0000000001327432
AUTHOR
Mikko Keskinen
Kirjoituksen näköiset kuvat : Aperitiffin tekstifaksimilet
Book and Radio Play Silences: Medial Pauses and Reticence in ‘Murke's Collected Silences’ by Heinrich Böll
This article analyses silence at the interface between print and audio media by reading and listening to Heinrich Böll's short story ‘Murke's Collected Silences’ (‘Doktor Murkes gesammeltes Schweigen’) in its book (1958) and three German-language radio play versions (1965; 1986; 1989). Reference is also made to Benjamin Gwilliam's sound art piece (2007) based on the 1986 adaptation. The Böll story thematises silence and media in various ways, and has definite countertextual aspects, in the sense of technology, textuality, and materiality of language. In the printed story, silence is either verbally named or typographically indicated, whereas the radio plays present or perform it. The compa…
Narrating Selves amid Library Shelves : Literary Mediation and Demediation in S. by J. J. Abrams and Doug Dorst
This essay focuses on the various forms of narrating, mediating, and interpreting selves within and around a book object, the novel S. (2013) by J. J. Abrams and Doug Dorst. The novel S. is an experiment in producing a deceivingly realistic replica of a maltreated library book object, but its discursive practices also rely on familiar literary forms, harking back to epistolary commonplaces, as well as to marginalia, both ancient and modern. The book object S., which carries the text of the novel-within-a-novel, the readers' multilayered markings, and paraphernalia, forms an archive dramatizing the workings of memory, thought, and emotion. That archive also demonstrates how the characters co…
Facsimile : The Makings of the Similar in Graham Rawle’s Collage Novel Woman’s World
This article reads Graham Rawle's collage novel Woman's World (2005) by utilizing the literal and metaphoric meanings of the facsimile as critical tools. Woman's World is an assemblage of circa 40,000 fragments cut and pasted from over a 1000 copies of British women's magazines of the early 1960s. These snippets are reproduced in facsimile and thus feature a jerky variety of font types, cases, and sizes. Woman's World does not only present a facsimile of its found graphic materials but it also studies, in my reading, the "facsimile" (similarizing, imitating, copying) qualities of gender identification, adopted discourses, (cross-)dressing, and the novel's own construction. The "varieties of…
Book and Radio Play Silences : Medial Pauses and Reticence in ‘Murke's Collected Silences’ by Heinrich Böll
This article analyses silence at the interface between print and audio media by reading and listening to Heinrich Böll's short story ‘Murke's Collected Silences’ (‘Doktor Murkes gesammeltes Schweigen’) in its book (1958) and three German-language radio play versions (1965; 1986; 1989). Reference is also made to Benjamin Gwilliam's sound art piece (2007) based on the 1986 adaptation. The Böll story thematises silence and media in various ways, and has definite countertextual aspects, in the sense of technology, textuality, and materiality of language. In the printed story, silence is either verbally named or typographically indicated, whereas the radio plays present or perform it. The compar…
Her Mistress's Voice: Gynophonocentrism in Feminist Discourses
I will trace the metaphors of voice in the discourses of feminisms as articulated by Judith Fetterley, Kaja Silverman, Julia Kristeva, and Hélène Cixous. I will analyze the presuppositions of their vocal or sound imagery, paying special attention to the implications of the essentialism/constructivism opposition. It is not my intention to provide a comprehensive account of voice in feminisms, nor to make sweeping generalizations on the basis of a very limited corpus. Moreover, in spite of their differences in cultural background, period, and main area of study, the four theorists to be read are, as it were, within earshot from each other, centering, whether anglo- or francophone, around the …
Kertomuksen mielet, virtuaaliset maailmat
Ubique and Unique Book: The Presence and Potential of the Codex : Introduction to the Thematic Cluster (Part 1)
The articles in this two-issue thematic cluster of Image [&] Narrative (20.1 and 20.2) explore the contemporary status of the book (in literature and, more generally, in culture). This introduction addresses the cultural context of the notion of book today and presents the various articles of the issue. nonPeerReviewed
E-pistolarity and E-loquence: Sylvia Brownrigg's The Metaphysical Touch as a Novel of Letters and Voices in the Age of E-mail Communication
Blocks to, and building blocks of, narrativity : fragments, anecdotes, and narrative lines in David Markson’s Reader’s block
David Markson’s Reader’s block (1996) consists of 193 pages of quotations, anecdotes, names, and fragments. The book bears the paratext “A novel,” and the work has indeed been read as a narrative whole, in which “an aging author [...] contemplates the writing of a novel.” By being out of ordinary and therefore worth of telling, the anecdotes or curiosities seemingly fulfill the requirements of a “natural” narrative as defined by Monika Fludernik (1996). However, a mass of such mini-narratives, mixed with even more fragmentary texts, seems to defy narrativity (and tellability). In my reading, the ostensive block to narrativity also functions as its very building block. Thanks to polysemy, bl…
Carving Out Other Narratives : Textual Treatment in Jonathan Safran Foer's Tree of Codes
Dead Dog Talking : Posthumous, Preposthumous, and Preposterous Canine Narration in Charles Siebert’s Angus
The section focusing on narrating and narrated animals opens with Mikko Keskinen’s chapter, which probes the narrational peculiarities of posthumous tales told by dogs. The primary target of Keskinen’s analysis is Charles Siebert’s novel Angus (2000), a first-person memoir of a dying Jack Russell terrier. The novel presents its canine protagonist Angus as having an outstanding command of the English language, whereby it is no surprise that his lineage turns out to be particularly literary. Yet there are curious idiosyncrasies in his parlance, which appear to suggest a uniquely cynomorphic language and worldview. Since Angus the dog resides on the border zone between human and nonhuman spher…