Mikko Keskinen - Böcker

Audio Book deals with the ways in which the auditory—voices, sounds, noises—is represented in postphonograph narrative fiction. More specifically, it examines how the various technologies enabling the transmission or storing of sound and voice are figured in selected prose works. Drawing from contemporary American, British, French, and German literature, the author discusses these use of these technologies in Nicholson Baker's Vox, Michel Tournier's Tristan Vox, Heinrich Böll's Murke's Collected Silences, Don DeLillo's The Body Artist, Nick Hornby's High Fidelity, and Sylvia Brownrigg's The Metaphysical Touch. The texts foreground sound technologies (the telephone, radio, tape recorder, answering machine, record player, or, counterintuitively, e-mail) in their narration and manifest important aspects of audio in literature. In prior criticism, these texts have not been systematically read from media-technological perspectives.The sound technologies represented in the texts problematize the clear distinction between speech and writing, or between "natural" articulation and its technological reproduction. Audio Book suggests that literary writing is metaphorically conceivable as a transmitting and storing technology, as an audiobook of sorts, capable of recording (upon writing) and reproducing (upon reading) auditory information. The sound technologies proper have also bearing on the narrative structure, metaphorics, and style of each fictional work studied in Audio Book. In addition, themes such as identity, genre, the nature of literary representation, and the absence/presence problem are brought to the fore on account of the technologies depicted.

The Experimental Book Object shows why and how books matter in the 21st century. Digital and audio platforms are commonplace, and other fields of art beyond literature have increasingly embraced books and publication as their medium of choice. Nevertheless, the manifold book object persists and continues to inspire various types of experimentation. This volume sets forth an unprecedented approach where literary and media theory are entangled with design practitioners’ artistic research and process descriptions. By probing the paradigm of the codex, this collection of essays focuses on historical and contemporary experimentation that has challenged what books are and could be from the perspectives of materiality, mediation, and visual and typographic design. Investigations into less-studied areas and cases of performativity demonstrate what experimental books do by interacting with their systemic and cultural environments. The volume offers a multifaceted and multidisciplinary view of the book object, the book design and publishing processes, and their significance in the digital age.