scholarly journals Genre and Stylistic Features of the Modern Audiobook

2021 ◽  
pp. 156-170
Author(s):  
Vera Yu. Bal ◽  
◽  
Elizaveta E. Gutkevich ◽  

Modern technological conditions make it possible to create, quickly replicate and use audio books conveniently. Audio books are one of the fastest growing segments of the global publishing market. Informative issues of creating audio books, not technological ones, are in the research focus of the article. The content of an audiobook is a voiced text that refers to the “auditory literature”. Assessments of the quality of the auditory literature are polar. On the one hand, it is considered secondary to the original literary text; on the other hand, it is a self-contained artistic phenomenon with its own aesthetic nature. In this article, an audiobook is considered precisely in the aspect of its artistic value, which is highlighted when speaking about the genre nature of the voiced text. The genre features of the voiced text in this study are identified taking into account the communicative features of its formal-stylistic features. The communicative nature of the audiobook genre is associated with two types of reading, which reflect the opposite positions of the two participants in communication. On the one hand, this is an expres-sive reading aloud, which can also be defined as staged reading. Genetically, this type of reading is associated with public performances of artists and initially assumed live reading. Further, this type of reading is transformed into the genre of radio plays, called “theater at the microphone”. In modern communicative practices of creating and repli-cating audio content, including one related to the actor’s readings of works of art, there is no binding to time and place. On the other hand, this is auditory reading, a modifica-tion of which is audio reading in modern technological conditions. If auditory reading is the first reading practice of a child mastering books from the voice of a parent, then audio reading is the choice of an adult who can read. The acoustic representation of a literary work is associated not only with the performance of elementary technical characteristics of sound, but also with the introduction of a certain aesthetic value into it. The creative translation of a literary text from verbal to acoustic should preserve its value in the aesthetic plane, without reducing it to a purely pragmatic one. Actualization of the aesthetic value of an audiobook outside of its paper format is associated with the principles of its directing and editorial preparation – the principles associated with the implementation of the stylistic characteristics of the genre form of an audiobook. Translation of a verbal literary text into an audio one is carried out as a result of comparing reading a book to dramatic action. In this case, the forming element of the genre becomes the sounding text itself. In the case of audio books, the reader’s voice as a performer’s instru-ment and the musical noise accompaniment of the text read is a style-forming genre element. The article traces the publishing strategies for the embodiment of the formal-stylistic features of the audiobook genre in the context of modern audio cultural practices.

Mind ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 129 (516) ◽  
pp. 1127-1156 ◽  
Author(s):  
C Thi Nguyen

Abstract There seems to be a deep tension between two aspects of aesthetic appreciation. On the one hand, we care about getting things right. Our attempts at aesthetic judgments aim at correctness. On the other hand, we demand autonomy. We want appreciators to arrive at their aesthetic judgments through their own cognitive efforts, rather than through deferring to experts. These two demands seem to be in tension; after all, if we want to get the right judgments, we should defer to the judgments of experts. How can we resolve this tension? The best explanation, I suggest, is that aesthetic appreciation is something like a game. When we play a game, we try to win. But often, winning isn’t the point; playing is. Aesthetic appreciation involves the same flipped motivational structure: we aim at the goal of correctness, but having correct judgments isn’t the point. The point is the engaged process of interpreting, investigating, and exploring the aesthetic object. When one defers to aesthetic testimony, then, one makes the same mistake as when one looks up the answer to a puzzle, rather than solving it for oneself. The shortcut defeats the whole point. This suggests a new account of aesthetic value: the engagement account. The primary value of the activity of aesthetic appreciation lies in the process of trying to generate correct judgments, and not in having correct judgments.


2014 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-228
Author(s):  
Vladimir Braginsky ◽  

Barthes defined the literary text as “a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture”. Developing this statement, we can postulate two forms of existence of the literary text. On the one hand, it may exist as a holistic entity in which all components are interlinked so that they can bear an integral meaning. This is a “syntagmatic” existence of the literary work as a “tissue”, or a certain structure. On the other hand, the literary text may exist as a destructuralised set of the same components isolated from each other—its “paradigmatic” existence as a sum total of quotations that contribute to the all-embracing repository of “quotations”, which makes up the intertext of a particular literature. This intertext provides “building blocks” for the construction of new literary pieces. In this article I shall discuss the two forms of existence of literary works on the basis of one piece of Persian literature translated into Malay. The example chosen is Hikayat Bakhtiar (Tale of Bakhtiar), and its transformations and diverse literary constructions that were built of “quotations” from it over more than two centuries. This discussion, among other things, will help us to explain the strong Persian influence on Malay traditional literature, despite the relatively small number of Persian writings translated into Malay. Keywords: traditional Malay literature, persian influence, Hikayat Bakhtiar , quotation, recension, intertext, Hikayat Maharaja Ali , Syair Bidasari


2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 379-394
Author(s):  
Emelia Quinn

When we encounter the work of Grinling Gibbons, we find ourselves in the presence of multiple non-human animals. However, it is unclear how one should address these presences. On the one hand, for ecofeminist scholars such as Josephine Donovan, the aestheticization of animal death is to be vehemently resisted and the embodied presence of animals recovered by looking beyond the surface: a mode of looking that Donovan terms ‘attentive love’. On the other hand, a re-reading of the philosophical ideas of Simone Weil, upon which Donovan premises her argument, suggests that attention to others requires a mode of radical detachment. These two positions speak in important ways to the dilemmas faced by a vegan spectator. Drawing on Jason Edwards’s previous work on ‘the vegan viewer’, this article seeks to reconcile a vegan resistance to Gibbons’s depictions of animal death, in their spontaneous falling under human dominion, with the aesthetic pleasure generated by Gibbons’s craftmanship. I therefore propose ‘vegan camp’ as a means of reconciling oneself to insufficiency and complicity in systems of violence without renouncing pleasure. Vegan camp is detailed as an aesthetics that acknowledges the violence of humanity and one’s inescapable place within it, dissolving the subjective idea of the beautiful vegan soul to pay attention to the pervasive presence of an anthropocentrism that, in the case of Gibbons, decoratively adorns the sites at which animals might be eaten, worn, or offered up for sacrifice.


Author(s):  
Paul Torremans

This chapter first discusses the two roots of copyright. On the one hand, copyright began as an exclusive right to make copies—that is, to reproduce the work of an author. This entrepreneurial side of copyright is linked in with the invention of the printing press, which made it much easier to copy a literary work and, for the first time, permitted the entrepreneur to make multiple identical copies. On the other hand, it became vital to protect the author now that his or her work could be copied much more easily and in much higher numbers. The chapter then outlines the key concepts on which copyright is based.


Author(s):  
María Rosa Palazón

There are no a-moral texts, even though amorality may be described by them: an amoral author would not dare into the search of beauty; it depends on a game of faculties that, also, play with the form. A moralizing literary text is not due to a game of author's faculties, but only to the author's conscience. Thus, it rebounds heavy and ugly. An ugly immoral literary text assaults on a redundant and calculated way some moral rules in favor of the "forbidden". Then, it is not a beautiful text. The aesthetic function is the one treating the stimulus as a purpose and not only as a means. This spontaneous behavior is condition of possibility for the moral act (the follower of the second kantian imperative). The one who spontaneously has the attitude that considers the other (alter) as a purpose and not only as a means, is a beautiful person. Its argued that it is not yet a morally good person. Anyway, "beau-ty" on its Latin etymologies (beau-t‚ and bello) means good, which involves a project that is dialoguing, truthful, respectful and advantageous for the community. It also means that the decision of using the proper means for the goal, has been taken. Once accepted the project, the individual shall act spontaneously on a ludicrous way so that the project may become real. He will be a more meritorious beautiful person if his spontaneous goodness means the overcoming over the experiences that have hurt hi. The matter is: is the moral beauty the highest point of morality? I will work on this topic on the basis of Schiller, Kant, Gadamer, and Sartre.


2018 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-92
Author(s):  
Matthias Löwe

Abstract Heterodiegetic narrators are not present in the story they tell. That is how Gérard Genette has defined heterodiegesis. But this definition of heterodiegesis leaves open what ›absence‹ of the narrator really means: If a friend of the protagonist tells the story but does not appear in it, is he therefore heterodiegetic? Or if a narrator tells something that happened before his lifetime, is he therefore heterodiegetic? These open questions reveal the vagueness of Genette’s definition. However, Simone Elisabeth Lang has recently made a clearer proposal to define heterodiegesis. She argues that narrators should be called heterodiegetic only if they are fundamentally distinguished from the ontological status of the fictional characters: Heterodiegetic narrators are not part of the story for logical reasons, because they are presented as inventors of the story. This is, for example, the case in Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s novel Elective Affinities (1809): In the beginning of this novel the narrator presents himself as inventor of the character’s names (»Edward – so we shall call a wealthy nobleman in the prime of life – had been spending several hours of a fine April morning in his nursery-garden«). Based on that recent definition of heterodiegesis my article deals with the question whether such heterodiegetic narrators can be unreliable. My question is: How could you indicate that the inventor of a fictitious story tells something which is not correct or incomplete? In answering this question, I refer to some proposals of Janina Jacke’s article in this journal. Jacke shows that the distinction between homodiegetic and heterodiegetic narrators should not be confused with the distinction between personal and non-personal narrators or with the distinction between restricted and all-knowing narrators. If you make such differentiations, then of course heterodiegetic narrators can be unreliable: They can omit some essential information or interpret the story inappropriately. Heterodiegetic narrators of an invented story can even lie to the reader or deceive themselves about some elements of the invention. That means: A heterodiegetic narration cannot only be value-related unreliable (›discordant narration‹), but also fact-related unreliable. My article delves especially into this type of unreliability and shows that heterodiegetic narrators of a fictitious story can be fact-related unreliable, if they tell something which was not invented by themselves. In that case, the narrator himself sometimes does not really know whether he tells a true or a fictitious story. Such narrators are unreliable if they assert that the story is true, although they are suggesting at the same time that it is not. I call this type of unreliable narrator a ›fabulating chronicler‹ (›fabulierender Chronist‹): On the one hand, such narrators present themselves as chroniclers of historical facts but, on the other hand, they seem to be fabulists who tell a fairy tale. This type of unreliability occurs especially if a narrator tells a legend or a story from the Bible. My article demonstrates this case in detail with two examples, namely two novels by Thomas Mann: The Holy Sinner (1951) and Joseph and His Brothers (1933–1943). My article also discusses some cases where it is not appropriate or counter-intuitive to call a heterodiegetic narrator ›unreliable‹: i. e. the narrator of Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain (1924) and the narrator of Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (1795/1796). On the one hand, these narrators show some characteristics of unreliability, because they omit essential pieces of information. On the other hand, these narrators are barely shaped as characters, they are nearly non-personal. However, in order to describe a narrator as unreliable, it is – in my opinion – indispensable to refer to some traces of a narrative personality: Figural traits of a narrator provoke the reader to identify all depicting, describing and commenting sentences of a narration as utterances of one and the same ›psychic system‹ (Niklas Luhmann). Only narrators who can be interpreted as such a ›psychic system‹, provoke the reader to assume the role of an analyst or ›detective‹, who perhaps identifies the narrator’s discordance or unreliability. In my article the unreliability of a narration is understood as part of the composition and meaning of a literary work. I argue that a narrator cannot be described as unreliable without designating a semantic motivation for this composition by an act of interpretation. Therefore, my suggestion is that a narration should be merely called unreliable if it encourages the reader not only to imagine the told story, but also to imagine a discordant or unreliable storyteller.


2019 ◽  
Vol 70 ◽  
pp. 08040
Author(s):  
Vladimir Tereshchenko

The relevance of studying the process of child’s growing up is due to a number of contradictions; on the one hand, children’s space of activities is changing, he/she develops in paradoxical, contradictory conditions, on the other hand, growing children do not show an active desire to grow up, sometimes imitate disharmonious forms of behaviour. The purpose of the study is, firstly, to describe the range of domestic and foreign works related to both childhood and adulthood on the background of changing socio-cultural practices, secondly, to isolate the existing manifestations of the problems, identifying the main contradictions caused by changes in the process of growing up, and thirdly, to attempt to develop conceptual provisions of psychological and pedagogical analysis of growing up in modern educational organization. We consider the growing up of a modern child in the educational environment as a process of constant changes in the structure of his/her subjective and objective characteristics, including the formation of child’s image of adulthood in ontogenesis, its development and implementation, as well as the reflection of development of adulthood by children in the psychological and pedagogical space by the participants of educational process (parents, teachers).


Tekstualia ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (60) ◽  
pp. 43-54
Author(s):  
Rafał Koschany

Screenplays are a paradoxical and ambivalent phenomenon. On the one hand, a screenplay is a literary genre and its development attests to the process of its emancipation from the power of fi lm and fi lm theory. On the other hand, however, the screenplay read as the text „is becoming a movie” already during the act of reading. The screenplay – as a quasi-literary phenomenon – can be a useful and inspiring tool in fi lm interpretation, as it opens up a variety of methodological possibilities.


Author(s):  
Khaled Abd alazaiz Hassan

The presence of existence on the binaries, was a feature of the main that left nothing but a problem for its features, and literature one of them; we find the diodes have intersected the joints, and formed its internal texture, and showed its purposes and themes in a striking way to the recipient who felt the beauty and beauty of rhythms and images express. Classical Arabic is characterized among all other semiotic languages; It's characteristics ate unique to them which reflected the prestige and ability for expression. Amongst these Fixed characteristics in Arabic language there is the contradictory duals. In this study, I tried to trace the terms "binary" and "contrast": language and language, and the approach between them to arrive at a single integration, forming another term " contradictory duals", and its role in the literary text on the one hand and on the receiver on the other hand.    


2014 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 323-342
Author(s):  
Caslav Koprivica

In this text, the work of Serbian writer Stanislav Krakov, between the two world wars, the famous, and later, due to ideological divisions, repressed and forgotten figure, is ovserverd through the lens of philosophy of existence and phenomenology. The ?philosophical? significance of Krakov?s autobiographical war prose, which in the aesthetic, especially formal-innovative aspect, represented the pinnacle of the genre of that time Serbian literature, is that it can be viewed as a first-class document of phenomenological introspection of a man in situation of mortal combat; and the ragne his prose of his prose is, in some respects, without exaggeration, comparable to war prose of Ernst J?nger. But besides his authentic documentality, Krakov?s writing is characterized by brilliant insights. So, on the one hand, Krakov can be viewed as a thinker of war and corporeality avant lettre, and, on the other hand, the interpretative contextualization of his prose within the aforementioned philosophical tradition helps us to better understand his literature.


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