The Voice As Something More

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.

A new, philosophically grounded theory of the voice—the voice as the lever of thought, as one of the paramount embodiments of the psychoanalytic object. Plutarch tells the story of a man who plucked a nightingale and finding but little to eat exclaimed: "You are just a voice and nothing more." Plucking the feathers of meaning that cover the voice, dismantling the body from which the voice seems to emanate, resisting the Sirens' song of fascination with the voice, concentrating on "the voice and nothing more": this is the difficult task that philosopher Mladen Dolar relentlessly pursues in this seminal work. The voice did not figure as a major philosophical topic until the 1960s, when Derrida and Lacan separately proposed it as a central theoretical concern. In A Voice and Nothing More Dolar goes beyond Derrida's idea of "phonocentrism" and revives and develops Lacan's claim that the voice is one of the paramount embodiments of the psychoanalytic object (objet a). Dolar proposes that, apart from the two commonly understood uses of the voice as a vehicle of meaning and as a source of aesthetic admiration, there is a third level of understanding: the voice as an object that can be seen as the lever of thought. He investigates the object voice on a number of different levels—the linguistics of the voice, the metaphysics of the voice, the ethics of the voice (with the voice of conscience), the paradoxical relation between the voice and the body, the politics of the voice—and he scrutinizes the uses of the voice in Freud and Kafka. With this foundational work, Dolar gives us a philosophically grounded theory of the voice as a Lacanian object-cause.

Written to save careers one voice at a time through scientifically proven methods and advice, this resource teaches people how to protect and improve one of their most valuable assets: their speaking voice. Simple explanations of vocal anatomy and up-to-date instruction for vocal injury prevention are accompanied by illustrations, photographs, and FAQs. An audio CD of easy-to-follow vocal-strengthening exercises--including Hum and Chew, Puppy Dog Whimper, Sirens, Lip Trills, and Tongue Twisters--is also included, along with information on breathing basics, vocal-cord vibration, and working with students who have medical complications such as asthma, acid reflux, or anxiety.

Frank Sinatra was the best-known entertainer of the twentieth century—infinitely charismatic, lionized and notorious in equal measure. But despite his mammoth fame, Sinatra the man has remained an enigma. Now James Kaplan brings deeper insight than ever before to the complex psyche and turbulent life behind that incomparable voice, from Sinatra’s humble beginning in Hoboken to his fall from grace and Oscar-winning return in From Here to Eternity. Here at last is the biographer who makes the reader feel what it was really like to be Frank Sinatra—as man, as musician, as tortured genius.

Seventeen-year-old Luke's older sister, Pat, has always been his moral compass, like a voice inside his head, every time he has a decision to make. So when Pat disappears on a tiny island off the coast of Honduras and the authorities claim she's drowned - despite the fact that they can't produce a body - Luke heads to Honduras to find her because he knows something the authorities don't. From the moment of her disappearance, Pat's voice has become real, guiding him to Utila, where she had accepted a summer internship to study whale sharks. Once there, he meets several characters who describe his sister as a very different girl from the one knows. Does someone have a motive for wanting her dead? Determined to get to the bottom of Pat's disappearance, Luke risks everything, including his own life, to find the answer.

Introduction: Personally speaking -- Baby talk -- Origins -- Emotion -- Language -- Sex and gender -- The voice in society -- The voice of leadership & persuasion -- Swan song.

#1 New York Times bestselling author Dean Koontz gives a new meaning to “blood brothers” in this chilling novel of friendship gone awry... No one could understand why Colin and Roy were best friends. Colin was so shy; Roy was so popular. Colin was nervous around girls; Roy was a ladies’ man. Colin was fascinated by Roy—and Roy was fascinated by death. Then one day Roy asked his timid friend: “You ever killed anything?” And from that moment on, the two were bound together in a game too terrifying to imagine...and too irresistible to stop.

Collection of addresses by one of the Church of England's most loved and respected pastors.