Voice
Session Coordinator: Johanna Frank
The Society for the Humanities, Cornell University
Andrew D. White House, 27 East Avenue
Ithaca, NY 14853-1101
jlf67@cornell.edu

Voicing Desire: The Representation of Women and Voice in Variations of Phantom of the Opera

Early literary feminists marked feminist texts by the ability of female authors and characters to find "their own voice," to control their own story, and to speak their personal history. Through the work of these authors and critics, women finally had an opportunity to" have their say."  In this essay, I will use the work of Kaja Silverman, Catherine Clement, and Slavoj Zizek among others to examine the representation of the female opera singer in several variations of The Phantom of the Opera. Using the original Gaston Leroux novel, the 1925 Lon Chaney film version, and the Andrew Lloyd Weber musical, I will examine not only the representation of female voice but also the representation of female performance, which in some cases undercuts the usual objectification of the performer as object as a result of the presence of the female voice. 

Ann C. Hall
Ohio Dominican University
halla@ohiodominican.edu

Bound Sound: Voice, Spectator, Dramatic Presence

“Speak so that I may see you.” Rather than posit sound or sight as one dominant sense over the other, Socrates defines voice as a function of the visual. The spectator/receptor necessitates aurality to acquire visuality. In this paper I take as my premise that voice is bound up with bodies, that voice speaks of the body, and that voice has to do with loss. My hypothesis, however, is that the body in which such voice is bound and speaks is not the body of the source of the voice but rather the body of its receptor. Voice enables the receptor to become spectator. To consider this hypothesis I examine the figure of the spectator/receptor in Adrienne Kennedy’s plays Owl Answers (1963) and A Lesson in Dead Language (1968); however, my primary focus is the character Clara in A Movie Star Has To Star in Black and White (1976).

Johanna Frank
Cornell University
jlf67@cornell.edu

"Am I As Much As Being Heard?": Projective Choreographies, Perceptive Cosmologies

Many of Samuel Beckett’s later plays begin to emphasize the voice over the image in so far as very little is given for the eye to see, while the plays consist of complex, jazz-like compositions for the voice. In Not I (1972) and That Time (1974), the stage image is limited to lips or faces suspended unnaturally above the stage. Rockaby (1980) and Ohio Impromptu (1981) offer only oddly stilled figures for contemplation while the voice soars around them. The stage worlds of these plays is far more limited than the aural worlds; rich verbal images play against austere visuality. Obviously, interpreting these plays either analyzes the connections between the plays’ texts and their staging, or contemplates the narratives and imagery of the speeches themselves. A relatively unremarked aspect of these plays is the ways the plays operate the voice as a character. The plays’ blocking is less about visuality than about the play of voices, a dynamic that creates an aural geometry as well as a set of oratorial choreographies that produce a cosmology–a sense of the order and rule of a universe past vision and materiality that comes from a space far more constricted than the voice ever is. Yet this verbal urging produces a sense of expansion: a beauty and the performance of the much more in addition to the limits vision sets. If Beckett began his career playing out Dante’s “to be is to be perceived,” than his later plays explore the different profundity of “to persist is to be heard.”

Judith Roof
Michigan State University
roof12@comcast.net