[Ethnocomm] CFP: VOX MEDIA: Sound in Literature [Deadline Approaching]

[Nuno Neves]

MATLIT, 2017, vol. 5
VOX MEDIA: Sound in Literature
Editors: Osvaldo Manuel Silvestre (University of Coimbra)
Felipe Cussen (University of Santiago de Chile)

Call for Papers
The easiness by which the idea of literature translates into the idea of
text and the latter into “letters printed on paper” is probably to blame
for the one-sided version both common sense and critical belief constantly
show of the relation between readers and books: literature is something
that we read in silence. Better still, literature is a text that becomes a
book by means of an inscription process that becomes invisible itself,
since the materiality of the text is annulled as a result of what is being
transmitted by the former: ideas, meaning, in a word, contents.

And yet, there is no literature without a material inscription process
which turns each verbal sign into a thing belonging to the phenomenal
world, to be seen before being read and to be read in silence – or not. Or
else, in order to be spoken (another form of material inscription),
preceding and dispensing with the writing or coming immediately after it.
There are, it is well known, western and non-western literary narratives in
which Voice precedes writing. There are, also, some arguments supporting
this claim, although one might suspect a mild revisionist tone to some of
them. Nevertheless, this is not about searching for a privilege of the
Origin for the study of the sound dimension of literary phenomena, but
rather about admitting the relevance of such a field to a larger,
simultaneously modern and archaic, version of literature.

In the crossing of historical vanguards and changes in communication
technologies, literature has opened itself to the materialities of sound,
voice and performance. This process was accelerated and dramatized by both
mediation and technical reproduction up until the digital revolution, which
eventually led to the historical and technological specificity of the
post-digital state of affairs. The process further suffered the overlap of
massification, thus operating to a large extent on a scene of
“re-oralization”, although by then within the historical setting of a
“secondary orality”. From the more avant-garde to the more massified
environments, from Sound Poetry to the Spoken Word or Slam Poetry, without
overlooking the vast intermediary territory of “readings (or recitations)
of poetry”, it is safe to admit that the self-awareness that planet
literature has is also to encompass those ever-growing dimensions: phonetic
poetry, sound poetry, recordings of literary texts (either by its own
authors or other readers), setting of poems into music (especially in the
cases in which the voice is not turned into singing, thus sabotaging the
form of “song”), poetry and narrative live readings, spoken word, slam
poetry, rap.

MATLIT’s volume 5 is thus intent on exploring what we call literature as
VOX MEDIA: voice as a means for literature and the disturbances suffered by
the medium from the combined effect of performance and the technologies for
mediation, representation and reproduction. And also other instances, like
the tensions between the body and technology, audibility v. inaudibility of
text, sound and meaning, physical presence and/or absence of the authors,
and so forth. The goal is not only that of generating a catalogue or a
compendium of the contemporary effects of VOX MEDIA on the notion of
literature, but that of generating an archaeology for VOX MEDIA and for all
related phenomena repressed by their historical invisibility.

Submissions must be uploaded before *October 31, 2016*.
Prior to submission, authors have to register in the journal system:
http://iduc.uc.pt/index.php/matlit/login
Please see author guidelines:
http://iduc.uc.pt/index.php/matlit/about/submissions
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