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In his course on the Neutral at the Collège de France in 1977-1978, Roland Barthes explained that voice is “a false good subject, an object that resists: sparks off adjectives (soft, startling, white, neutral, etc., voice) but nothing more.” Voice is often understood in the paradigm of life and death: Plato’s
Phaedrus notably opposes
viva voce to writing, writing being on the side of death as immortality. Speaking viva voce, bringing a voice to life, isn’t this the primary mission of a poem, involving as it does a written and an oral dimension? Is a poem written to be spoken or declared at all times, like Walt Whitman’s oral and even operatic poetry? Whitman’s poetics are indeed deeply related to performance, just as a play is written to be played on stage. Is voice a chiasmus, a crux between the outside, alterity and oneself, one’s own musical body, what Danielle Cohen-Levinas referred to as “needing an incarnation other than itself”? For the musicologist, a “voice is the emanation of a repressed body. Such is the project of music in the Western civilization from the 17th century to the dawn of the 20ieth century.” According to Cohen-Levinas, it is endowed with the ability to turn the body away. One hears this diversion of the body in voices from the 18th century up to the beginning of the 20ieth century, or in a much more radical way, in Wagner’s project, for instance, where the body becomes indifferent, a mere corporal envelope. On the other hand, as Violaine Anger explains, as polysemic as the word voice may be, it remains the seat of unification: “if there is only one word [voice], that is because it marks the presence of a subject. Less an individual—which is a biologic notion— than a subject, however torn and unsure of its being and identity as it may be.” From the frantic voice of the lyric subject during the Romantic period to the collective voice drowned in the sea of modernity, in
Idée de la voix, Claude Jamain sees and analyzes voice as having always been an entity to be sought and questioned.
This international symposium proposes to interrogate the textuality of voice under all its forms and shapes. It will be the occasion to listen to the voices haunting theater and opera stages, those at work in literature but also on the radio and in films. The symposium will focus on the chiasmus between voice and scription, on their corporeity as well as their spectrality. We will question how voices create meaning and how they overflow it, using a diachronic, translinguistic and transdisciplinary approach.
Organisation-
Sylvie Le Moël, professeur de littérature allemande à l'UPEC et membre d'IMAGER
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Marie Olivier, maître de conférences en littérature anglo-américaine à l'UPEC et membre d'IMAGER