed interest in voice and language in the twentieth century, and to that end, it privileges the influence of electronic communication.