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Sounding Postmodernity: Narrative Voices in the Radio Adaptation of Alasdair Gray's Lanark

  • Jarmila Mildorf

Date Published:

11 Jan, 2017

Abstract:

 

 

 

Alasdair Gray’s novel Lanark: A Life in Four Books (1981) eludes generic categorization by crossing the boundaries between dystopian fiction, fantasy novel, life writing, and fiction marked by magic realism. In postmodern fashion, it plays with spatiotemporal frameworks and narrative order, shifts narrative voices, and perspectives and uses a multiplicity of presentational modes including dialogue and scholarly text commentary with encyclopedic annotations. In its “Epilogue,” the novel features metalepsis when it introduces the author, who talks to his protagonist about his work. The question arises how the novel’s radio play adaptation, first broadcast by the BBC on 1 November 2014, translates this playfulness into its own semiotic system. This paper particularly focuses on the narratological category of “voice” and explores what happens when narrators’ and characters’ voices are actualized in radio drama, how the radio play uses voice-over narration, voice qualities and the doubling of parts to create a recognizable as well as surprising aural storyworld. It also analyzes how sound techniques and music are employed to create narrative structures. Because of their medial instantaneousness and evanescence, radio plays arguably have to rely on disambiguation to make themselves accessible to a listening audience. However, as this paper shows, they also have a range of radiophonic techniques at their disposal to create narrativity on their own terms.

 

Jarmila Mildorf received her PhD in sociolinguistics from the University of Aberdeen (Scotland) and is now a Senior Lecturer of English language and literature at the University of Paderborn (Germany). She is the author of Storying Domestic Violence (2007) and has co-edited six collections of essays: Imaginary Dialogues in English: Explorations of a Literary Form (2012), The Writing Cure: Literature and Medicine in Context (2013), Magic, Science, Technology, and Literature (2nd ed. 2014), Imaginary Dialogues in American Literature and Philosophy (2014), Audionarratology: Interfaces of Sound and Narrative (2016) and Dialogue across Media (2016). She was also a guest co-editor of a special issue on Narrative: Knowing, Living, Telling (Partial Answers 6.2). Her research interests are dialogue studies, conversational storytelling, second-person narration, the medical humanities, and radio drama.

Updated in December 2018

 

 

Publisher's Version

Last updated on 04/13/2020