Book Description

"For all its orality, oral history has a long-standing, closely entwined relationship with writing. Sound Writing considers the interplay between sound recordings and written literature, looking back to antiquity while focusing on the nineteenth- to the twenty-first centuries. It also refers to a dream of sound writing itself, enabling voices to reach readers directly, cutting out the need for authorial mediation. Oral histories are nevertheless actively mediated, often turned into and received as written texts. There can be value in transforming spoken oral histories in print or on screen, not least in order to make them 'readable' for wider audiences. Indeed, such re-creations can be worthy and wonderful works of scholarship and art--and this book explores a wide range of different forms and media (like the polyphonic novel, and hyperlinked websites) which can most effectively convey speakers' narratives on their own terms--but there is also, always the danger of speakers' voices being distorted or lost in the process of mediation. This book examines how oral histories are co-created, by speakers, by authors, and also by readers. It considers how oral history can inform our understandings of authorship and reading, to reconceive and query their potential as creative, multiple, collective, and activist. Finally, it reflects on the role of authorship in the academy"--