Mapping the Urban Database Documentary: Authorial Agency in Utopias of Kaleidoscopic Perception and Sensory Estrangement

Storytelling by Sound. A Theoretical Frame for Radio Drama Analysis

The veil and the headscarf have become deeply controversial signifiers of identity in recent years. In a conjuncture which is rather too hastily described as ‘a clash of civilizations’, in Christian-secular western Europe wearing the veil or scarf in public has come to epitomize a fundamentalist and antimodern Islamic culture that is opposed to freedom and emancipation. Fierce debates about banning the scarf and veil have taken place in France and Germany, as also in other countries like Belgium, the Netherlands and Switzerland. The way in which this issue has escalated as a theme in the debate about identity politics is nowhere clearer than in the July 2010 decision of the French National Assembly to categorically ban the wearing of the full niqab or burka, in the name of human dignity and equality. In the opinion of many commentators, this amounted to a highly questionable readiness to enforce dignity and equality at the expense of the rights of individual freedom. The vehemence of the debate, and the ease with which the basic rights of individuals were overridden, demonstrate a preoccupation with questions of identity that far exceeds the material question of dress alone. In view of this vehemence, it is not surprising to find an ostensibly stark dichotomy of values in play: tradition as opposed to modernity, progress as opposed to reaction, religion to reason, and emancipation to oppression. But if we look at how the question of veiling has been negotiated in Europe since the Reformation, it becomes clear how deeply invested the West has been in this history of uncovering and concealing. It also becomes clear just how complex and contradictory are the criteria, and thus also the values, that have been applied to both the enforcement of veiling and its prohibition. This essay will offer a history of veiling regulations in Catholic and Reformed societies of early modern Europe that are often as unexpected as they are stereotypical. The chequered history of the demarcations this has involved will hopefully help us to challenge the false polarization of allegedly sharp distinctions in the current debates about veiling. In 1827 Johann Georg Krünitz’s Oekonomische Encyklopädie was still well aware of the volatile history of the female veil in western European societies.

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Covered Women?: Veiling in Early Modern Europe

It has always been stated that the radio is the invisible medium that has the greatest effect in stimulating the imagination of listeners. Therefore, this article intends to compare two kinds of presentation structure—dramatisation versus narration—in a fictional radio story to determine the extent to which the imagination is aroused and the point to which the listener becomes involved. The outcomes of the study point to the fact that the dramatised structure is the form of presentation that is best able to fulfil these aims.

Stimulating the Imagination in a Radio Story: The Role of Presentation Structure and the Degree of Involvement of the Listener

In German-speaking research on ‘Horspiele’ or radio plays, there is little to be found when it comes to adequate theoretical tools for analysing a radio play. Radio drama is still widely seen as a literary genre and is therefore analysed by literary studies theories or drama theories. This article argues that radio drama is an acoustic art form in its own right and should be analysed as such. Its aim is to support this argument first by describing the historical reasons that led to the misinterpretation of the art form, and then by presenting a methodology, based on semiotic and narratological theories, that enables scholars to analyse a narrative radio play by integrating all of its acoustic features. The article seeks to emphasize that music, noises and voices and also technical features like electroacoustical manipulation or mixing, can be, and often are, used as tools to signify story elements and therefore should be analysed accordingly. To demonstrate the applicability of the model, a short analysis of some German radio plays is presented at the end of the article. This article summarizes the results of research, to be published in German, in which an analytical model for radio drama research is presented, the object of the study being 60 German radio plays from 1929 to 2002 (Huwiler 2005). Although there are reasons why we should not equate the German ‘Horspiel’ with the English ‘radio play’, the two terms are used equivalently in this article. In general, these reasons arise from the separate developments of the art form in the two different language regions. Horst Priessnitz observes that in ‘contrast with the way things developed in Germany, where the Horspiel could at an early date free itself from its connections with the theatre, the English radio play remained for a longer period in close alliance with stage performance’ (Priessnitz 1981: 32). However, I will show in this article that the German ‘Horspiel’, though at first more independent of stage drama than was the English radio play, was also strongly influenced by literary tradition and not as independent as Priessnitz suggests. Moreover, it is not only the case that the terms ‘radio play’ and ‘Horspiel’ have never been exactly synonymous at any one time, but between them they cannot even provide a historically coherent definition of the art form in the two language regions, since neither term 45 RJ–ISBAM 3 (1) 45–59 © Intellect Ltd 2005 Keywords

Storytelling by Sound: A Theoretical Frame for Radio Drama Analysi

Huwiler also takes Friedrich Schiller’s Theatre as a moral institution as a point of departure, but continues studying a play written in Schiller’s post-revolutionary period: Wilhelm Tell (1804). While examining two contrasting performance traditions—a critical and an affirmative one—, Huwiler shows how this German play, centring on a Swiss folk hero, is supremely apt for taking the temperature of the nation and reading off the changes to its self-image and how it has developed into the national play of Switzerland.

Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell: The National Play of Switzerland?

Der Band enthalt 13 Studien zum Schauspiel des Mittelalters und der Fruhen Neuzeit. Dabei werden sowohl theoretische Betrachtungen, etwa zum Unterschied zwischen Osterfeier und Osterspiel und zur Bedeutung der Musik fur die Spiele, wie auch Untersuchungen zu spezifischen Texten vorgelegt.

E. Huwiler

Papers

Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell: The National Play of Switzerland?

Wat nyeus verfraeyt dat herte ende verlicht den sin. Studien zum Schauspiel des Mittelalters und der Frühen Neuzeit