The Voice in Twenty-First Century Spoken Word Poetry and Confessionalism: An Analysis of Performances by Lozada-Oliva, Benaim, and Vaid-Menon

2022 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Anushree Joshi
Authorship ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Josephine Dougal

Robert Burns, the eighteenth-century Scottish poet and song writer, continues to maintain a substantial cultural ‘afterlife’ in the twenty first century, both within Scotland and beyond. Achieving cult status in the nineteenth century, the power of Burns as a popular cultural icon remains undiminished. Where the appropriation of Burns as national icon in the nineteenth century was made manifest in statuary, commemorative objects, and painted portraits, the twenty-first century has been marked by the proliferation of the image of Burns in new forms and  technologies, with Burns as product and brand logo, museum and heritage attraction, and tourism industry selling point. This recent flourishing of interest and engagement raises questions about why and how an eighteenth-century poet continues to be the object of such extensive cultural elaboration at this time. In approaching this question, some fruitful lines of enquiry are being suggested in recent discussions that have looked at the nineteenth-century Burns as a ‘mobilizing agent in collective memory production’ (Rigney 2011, 81). One such appraisal points to how the construction of Burns in the nineteenth century as an iconic figure of Scottish cultural memory has the potential to ‘be resignified as necessary in subsequent chronological and geographical sites’ (Davis 2010, 14). It is this potential for the resignification of Burns as a symbolic site for the nation’s memory that this paper explores. In pointing to Burns’ representation in a variety of popular forms and in public discourse, the paper examines how a writer comes to be invested and reinvested as the voice and persona of the nation.


Author(s):  
Natalie Pollard

Tracking fugitive dynamics into the twenty-first century, this chapter probes Paul Muldoon’s exploration of metamorphosing poetic and corporeal forms. It focuses on the ventriloquizing of artworks, artists, and nonhuman agents (animals, plants, bodies, objects, waste products). It offers particular attention to: a) Muldoon’s limited edition pamphlets and literary-artistic collaborations containing photographs, drawings, and paintings. One example is Plan B, the cover of which shows a statue of Apollo wrapped in polythene. The poems within depose the colonizing order Apollo’s torso represents, engaging in refractions of aesthetic and literary inheritance. b) the voice of human and nonhuman bodies, especially Muldoon’s mythological preoccupation with half-animal forms, degenerating waste products, and digesting/gustatory metaphors for the lyric work. Each destabilizes fixed and perfected forms, often in favour of organic mutability and resonance.


Author(s):  
Ying Xiao

This article appears in theOxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aestheticsedited by John Richardson, Claudia Gorbman, and Carol Vernallis. During the 1980s and 1990s, China experienced an explosion of films for youth, imbued with the aesthetic and ethic of rock ‘n’ roll. This chapter examines a variety of films, from the countercultural to the more mainstream, focusing on the voice, image, persona, and iconography of Cui Jian, and offering an audiovisual perspective on urban youth cinema and Chinese rock. The emergence and development of Chinese rock ‘n’ roll film from the late 1980s to the twenty-first century resulted from widespread, multifaceted transformations in postsocialist China. At the core of this rock imaginary is the aesthetic of cinema vérité and postsocialist realism. In sync with the kaleidoscopic manifestation of the cityscape and long tracking shots of protagonists roaming the metropolis, rock music and the hand-held mobile camera seek to document a reality of postmodern life and capture a feeling of postsocialist anxiety-a concern for realism articulated through dialogue and ambient sound.


2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-124
Author(s):  
JONATHAN CROSS

AbstractThe appearance of thecorps sonoreat a key dramatic moment in Rameau'sPygmalion(1748) opens up anespace sensible(a term borrowed from Michel Leiris) where sounds derived from the harmonic series can articulate transformed temporal and spatial environments. Thecorps sonore– rediscovered and repurposed by the spectral movement of the 1970s – reappears in a number of twenty-first-century operas in order to animate a late-modern sense of theespace sensible. Instead of crossing a threshold towards the transcendent, the seemingly immobilecorps sonorecan now represent a modernist sense of loss, death, exile, ruin, and failure. Michaël Levinas's 2010 operatic reinterpretation of Kafka'sMetamorphosisstands as an exemplar of the ways in which the spectrum of sound (here the voice of the ‘becoming-animal’ Gregor Samsa metamorphosed by electronic means) can create a ‘deterritorialized’ space of alienation. Liminal, spectral spaces in works by Dufourt, Grisey, Haas, Harvey, Murail, and Saariaho are also discussed.


Author(s):  
Fiona Macintosh ◽  
Justine McConnell

Chapter 3 explores the twenty-first-century turn to orality exemplified in the works of poets such as Kate Tempest, Titilope Sonuga, and Alice Oswald. Engaging with Graeco-Roman epic in their work, these poets do so via a mode of performance that bears similarities with that of the Homeric bard. But this is not the composition-in-performance that Milman Parry and Albert Lord posited as the mode of Homeric performance; rather, these poets compose what John Miles Foley termed ‘Voiced Texts’. Such works hold the written and the spoken word in tension, denying primacy to the written even in our literacy-obsessed age, and making space for a new kind of orality that meets the demands of the contemporary era, while retaining the composite role of composer/performer that is a hallmark of oral traditions. Key to the popularity of this approach is the capacity of oral poetry to merge myth and history (as Jack Goody and Ian Watt argued), and to constantly rewrite its stories, even those that have been staunchly canonized, as the Graeco-Roman epics have been. The chapter concludes by exploring the ways that narrative podcasts, such as Serial and S-Town, evoke epic and mark another route along which the performance of epic is now being developed.


2018 ◽  
Vol 67 (3) ◽  
pp. 454-471 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander J. B. Hampton

With the turn of the twenty-first century, a group of writers began rehabilitating British nature writing and the voice of the individual interacting with it, producing what has become collectively known as the new nature writing. This examination considers how this literature represents a post-secular re-conceptualization of our relationship to nature. The new nature writing challenges a key element of the secular social imaginary, namely the subject-centered, immanence-bound, disenchanted representation of nature, which sets the self over and above nature, destabilizing existing dichotomies, and generating a multiplicity of hybridized possibilities that re-conceptualize our relationship to nature.


Resonance ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 353-376
Author(s):  
Daniel W. Siepmann

In recent years, music analysts have grappled with the sonic strategies from popular expressions that evade traditional notation. Their approaches often rely on harmonic spectrographs or various textual tools to decode the creative mechanics of these art forms. But for many practices with innate musicality—such as spoken-word poetry—these common techniques make limited explanatory headway. This article proposes an alternate path to fill the gaps: Adopt an analytic perspective, grounded in phenomenology, that listens for the musical subject’s negotiation of embodiment through their calculated treatment of timbre in the voice. Here, the analyst traces their perception of the subject’s bodily resonance through diagrams called timbral maps. And through these maps, two key concepts are discovered that structure the creator’s interior logic: timbral surfaces and timbral moments. Surfaces and moments are built into recognizable patterns, which in turn disclose the methods of these artists as lucid on their own terms. This “surface-moment” model is prototyped using a recorded performance of “This Clouded Heart” by the grunge-era Seattle poet and performance artist Steven Jesse Bernstein. The model reveals several stylistic tactics honed by Bernstein through his play with resonant shifts, but more significantly, argues for recasting timbre in analytic contexts: first, as a sustained and winding musical dimension, able to unfurl like other large-scale organizing principles; and second, as a heuristic capable of engaging listeners in an empathetic web between themselves and the subject through the mimetic connection of their bodies.


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