Sounding Postmodernity: Narrative Voices in the Radio Adaptation of Alasdair Gray's Lanark
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.
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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
Cites background from "Sounding Postmodernity: Narrative V..."
...5 On the relation between music and narration, see Mildorf and Kinzel 2017 and Mohr 2015. rather meditative piano passages that underscore the melancholy content of the story, e.g., when the meeting of Blue with his former fiancée is recounted....
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14 Dec 2016
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 ...
2 citations
17 Dec 2019
TL;DR: This article analyzed silence at the interface between print and audio media by reading and listening to Heinrich Boll's short story "Murke's Collected Silences" (Doktor Murkes gesammeltes Schweig... ).
Abstract: This article analyses silence at the interface between print and audio media by reading and listening to Heinrich Boll's short story ‘Murke's Collected Silences’ (‘Doktor Murkes gesammeltes Schweig...
2 citations
TL;DR: The authors explored how narrative formats facilitate transportation and related phenomena and found that over two hundred subjects encountered fictional stories in different iterations: printed text or audiobox, and they found that the stories facilitated transportation.
Abstract: This project explores how narrative formats facilitate transportation and related phenomena. Over two hundred subjects encountered fictional stories in different iterations: printed text or audiobo...
1 citations
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Book•
29 Jun 2012
26 citations
TL;DR: This article explored areas of intersection between sociolinguistic narrative analysis and literary narratology, focusing on a phenomenon that has recently received some attention in narration but hardly any in the study of narratives told in face-to-face interaction, namely, second-person narration.
Abstract: This article explores areas of intersection between sociolinguistic narrative analysis and literary narratology. Specifi cally, I focus on a phenomenon that has recently received some attention in narratology but hardly any in the study of narratives told in face-toface interaction: namely, second-person narration. Manfred Jahn (2005) defi nes second-person narration as a “story in which the protagonist is referred to by the pronoun you. Second-person stories can be homodiegetic (protagonist and narrator being identical) or heterodiegetic (protagonist and narrator being different)” (522). This initial defi nition, though a useful starting point, requires further elaboration and specifi cation—especially when it comes to literary you-narratives. In particular, studies have shown that in literary contexts the referential scope of you can be much wider than Jahn’s defi nition indicates and may include real readers as well as larger audiences (Herman 1994; Phelan 1994). Indeed, my own research suggests that
15 citations
01 Jan 2006
12 citations
"Sounding Postmodernity: Narrative V..." refers background in this paper
...Even though one does not perceive any overt narrative instance at these points because the spatiotemporal transitions are not accompanied by voice-over narration, the very fact that space and time noticeably change points to narrative strategies (see Frank; and Huwiler 2005)....
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...In my analysis, I follow Frank (1981) and Huwiler (2005) in assuming that narrative structuring can also be observed on the levels of sounds, voices, and other radiophonic means....
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Book•
20 Sep 2005
TL;DR: Gavin Miller as discussed by the authors re-opened contact between this highly individualistic artist and those Scottish and European philosophers and psychologists who helped shape his literary vision of personal and national identity, including the work of W. Robertson Smith, J.G. Frazer and R.D. Laing.
Abstract: Alasdair Gray’s writing, and in particular his great novel Lanark: A Life in Four Books (1981), is often read as a paradigm of postmodern practice. This study challenges that view by presenting an analysis that is at once more conventional and more strongly radical. By reading Gray in his cultural and intellectual context, and by placing him within the tradition of a Scottish history of ideas that has been largely neglected in contemporary critical writing, Gavin Miller re-opens contact between this highly individualistic artist and those Scottish and European philosophers and psychologists who helped shape his literary vision of personal and national identity. Scottish social anthropology and psychiatry (including the work of W. Robertson Smith, J.G. Frazer and R.D. Laing) can be seen as formative influences on Gray’s anti-essentialist vision of Scotland as a mosaic of communities, and of our social need for recognition, acknowledgement and the common life.
7 citations