Voice

Abstract

Few terms are as central to the modern understanding of authorship as ‘voice’. Prior to the nineteenth century, authors were rarely, if ever, discussed in terms of having a distinctive voice, but this changed with the rise of the romantic cult of personality. But the question of voice is also fraught with difficult questions of representation, inclusion, and marginalization. In this chapter, the poet and performance artist Ulrike Almut Sandig approaches this question by reminding us that the human voice is a composite phenomenon that requires both the human body and human language. Voice is not constituted by material reality alone and can thus also not be reduced to biology. But neither is it strictly semiotic and is therefore irreducible to the cultural signifiers that constitute gender or racial identities.