Sound Effects: The Object Voice in Fiction

Sound Effects combines literary criticism and psychoanalytic theory in eleven original articles which explore the potential of the object voice as an analytic tool to approach fiction. Alongside the gaze, the voice is Jacques Lacan’s original addition to the set of partial objects of classical psychoanalysis, and has only recently been theorised by Mladen Dolar in A Voice and Nothing More (2006). With notable exceptions like Garrett Stewart’s Reading Voices (1990), the sonorous element in fiction has received little scholarly attention in comparison with poetry and drama. Sound Effects is a contribution to the burgeoning field of sound studies, and sets out to fill this gap through selective readings of English and American fiction of the last two hundred years.

Contributors: Fred Botting, Natalja Chestopalova, Mladen Dolar, Matt Foley, Alex Hope, Phillip Mahoney, Sylvia Mieszkowski, Jorge Sacido-Romero, Marcin Stawiarski, Garrett Stewart, Peter Weise, and Bruce Wyse.

Jorge Sacido-Romero, Ph.D. (1967), is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Santiago de Compostela. He has published widely on modern British fiction writers and is the editor of Modernism, Postmodernism, and the Short Story in English (Rodopi, 2012).

Sylvia Mieszkowski, Ph.D. (1973), is currently guest professor of English literature at Bayreuth University. She has published Teasing Narratives (2003), a comparative study on tales of dysfunctional seduction, and Resonant Alterities, a monograph on sound in non-realist fiction (2014).