SEL audioworkshop #4

Audionarratology: Lessons from Audio Drama

20 February 2018, Ghent

The workshop brings together the authors of the volume Audionarratology: Lessons from Audio Drama for a discussion of their chapters. The goal is to strengthen the coherence of the volume and tap into the collective knowledge of the participants to improve individual chapters. The volume revisits key narrative concepts (e.g., focalization, mediation, voice) and encourages reconsiderations of ideas circulating in recent narrative approaches (cognitive, transmedial, rhetorical, and unnatural) from the viewpoint of audio drama. Moreover, it argues that the aural makeup of audiophonic narratives stimulates and even necessitates reconsiderations in narrative theory. In other words, audio drama raises important questions for the study of narrative. Given the purely auditory nature of this art form, the question of how audio drama organizes narrative features and structural elements becomes particularly relevant in the context of media-conscious and transmedial postclassical narratologies. What media-specific (i.e. audiophonic) affordances does audio drama offer to create storyworld existents such as characters, spaces and time(s), as well as discourse level features such as emplotment, discourse time, and viewpoint? The volumes explores how sound, music, language, and voice work together or contradict each other to convey narrative information such as spatial configurations, temporal shifts, narratorial unreliability, humor in characterization.