“Words and Voice: Radio Drama as Audioliteral Text”
Guest lecture by PD Dr. Jarmila Mildorf (University of Paderborn)
In his discussion of audiobooks, Ludwig Jäger (2014) coined the term “Audioliteralität [audioliterality]” to capture the process whereby scripted texts are transcribed into vocal-acoustic ‘palimpsests’ that are unique in their mutual interdependence of words and voice. The resulting “audioliteral texts” are aesthetically quite different from their source texts and require a reception on the part of listeners that is distinct from reading.
Jäger’s term can be applied to radio drama, where an equally complex relationship pertains to the production, performance and broadcasting of a script (see also Hauthal 2021) or – in the case of a radio play adaptation – of a literary source text in the form of an adapted script. Unlike audiobooks in a narrow sense, radio plays further complicate matters because in addition to words and voices, they employ a range of audiophonic means to create sonic storyworlds: sounds, music, silence, electroacoustic manipulation and stereophony (Schmedes 2002, Huwiler 2005).
In this talk, I discuss issues surrounding audioliterality in the example of a BBC radio play adaptation of Henry James’s The Turning of the Screw. A close audionarratological analysis (Mildorf and Kinzel 2016, Bernaerts and Mildorf 2021) of (narrator-)characters’ voices and the words they speak reveals how the radio play creates its own strategies for guiding listeners in their interpretations while playfully drawing on the original text’s openness and indeterminacy.
Jarmila Mildorf teaches English language and literature at Paderborn University. Her research interests are in audionarratology, radio drama, music and narrative, socionarratology and conversational storytelling, dialogue studies, autobiography and oral history, narrative medicine and the medical humanities. She is the author of Storying Domestic Violence: Constructions and Stereotypes of Abuse in the Discourse of General Practitioners (2007) and co-editor-in-chief of the book series ‘Narratives and Mental Health’ (Brill). Her ‘Habilitation’ (2018) was on fictional dialogue from a sociocognitive pragmatic perspective. She has furthermore co-edited numerous books and special journal issues to date, including Audionarratology: Interfaces of Sound and Narrative (2016, with Till Kinzel), Dialogue across Media (2017, with Bronwen Thomas), “Narrating Selves and the Literary from the Bible to Social Media” (Partial Answers 17:1 (2019), with Matti Hyvärinen and Mari Hatavara), Radio Art and Music: Culture, Aesthetics, Politics (2020, with Pim Verhulst) and Audionarratology: Lessons from Radio Drama (2021, with Lars Bernaerts).