[ecrea] CFP: VOX MEDIA: Sound in Literature

MATLIT, 2017, vol. 5
VOX MEDIA: Sound in Literature
Editors: Osvaldo Manuel Silvestre (University of Coimbra)
Felipe Cussen (University of Santiago de Chile)

Call for Papers
The easiness by which the idea of literature translates into the idea of 
text and the latter into “letters printed on paper” is probably to blame 
for the one-sided version both common sense and critical belief 
constantly show of the relation between readers and books: literature is 
something that we read in silence. Better still, literature is a text 
that becomes a book by means of an inscription process that becomes 
invisible itself, since the materiality of the text is annulled as a 
result of what is being transmitted by the former: ideas, meaning, in a 
word, contents.

And yet, there is no literature without a material inscription process 
which turns each verbal sign into a thing belonging to the phenomenal 
world, to be seen before being read and to be read in silence – or not. 
Or else, in order to be spoken (another form of material inscription), 
preceding and dispensing with the writing or coming immediately after 
it. There are, it is well known, western and non-western literary 
narratives in which Voice precedes writing. There are, also, some 
arguments supporting this claim, although one might suspect a mild 
revisionist tone to some of them. Nevertheless, this is not about 
searching for a privilege of the Origin for the study of the sound 
dimension of literary phenomena, but rather about admitting the 
relevance of such a field to a larger, simultaneously modern and 
archaic, version of literature.

In the crossing of historical vanguards and changes in communication 
technologies, literature has opened itself to the materialities of 
sound, voice and performance. This process was accelerated and 
dramatized by both mediation and technical reproduction up until the 
digital revolution, which eventually led to the historical and 
technological specificity of the post-digital state of affairs. The 
process further suffered the overlap of massification, thus operating to 
a large extent on a scene of “re-oralization”, although by then within 
the historical setting of a “secondary orality”. From the more 
avant-garde to the more massified environments, from Sound Poetry to the 
Spoken Word or Slam Poetry, without overlooking the vast intermediary 
territory of “readings (or recitations) of poetry”, it is safe to admit 
that the self-awareness that planet literature has is also to encompass 
those ever-growing dimensions: phonetic poetry, sound poetry, recordings 
of literary texts (either by its own authors or other readers), setting 
of poems into music (especially in the cases in which the voice is not 
turned into singing, thus sabotaging the form of “song”), poetry and 
narrative live readings, spoken word, slam poetry, rap.

MATLIT’s volume 5 is thus intent on exploring what we call literature as 
VOX MEDIA: voice as a means for literature and the disturbances suffered 
by the medium from the combined effect of performance and the 
technologies for mediation, representation and reproduction. And also 
other instances, like the tensions between the body and technology, 
audibility v. inaudibility of text, sound and meaning, physical presence 
and/or absence of the authors, and so forth. The goal is not only that 
of generating a catalogue or a compendium of the contemporary effects of 
VOX MEDIA on the notion of literature, but that of generating an 
archaeology for VOX MEDIA and for all related phenomena repressed by 
their historical invisibility.

Submissions must be uploaded before *October 31, 2016*.
Prior to submission, authors have to register in the journal system: 
http://iduc.uc.pt/index.php/matlit/login
Please see author guidelines: 
http://iduc.uc.pt/index.php/matlit/about/submissions


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