Audio Literature: subjectivity, form and remediation

In recent years, there has been an evolution in literary scholarship to take sound and voice seriously as categories of meaning. On the one hand, literary scholars go beyond the book in examining more diverse forms of literary media. On the other hand, new, interdisciplinary fields have started to emerge such as sound studies and literary radio studies. This proposal suggests a number of closely interrelated projects that study new genres and media such as the literary recording and the audiobiography, that rethink familiar categories such as orality and aurality, and that examine changing attitudes to sound and voice (e.g. the use of synthetic voices). These projects combine insights from various fields (e.g. literary studies, media history, cultural studies and linguistics) and experiment with new forms of digital sound analysis (e.g. the use of speech analysis software such as SPRAAK for the analysis of spoken word poetry). They tie in with the interests of the VUB (e.g. the Centre for Literary and Intermedial Crossings (CLIC) and the Brussels platform for digital humanities (DIGI)) and will lead to external funding applications and high-quality publications.