November 13, 2019 | 6:00PM
Seminary Co-Op
Free.
“Where to start, with voice? The answer is with The Voice as Something More, essays that sweep through familiar academic and philosophical debates on voice, only to move on, with rare collective intensity, to voice as not heretofore imagined. The intellectual range in these essays is extraordinary, and what they represent is not a consensus. Rather, this invaluable book is something with far more life, reflections that convey how perplexing voice, as a concept, remains to analysis, while acknowledging how voice as a material phenomenon is terrifying, or beguiling, unlovely, or exquisite—and how disquieting that inconsistency can be.”—Carolyn Abbate, Harvard University
"A richly informative and theoretically brilliant collection, "The Voice as Something More" inaugurates a new, more vibrant and dialogic era in voice studies."—Kerim Yasar, University of Southern California
Martha Feldman and Mladen Dolar discuss "The Voice as Something More: Essays Toward Materiality." A Q&A and signing will follow the discussion.
About the book: In the contemporary world, voices are caught up in fundamentally different realms of discourse, practice, and culture: between sounding and nonsounding, material and nonmaterial, literal and metaphorical. In "The Voice as Something More," Martha Feldman and Judith T. Zeitlin tackle these paradoxes with a bold and rigorous collection of essays that look at voice as both object of desire and material object. (Cover photo by Jin Shisheng)
About Martha Feldman: Martha Feldman is the Mabel Greene Myers Professor of Music, Romance Languages and Literatures, and Theater and Performance Studies at the University of Chicago, author of the award-winning books "City Culture and the Madrigal at Venice" (University of California Press, 1995), "Opera and Sovereignty: Transforming Myths in Eighteenth-Century Italy" (University of Chicago Press, 2007), and "The Castrato: Reflections on Natures and Kinds" (University of California Press, 2015), and the coedited "The Courtesan’s Arts: Cross-Cultural Perspectives" (Oxford, 2006). Her current work explores racialized and trans* voices and includes an experimental book-in-progress "The Castrato Phantom" that maps the aftermath of the castrato phenomenon in 20th-century Rome. She is an associate producer on Patricia Barber’s albums "Smash" (Concord Records, 2013) and "Higher" (ArtistShare, 2019). (Headshot by Valerie Booth O.)
About Mladen Dolar: Mladen Dolar is Professor and Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Philosophy, University of Ljubljana. His principal areas of research are psychoanalysis, modern French philosophy, German idealism and art theory. He has lectured extensively at universities in the USA and across Europe and is the author of over one hundred and fifty papers in scholarly journals and collective volumes. Apart from twelve books in Slovene, his book publications include most notably "A Voice and Nothing More" (MIT 2006, translated into eight languages) and "Opera’s Second Death" (with Slavoj Žižek, Routledge 2001, also translated into several languages). His new book "The Riskiest Moment" is forthcoming with Duke University Press. He is one of the founders of the Ljubljana Lacanian School. (Headshot by Nada Zgank)
Photo credit: left to right, by Nada Zgank, Jin Shisheng, and Valerie Booth O.