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

Chapter five, “The Literarized Voice of the Modernist Theatre,” visits the tensions expressed toward language and speech in the theory and dramaturgy of Bertolt Brecht, Eugene Ionesco, Samuel Beckett, and Peter Handke to situate them as analogous to the structural and semiotic projects. With the exception of Brecht, the chapter makes no claims of a direct influence between the theorists and the practitioners but identifies similarities in order to afford a view of the practice as an engagement with like symptoms and issues. The chapter argues that the practitioners, like the theorists, intuited the challenges and changes introduced by new electronic media and that their work, primarily textual in orientation, manifests a conflict of aural and visual sensibilities. In consequence, the voice registers as a site of contested meaning.

Between chapter five and six, I insert a brief “Interlude” entitled “Walter Benjamin's Technological Voice.” Throughout the book, some of the noteworthy and influential twentieth-century theories of technology and communication media have been subsumed under the subjects of different chapters, specifically Heidegger's and Sartre's in chapter two and Baudrillard's in chapter six. Benjamin's theory, as expressed in the 1936 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” does not find a comparable home. As a literary critic, Benjamin was no phenomenologist, structuralist, or poststructuralist, even though he harbored driving interests in related themes and especially in mediation and technology. So although his work broaches issues of interest to phenomenologists and structuralists and although his thinking has been identified as anticipating the postmodern moment, his theory of technology stands alone in key respects. The interlude summarizes the position of the essay “The Work of Art,” notes its debt to Brechtian theory, and teases out Benjamin's implications for a hearing of the voice in technologized media, specifically the sound-synchronized film.

“The Poststructural Voice,” the sixth chapter, explores the critique of the voice in the poststructural and postmodern theories of Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard, and Jean Baudrillard. One general observation regarding poststructuralism notes its extension of the claims of linguistic hegemony initiated in structural