Multisensory Imaginings: An Audionarratological Analysis of Philip Roth's Novel Indignation and its German Radio Play Adaptation Empörung
14 Dec 2016-Vol. 2, Iss: 3, pp 307-321
TL;DR: In this article, the authors analyze the German radio play adaptation of Philip Roth's novel Indignation from an audionarratological perspective and show how both the book and the radio play offer potential for multisensory experiences on the part of readers and radio audiences.
Abstract: This article analyses the German radio play adaptation of Philip Roth's novel Indignation (Emporung, 2010) from an audionarratological perspective and shows how both the book and the radio play offer potential for multisensory experiences on the part of readers and radio audiences. The article furthermore explores how the two media differ in their semiotic and sensory affordances and possibilities. It is argued that aural signs and signals predetermine certain aspects of the storyworld in the radio play: for example, characters' and the narrator's voices, soundscapes, but also ambient sound and music. Due to its focus on the aural channel, radio drama calls on audiences' imagination in distinct ways, while also complicating narratological concepts. The ‘transcriptivity’ from written to spoken text that is inherent in the transposition of novel into radio play accounts for the fact that the radio play also adds new multisensory and interpretive dimensions to its pre-text. It therefore has to be considered ...
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TL;DR: In this paper, the authors explored the different modes of narrative sound in three German radio play adaptations of Auster's New York Trilogy, Stadt aus Glas, Katharina Bihler's Schlagschatten, and Norbert Schaeffer's Hinter verschlossenen Turen.
Abstract: In line with the strong emphasis on visuality in the wake of the “visual turn” in literary and cultural studies, graphic novel adaptations of literary texts have recently been the objects of scholarly study and narratological theory building. Much less attention, if any, has been accorded to radio play adaptations of novels like Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy . An analysis of radio play adaptations acquires a special significance in the case of this highly enigmatic work, which makes a seriously playful use of postmodern narrative strategies. It is perhaps above all this feature which made the adaptation of the novel’s first instalment, City of Glass , into a graphic novel by Paul Karasik and David Mazucchelli so successful. While the graphic novel visualizes characteristic features of its mother text, this paper explores the different modes of narrative sound in three German radio play adaptations of Auster’s novel. Alfred Behrens’ Stadt aus Glas , Katharina Bihler’s Schlagschatten , and Norbert Schaeffer’s Hinter verschlossenen Turen employ narrative devices like voices in both German and English, the evocation of city soundscapes, the narrative uses of music as well as issues of the simultaneity and/or difference of story and discourse time. The narrative auralization of Auster’s novels in the radio plays under discussion can be shown to foreground non-visual aspects of the pre-texts and to add further dimensions for interpretation that underline the usefulness of audionarratological analysis for adaptation studies.
6 citations
TL;DR: A bibliography of Philip Roth-related texts published during 2016, including critical works (books, book chapters, journal essays, and special journal issues) is presented in this article.
Abstract: What follows is a bibliography of Philip Roth-related texts published during 2016, including critical works (books, book chapters, journal essays, and special journal issues). All entries will reflect the format as defined in the eighth edition of the MLA Handbook (2016). All sources are arranged in alphabetical order according to the author’s last name. Individual essays included in edited collections are grouped in “Book Chapters” and are cross-listed according to MLA style. Digital book editions, such as those designed for Amazon’s Kindle and Barnes and Noble’s Nook readers, are not included in this listing. Given the recent growth in e-book technology, digital versions of Roth’s texts are becoming standard practice. This being the case, none of these e-book versions are included in this bibliography. Readers and researchers can easily visit online booksellers to find digital editions.
2 citations
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01 Jan 2016
TL;DR: The authors argue that audiobooks impose limitations on the recipient's continuous in-depth reflection, and as a result, audiobook reading is not suitable for the reader's continuous reflection.
Abstract: Comparisons between audiobook listening and print reading often boil down to the fact that audiobooks impose limitations on the recipient's continuous in-depth reflection. As a result, audiobook li ...
12 citations
01 Jan 2014
10 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors explored the different modes of narrative sound in three German radio play adaptations of Auster's New York Trilogy, Stadt aus Glas, Katharina Bihler's Schlagschatten, and Norbert Schaeffer's Hinter verschlossenen Turen.
Abstract: In line with the strong emphasis on visuality in the wake of the “visual turn” in literary and cultural studies, graphic novel adaptations of literary texts have recently been the objects of scholarly study and narratological theory building. Much less attention, if any, has been accorded to radio play adaptations of novels like Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy . An analysis of radio play adaptations acquires a special significance in the case of this highly enigmatic work, which makes a seriously playful use of postmodern narrative strategies. It is perhaps above all this feature which made the adaptation of the novel’s first instalment, City of Glass , into a graphic novel by Paul Karasik and David Mazucchelli so successful. While the graphic novel visualizes characteristic features of its mother text, this paper explores the different modes of narrative sound in three German radio play adaptations of Auster’s novel. Alfred Behrens’ Stadt aus Glas , Katharina Bihler’s Schlagschatten , and Norbert Schaeffer’s Hinter verschlossenen Turen employ narrative devices like voices in both German and English, the evocation of city soundscapes, the narrative uses of music as well as issues of the simultaneity and/or difference of story and discourse time. The narrative auralization of Auster’s novels in the radio plays under discussion can be shown to foreground non-visual aspects of the pre-texts and to add further dimensions for interpretation that underline the usefulness of audionarratological analysis for adaptation studies.
6 citations
TL;DR: In this article, a radio play adaptation of the novel Lanark: A Life in Four Books (1981) is presented, and the authors focus on the narratological category of "voice" and explore what happens when narrators and characters' voices are actualized in radio drama.
Abstract: Alasdair Gray’s novel Lanark: A Life in Four Books (1981) eludes generic categorization by crossing the boundaries between dystopian fiction, fantasy novel, life writing, and fiction marked by magic realism. In postmodern fashion, it plays with spatiotemporal frameworks and narrative order, shifts narrative voices, and perspectives and uses a multiplicity of presentational modes including dialogue and scholarly text commentary with encyclopedic annotations. In its “Epilogue,” the novel features metalepsis when it introduces the author, who talks to his protagonist about his work. The question arises how the novel’s radio play adaptation, first broadcast by the BBC on 1 November 2014, translates this playfulness into its own semiotic system. This paper particularly focuses on the narratological category of “voice” and explores what happens when narrators’ and characters’ voices are actualized in radio drama, how the radio play uses voice-over narration, voice qualities and the doubling of parts to create a recognizable as well as surprising aural storyworld. It also analyzes how sound techniques and music are employed to create narrative structures. Because of their medial instantaneousness and evanescence, radio plays arguably have to rely on disambiguation to make themselves accessible to a listening audience. However, as this paper shows, they also have a range of radiophonic techniques at their disposal to create narrativity on their own terms.
4 citations
01 Jan 2013
TL;DR: The authors explored the ways in which readers may read characters' conversations in dialogue novels, starting from the premise that reading and understanding fictional dialogue cognitively resembles hearing and interpreting real-life conversations but also involves drawing comparisons with other fictional dialogues one has read.
Abstract: In recent years, cognitive approaches to reading fiction have continued and elaborated on previous work in the fields of reception and reader response theories. While there has been empirical work at the boundaries between narratology, linguistics and cognitive psychology with a view to identifying how real readers read (Bortolussi and Dixon 2003; Emmott, Sanford and Morrow 2003; Zwaan 1993), literary-theoretical approaches have sought to trace the interplay between textual features and mental processes that guide readers in their perceptions of fictional characters (Herman 2011; Palmer 2004; Zunshine 2006). The latter approaches typically focus on the presentation of fictional characters' thoughts, feelings, motives, intentions and the like as inferred from narrative presentations of those characters' thought processes but also movements, body language and glances, for example. Such textual cues are typically found in narratorial comments. What happens if such narratorial context is absent in a fictional text, as is, for example, the case with so-called dialogue novels? In this paper I explore the ways in which readers may read characters' conversations in dialogue novels. Starting out from the premise that reading and understanding fictional dialogue cognitively resembles hearing and interpreting real-life conversations but also involves drawing comparisons with other fictional dialogues one has read (cf. Ralf Schneider's (2001) cognitive theory that involves mental-model construction of characters), I ask to what extent readers can make sense of characters' utterances if those utterances are only minimally embedded in narratorial explanations or not narratively embedded at all. In order to answer this question, I will draw on recent cognitive approaches in pragmatics, which have brought speaker intention into sharper relief. Especially Istvan Kecskes' (2010) socio-cognitive approach to pragmatics will form a backdrop for close linguistic and narratological analyses. This will be supplemented by a discussion of how important it is – despite linguistic methodology borrowed from the analysis of everyday verbal interaction – to attend to the specific literary qualities of fictional dialogue, which arguably trigger additional cognitive mechanisms of reception. Here I will critically refer to a recent study by Sven Strasen (2008), who, building on Pilkington (2000) and others, adopted and further modified pragmatic Relevance Theory to propose new ways of theorizing reception. The novel I will use as a test case is Philip Roth's Deception. Before I present my argument, I will first briefly outline linguistic and stylistic approaches to the study of fictional dialogue.
4 citations