Embodied Voices: Representing Female Vocality in Western Culture

ISBN-13: 9780521585835 / Angielski / Miękka / 1996 / 276 str.

Professor Leslie C. Dunn; Nancy A. Jones;Dunn/Jones

Opis

Embodied Voices explores cultural manifestations of feminine vocality in the light of current theories of subjectivity, the body, and sexual difference. The voice has been endlessly fascinating to artists and critics, yet it is the voices of women that have inspired the greatest fascination, because the female voice signifies sexual and cultural power. The fourteen essays in this book examine a wide spectrum of discourses, including myth, literature, music, film, psychoanalysis and critical theory.

Recenzje

'... this book makes a bold step in addressing, not least, the future of musicological discourse; namely, whether and how to (dis)locate the boundaries between the musical and the 'extra-musical'. Thus, it should excite anyone interested in the fundamental issue of the meaning of music in our culture.' Brio

Spis treści

Introduction; Part I. Vocality, Textuality, and the Silencing of the Female Voice: 1. The Gorgon and the nightingale: the voice of female lament and Pindar's Twelfth Pythian Ode; 2. Music and the maternal voice in Purgatorio XIX; 3. Ophelia's songs in Hamlet: music, madness and the feminine; 4. Wordsworth and Romantic voice: the poet's song and the prostitute's cry; Part II. Anxieties of Audition: 5. 'No women are indeed': the boy actor as vocal seductress in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century drama; 6. Deriding the voice of Jeanette MacDonald: notes on psychoanalysis and the American film musical; 7. Adorno and the Sirens: tele-phono-graphic bodies; Part III. Women Artists: Vocality and Cultural Authority: 8. The diva doesn't die: George Eliot's Armgart; 9. Rewriting Ophelia: fluidity, madness, and the voice in Louise Colet's La Servante; 10. Staring the camera down: direct address and women's voices; 11. The voice of lament: female vocality and performative efficacy in the Finnish-Karelian itkuvirsi; Part IV. Maternal Voices: 12. The lyrical dimensions of spirituality: music, voice, and language in the novels of Toni Morrison; 13. Red hot mamas: Bessie Smith, Sophie Tucker, and the ethnic maternal voice in American popular song; 14. Maternalism and the material girl Nancy J. Vickers.