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.
Using Mladen Dolar's influential A Voice and Nothing More as a
reference point, The Voice as Something More reorients Dolar's
psychoanalytic analysis around the material dimensions of voices--their
physicality and timbre, the fleshiness of their mechanisms, the veils
that hide them, and the devices that enhance and distort them.
Throughout, the essays put the body back in voice. Ending with a new
essay by Dolar that offers reflections on these vocal aesthetics and
paradoxes, this authoritative, multidisciplinary collection, ranging
from Europe and the Americas to East Asia, from classics and music to
film and literature, will serve as an essential entry point for scholars
and students who are thinking toward materiality.