Ventriloquism

Ventriloquo è colui che parla col ventre, che simula uno slittamento della voce dalla bocca allo stomaco, da un’interiorità che si apre all’altro attraverso l’inter-faccia del volto, a un’intestinità che nega l’altro nella figura dell’in-volto, dell’in-viso, da una parola nutrimento a una parola escremento, e non quello della sua eiezione naturale ma quello di una parola-vomito, borborigma che parla a sé stesso, che inverte la traiettoria del bolo dal dentro al fuori. Ma ventriloquo è anche colui che parla al ventre, nel senso che non si rivolge al viso, alle orecchie, alla bocca, al volto dell’altro, ma spinge l’interlocutore a dismettere il proprio volto per farsi ventre, per rimanere nel chiuso del proprio io, nel rimuginare la parola ricevuta dal ventriloquo finché essa non diviene a sua volta sterco, e non viene eietta come natura vorrebbe ma vomitata verso il volto altrui, negandone la purezza fenomenologica, frustrandone la funzione di volto, oppure spingendolo a diventare anch’esso pancia, in una asemiosi illimitata che spegne il senso invece di accenderlo, che chiude l’esistenza nell’angolo buio dell’essere, che restituisce i corpi alla natura e li rende ferini, invisi gli uni agli altri, nemici, barbari.

During COVID-19, Susan Linn has drawn upon her extensive experience as a therapist and her virtuosic ventriloquism to develop a virtual, screen-based approach to supporting children and families that are sheltering-in-place. She and her puppet, Audrey Duck, provide a crucial social-emotional space for play and make believe, drawing upon the opportunities presented by the relational triangularity possible in ventriloquism between child, practitioner, and puppet. By examining her work, one can gain insights into the nature of ventriloquism, as well as best practices for supporting children experiencing trauma and adversity.

The Author would like to point out Jacques Derrida's concept of hauntology which perfectly describes the experience of literature and contemporary world as haunted. Therefore, he follows closely the psychoanalytical concepts of phantom and crypt made by Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok. Then the Author shows how the notion of specter was absorbed and could be use in literature studies (Esther Rashkin, Nicholas Royle, Jodey Castricano). Derrida's theory makes it possible to perceive literature not as homogenic and coherent but as open structure, inhabited by voices of Otherness.

Anachronism Effects: Ventriloquism and Popular Media, argues that the seemingly outmoded cultural phenomenon of ventriloquism is a key site for understanding Western anxieties about media and mediation at the turn of the twenty-first century. Ventriloquism achieved mainstream popularity in the Vaudevillian era through its comedic dramatizations of the foibles of everyday communication. Subsequently translated into the audiovisual contexts of phonography, film, and television, the art boasts a growing plethora of media afterlives, while also serving as political shorthand for the mechanical reproduction of another’s speech. Anachronism Effects insists that ventriloquism’s circulation as a popular metaphor, and continued prevalence as a form of contemporary entertainment, offers a unique template for tracing the transmissions of power and knowledge through diverse media platforms, as well as through racialized, gendered, and queer bodies, in the information age—even as the practice continues to evoke the cultural detritus of a prior historical moment.

Anachronism Effects thus attends to the myriad ways in which ventriloquism has evolved as a distinct cultural object, as the art of “saying what people want to say but can’t say” by displacing this unspeakable or unsavory speech onto a dummy. From the radically race-critical 1970s vinyl record albums of the African-American ventriloquist duo Richard and Willie; to the late 1980s-early 1990s lip-synch scandal wrought by the “ventriloquism” of the Afro-German pop group Milli Vanilli; to the contemporary televisual, cinematic, and multimedia performances of the self-deprecating British ventriloquist Nina Conti and her jingoistic American counterparts Terry Fator and Jeff Dunham, the project’s case studies illuminate what it means to “vent” in both senses of the term, particularly in the context of the perceived dynamics of silencing or “correctness” that often accompanies contemporary political discourse. The dissertation’s initial case studies notably coalesce around highly politicized celebrations of national history (the mid-1970s U.S. Bicentennial, the early 1990s “reunification” of Germany), while its later chapters take up post-9/11 U.S. fantasies of a return to a folkloric national past. In each instance, ventriloquism’s play with the alignments and disconnections between body and voice enacts a material working-through of the temporal contradictions elided by national historical discourses.

My observation of Indian Cinema and use of Puppets and dummies-in the puppet form or, song form or as a character involved as part of the film.
Here, I have listed some of my observational study till date.
I did publish the same  on my blog in the year 2012.

https://sphoorthi-theatre.blogspot.com/2012/08/use-of-puppets-in-indian-cinema.html

The process of screen adaptation is an act of ventriloquism insofar as it gives voice to contemporary anxieties and desires through its trans-temporal use of a source text. Screen adaptations that propose to negotiate meanings about the past, particularly a conflicted past, are acts of 'trans-temporal ventriloquism': they adapt and reinscribe pre-existing source texts to animate contemporary concerns and anxieties. I focus on the acts of trans-temporal ventriloquism in Ian Iqbal Rashid's Surviving Sabu (1998), a postcolonial, turn-of-the-twenty-first century short film that adapts Zoltan and Alexander Korda's film The Jungle Book (1942), itself an adaptation of Rudyard Kipling's collection of short stories by the same name. Surviving Sabu is about the survival and appropriation of orientalist films as a means of self-expression in a postcolonial present. Inherent in this is the idea of cinema as a potentially redemptive force that can help to balance global power inequalities. Surviving Sabu's return to The Jungle Book becomes a means both of tracing the genealogy of specific orientalist discourses and for ventriloquising contemporary concerns. This article demonstrates how trans-temporal ventriloquism becomes a strategy of political intervention that enables the film-maker to take ownership over existing media and narratives. My argument examines Surviving Sabu as an exemplar of cultural studies of the 1980s and 1990s: a postcolonial remediation built on fantasy and desire, used as a strategy of writing within rather than back to empire.

Safety rules are unavoidable in hazardous work and are often codified insights from accidents and fatalities. Safety rules research predominantly focuses on factors that influence compliance and violation of rules (a rationalist view), but rarely examines how members draw from safety rules to take action and gain experience. This study draws from and extends an adaptation view of safety rules, which considers how members use safety rules as " tools " to inform action. The study compares how two wildland firefighting workgroups incorporate safety rules into communication practices, and specifically, how they ventriloquize them. From a communication perspective, ventriloquization directs attention to ways safety rules enable members to make sense of hazards, navigate authority, and develop experience. The findings contribute an explanatory workgroup model for how members adapt safety rules into action according to workgroup norms, complementary relationships, and practices, which extends our understanding of adaptive action and learning in hazardous work organizations.

In primetime U.S. political discourse, across liberal and conservative outlets alike, accusations of puppetry and ventriloquism proliferate. Despite its anachronism, the ventriloquial metaphor furnishes a reliable means of discrediting presidential candidates and president-elects by conjuring the figure of the dummy who speaks in a voice not his own. At the same time, the presidential voice’s constant mediation invites material comparisons to the channeling of voices through dummy and human bodies practiced in stage ventriloquism. This chapter examines how technologies of the voice, from microphones to speech aids such as earpieces and teleprompters, have figured into popular framings of the last three U.S. presidents as speaking puppets, arguing that bipartisan charges of ventriloquism reflect twinned national-cultural anxieties about the voice’s constitutive mediation and power’s constitutive decentralization in late capitalism. Through analyses of liberal speculations about George W. Bush’s use of listening devices, conservative claims about Barack Obama’s dependence on teleprompters, and bipartisan responses to Donald Trump’s self-presentation as a leader whose mediated voice remains perpetually unfiltered, the chapter proposes a new theory of the politics of voice that acknowledges the voice’s technicity and power’s distribution.

As an audiovisual medium rooted in processes of synchronization, film has sometimes been metaphorized as ventriloquism. At the levels of film genre and form, documentary cinema in particular has also been called ventriloquial, owing to its frequent emphasis on giving voice to voiceless—or underrepresented—persons or things. This article contends that the material practice of ventriloquism has more to offer to documentary cinema than a convenient (and typically negative) metaphor for the deceptive synchrony of sound and image or the embattled relation between subject and object. Through a close examination of contemporary British ventriloquist Nina Conti's 2012 documentary film, Nina Conti: Her Master's Voice and the Legacy of Six Bereaved Puppets, the article argues that the ventriloquial technique of bifurcation—in which a ventriloquist's lips appear to move out of sync with the sound of her voice—gives us a unique model for rethinking the pairings of film sound and image and documentary subject and object not as irrevocably divided but as operating alongside one another, albeit in an uneven and instable manner. Taking inspiration from feminist and queer theories of relationality such as Trinh T. Minh-ha's concept of “speaking nearby” and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's notion of “besideness,” this article additionally suggests that Conti's ventriloquial documentary opens us to the possibility of a puppet love distinct from heteronormative constructs.

In this response to Cooren (2014), I question whether a theory tied to a scholarly tradition with strong epistemological and methodological commitments can in fact be a response to Craig's (1999) call for dialogue between communication traditions. Ventriloquism originated in the Montréal School of the Communicative Constitution of Organizations (CCO), a field of study that understands organizations and organizing to be the result of interaction. Because of this epistemology, CCO scholars use conversation analysis (CA) as their primary method. Although Cooren has presented ventriloquism as a means to unify the field, it seems difficult to imagine other research methodologies being adopted into such a vision.

Taking a ventriloqual approach to intersectionality analysis, this study investigates the communicative constitution of graduate student parenthood and their work-life negotiations. Analyzing 30 in-depth interviews, we found that figures – ideal graduate student worker norms, gender ideologies of work and family, and cultural values of family and child-rearing responsibilities – intersected with one another in shaping the experiences for graduate student parents. These intersectionalities belong to broader structures that constrain graduate students’ career and personal-life choices to fulfill/disrupt roles in navigating parenthood, yet the interplays of various aspects of intersectionality create space for transformation. The study contributes to an emergent grounded-in-action perspective of intersectionality to uncover systems of interlocking oppressions and lived tensions. The theoretical and practical implications of nonhuman agents acting to enable and constrain sustainable work-life communication are presented.

This paper considers the problem of political ventriloquism in a digital age. Democracy relies on the authority of collective voice conceived of as constituent power or vox populi but new technologies that mimic human participation can divert public debate, posing a threat to authenticity and accountability. If ventriloquism primarily serves to manipulate the gullible the practice should be curtailed. However, this neglects the power of ventriloquism to also open politics to new voices, and minimizes the responsibility of listeners. Efforts to address the practice therefore cannot follow a model based on simple silencing without prioritizing pacification over transformation.

This article provides a thorough insight of the exhibition, Present Imperfect: Disorderly Apparel Reconfigured, which ran at Fashion Space Gallery in London, from 12 May – 4 August 2017. The exhibition comprised of five items that were chosen especially due to their lack of preservation and severely damaged condition, in order to highlight the rich history they embody. Curator Amy de la Haye and exhibition maker Jeffrey Horsley, managed to animate these otherwise perished articles of clothing, as well as bestow them not only one but multiple voices. Instead of labels, a selection of texts–drawn from various resources and across disciplines—was attributed to each item, giving them a voice that ventriloquized their alternative stories. This, I argue, suggests fragments as a means of totality and permanence, and that the absence of the wearer can still find a lexicon due to the memorialized loss that is incorporated within the garments and our very own imagination. The allusion is one that points to the metaphysical presence and materiality of objects; now castrated, these ‘autonomous partial objects’ find a new dwelling in the framing of the ‘essay exhibition’ context that acts not as a coffin, but as a stage for them to perform the stories they embody. As I enter the polylogue, my reflections are adding yet another interpretation of the exhibits, expanding the exhibition’s suggestive deconstructionist ‘methodologies.’

In what ways does neo-Victorian fiction ‘talk back’ to the nineteenth century? What is at stake in the contemporary interest in ‘re-voicing’ the Victorian era? Gender and Ventriloquism in Victorian and Neo-Victorian Fiction is the first book-length study of the relationship between ventriloquism and gender in nineteenth-century literature and contemporary fiction. Offering an insight into the gendered history of ventriloquial utterance, this monograph seeks to re-evaluate the concept of ventriloquism by challenging the power relationship between ‘ventriloquists’ and ‘dummies’. The ventriloquial metaphor articulates an ambivalent exchange between imitation and alteration, tribute and critique, voicing and silencing. Through detailed analysis of Victorian and neo-Victorian narratives of ventriloquism, Helen Davies locates ventriloquism as a key trope for exploring the politics of contemporary fiction’s dialogue with the nineteenth century.

Catalogue essay for NOT I: Throwing Voices (1500 BCE - 2020 CE), Los Angeles County Museum of Art, curated by José Luis Blondet

Purchase link: https://www.thelacmastore.org/collections/not-i-throwing-voices-1500-bce-2020-ce/products/six-scripts-for-not-i-lacma-exhibition-catalogue

In this response to Cooren (2014), I question whether a theory tied to a scholarly tradition with strong epistemological and methodological commitments can in fact be a response to Craig's (1999) call for dialogue between communication traditions. Ventriloquism originated in the Montréal School of the Communicative Constitution of Organizations (CCO), a field of study that understands organizations and organizing to be the result of interaction. Because of this epistemology, CCO scholars use conversation analysis (CA) as their primary method. Although Cooren has presented ventriloquism as a means to unify the field, it seems difficult to imagine other research methodologies being adopted into such a vision.

The article discusses the story of the armata sagapò as a war rumour, putting it in relation to three other unverified stories of the Second World War that circulated in post-war Italy, i.e. the anecdote of the Soviet dispatch number 630, the speech attributed to Churchill on the performance of the Folgore divisions at El Alamein, and the myth of Italiani brava gente. It shows that all the considered narratives were structured around a common pro- cess of ventriloquisation and, by relying on the sociological scholarship that has investigated the phenomenon of rumours, argues that the formation and circulation of these pieces of hearsay were related to the process of renegotiation of Italian identity that followed the collapse of Fascism. While doing this, the article questions the veracity of the story of the sagapò nickname putting forward a new explanation for its creation.

This article proposes the analysis of three speeches pronounced by the UQAM’s chancellor in
order to understand the values that are cultivated and the tensions that characterize the university.
Using various analytical methods (narrative, critical and ventriloquism), anchored in a
constitutive approach of communication (CCO), we examine how the chancellor defines his
university, which is facing an unfavourable economical context. The analysis shows how, in
those speeches, the chancellor cultivates the ideas of academic freedom and university autonomy
vis-à-vis marketization, using the principle of democracy as a basic value. This article proposes
an innovative discursive approach to study higher education institutions. Its main contributions
are, first, to demonstrate the relevance of a constitutive approach of communication for
discourses analysis and, second, to show the complementariness between three distinct analytical
methods.

The translation of a text with homoerotic content reveals complex political, social and cultural contestation in the transnationalization of sexual desire and identity. This article examines the translations of homoerotic poetry by Russian émigré writer Valerii Pereleshin from and into Russian. Pereleshin’s different approaches in his inverse translation (Pushkin’s “Imitating the Arabic” and Kuzmin’s Alexandrian Songs) and direct translation (Pessoa’s “Antinous”) demonstrate how translation choices are governed by the interplay of discourses of same-sex desires in different cultural contexts, as well the poet-translator’s expression of sexual otherness.
(continua na p. 1)

CEARNS, Jennifer, "The Ventriloquist Behind the Shattered Mirror: A Study of Pessoa's Bilingual Oeuvre" (2014). Pessoa Plural―A Journal of Fernando Pessoa Studies, No. 6, Fall, pp. 78-103. Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library. https://doi.org/10.7301/Z0TQ601G

Is Part of:

Pessoa Plural―A Journal of Fernando Pessoa Studies, Issue 6

The Ventriloquist Behind the Shattered Mirror: A Study of Pessoa’s Bilingual Oeuvre
[O Ventriloco detrás do Espelho Partido: estudo sobre a poesia bilingue de Pessoa]

https://doi.org/10.7301/Z0TQ601G

ABSTRACT

Amidst a vast body of literature focussing on Pessoa's Portuguese-language work, until recently comparatively little attention has been paid to his work in other languages, specifically, English. In this essay I argue that Pessoa's bilingualism becomes a fundamental method of self-dilution in his deconstruction of self. In English in particular, a strong presence of other influential voices resonate in Pessoa's language, further reinforcing this process. This ventriloquism leads to a true cacophony of voices in his English work, fulfilling the objectives he sets out for himself in Portuguese. I critique Bloom's conclusion that this made Pessoa's poetry 'weaker'; indeed, in this light his English work asserts itself rather more convincingly than previously considered. Ultimately Pessoa's project(s) of 'deselving' can only be comprehensively appreciated through the careful consideration of all of his work, across voices, heteronyms and languages.

RESUMO

Em meio a um vasto corpo de literatura focando nas obras pessoanas em português, comparativamente, pouca atenção tem sido dedicada ao seu trabalho em outros idiomas, mais especificamente, em inglês, até recentemente. Neste ensaio, argumenta-se que para Pessoa o bilinguismo se torna um método fundamental de auto-diluição em seu projeto de auto-desconstrução. É particularmente notável a forte presença de outras vozes influentes ressoando na linguagem de Pessoa em inglês, reforçando ainda mais este processo. Este ventriloquismo leva a poesia a uma verdadeira cacofonia de vozes em sua obra inglesa; o qual cumpre objetivos que o poeta define por si mesmo em português. Eu critico a conclusão de Bloom que sugere que isso torna a poesia de Pessoa 'ʹmais fraca'ʹ; de fato, a este respeito seu trabalho em inglês afirma-se um pouco mais convincente do que foi considerado anteriormente. Em última análise, projetos pessoanos de se criar podem ser apreciados de forma abrangente através da análise cuidadosa de todos os seus trabalhos, através de vozes, heterônimos e línguas.

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This paper treats one of Charles Lamb’s early publications – The Curious Fragments – both from the point of view of its language, and from that of the literary persona that Lamb adopts in the writing. Although the language used is an attempt to mimic early modern English, it is not Lamb's intention to produce a convincing forgery but rather to pay tribute to Robert Burton from whom Lamb borrows the “Anticke” style. This quite bizarre process, a veritable second degree impersonation – Lamb impersonates not the actual Democritus-philosopher, but Burton’s Democritus – has been labelled as Elizabethanizing.

In this article, I propose to respond to Craig’s (1999) call for a dialogue between what he identified as the seven traditions in the study of communication, as well as Russill’s (2005) positioning of pragmatism as a meta-perspective on the seven others. I show that a way to respond to Craig and Russill consists of considering communication as an activity of ventriloquism, a thesis that is, as I demonstrate, congruent with the pragmatist meta-tradition. Communicating and experiencing the world, according to the pragmatist view, indeed amounts to responding or reacting to what one considers a situation requires, demands or requests, which is precisely what a ventriloqual view tries to analyze and unveil. I then introduce a dialogue between this ventriloqual view of pragmatism and the seven traditions that Craig identified.

As a discourse analyst, I take Francois Cooren's compelling reconstruction of communication theory as ventriloquism as a universe in which the world speaks through us and by our speaking of it, as an invitation to new noticings, new conversations, new questions for analysis (of discourse; interaction; communication). In this discussion note, I stage an inter-action between Cooren’s ventriloqual universe and the concepts of affect, orders of indexicality and polycentricity that animate the work of discourse scholars Rick Iedema and Jan Blommaert. In doing so, I consider how these concepts and the noticings they invite may enhance a ventriloqual view and (perhaps selfishly), how they matter to me as I continue to develop my thinking and doing in discourse studies.

On reading Samuel Beckett’s Not I for the first time, Billie Whitelaw was struck by a woman’s ‘inner scream […] something akin to verbal vomit […] talking her thoughts at the speed of thought’ (Whitelaw 1995, 116). Performing the role of Mouth was to become a career-defining moment for Whitelaw; one not easily forgotten for its visceral schizophrenic ravings, emanating from the disembodied mouth of a woman who refuses to acknowledge that her voice is her own. A mouth that forces its language out, and sucks the audience back into its ‘rioting, rambling hole’ (Whitelaw, 118). Beckett’s works play a significant role in the medical humanities, a field located at the intersection between literature and the sciences.

This paper considers the difficulties associated with speaking; what Steven Connor refers to in Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism as that ‘duet of utterance and response’ (Connor 2000, 8). Through her ravings Not I’s Mouth appropriates the aesthetics of ventriloquism to stage the patient’s struggle for agency within the performative clinical encounter.

Mouth is both spectral and embodied, a site for articulation and dissociation in which the source of language can never been assumed. As advocacy continues to play an important role in patient care to both augment and challenge the dominant biomedical and scientific voices at play within medicine, Mouth offers a model for the patient experience at odds with the clinical discourse that it is forced to surrender to.

Delivered: 7th April, 2017 - British Society of Science and Literature Annual Conference, University of Bristol.

Cooren (2014) argues that a ventriloquism metaphor for communication can provide a unified perspective on seven traditions in the study of communication. This Discussion Note does not argue for or against the idea that a suitably deployed and motivated ventriloquism metaphor can do this. Instead, the Note expresses some concerns about whether Cooren does suitably deploy, motivate, and support ventriloquism as a metaphor for communication. The concerns are about whether ventriloquism as opposed to a simpler personification-based view should be used, and whether two different notions of ventriloquism are being adequately considered. I also point to a complication that should be embraced in how one should analyse back-ventriloquism, i.e., people being ventriloquized by their own dummies, as suggested by Cooren. None of the concerns are fatal to Cooren’s enterprise, but rather point to the need for a more refined untangling of issues.

In this article I offer a preliminary account of the role of metaphor as a representational strategy In Capital Volume One by Karl Marx. While extensive consideration and debate has been concerned with Marx’s writing on politics, philosophy, economics and literary theory, relatively little attention has been given to Capital as a work of literature. I offer a preliminary analysis of metaphor in Capital 1, reading three groupings of metaphors that occur throughout the text. Marx builds up an imagistic, metaphorical level of description that is sufficiently varied, rich and consistent to constitute an important feature of his project to represent capital in this text. I suggest below some types or groupings that help to draw out the themes and concerns that these references highlight. Capital and capitalist production is frequently anthropomorphised, attributed characteristics of persons in order to contribute to the polemical force of key arguments; a number of references are concerned with speaking for either a real author or a character or type; a notable group of examples deals with blood and bodies; and another key cluster of references allude to plays, characters in plays, acting and performance. A number of persons and personified non-persons speak directly in this text, such that it becomes “polyvocal”. Marx’s use of allusion and metaphor in this way builds up a set of vivid images that reinforce his characterisation of capital as a form and a relation that operates by means of perverse transformations, reversals and distortions, and violations of the integrity of persons and natural processes, including death. I examine the selected examples with some attention to

Published by Strange Attractor Press, 2017

Winner of the Folklore Society’s 2017 Katharine Briggs Award:
“A thoroughly clever, enjoyable account… Josiffe deftly and engagingly elucidates the construction of a piece of distinctively modern, mediated folklore.”

“Christopher Josiffe’s meticulous telling is both brilliantly silly and irreducibly mysterious.” Bee Wilson in the London Review of Books

“Thoroughly researched…vigorously written and often charming”
Kevin Jackson in the TLS

During the mid-1930s, British and overseas newspapers were full of incredible stories about Gef, a ‘talking mongoose’ or ‘man-weasel’ who had allegedly appeared in the home of the Irvings, a farming family in a remote district of the Isle of Man.

The creature was said to have the ability to talk in several languages, to sing, to steal objects from nearby farms and to eavesdrop on local people, such that they became uneasy at the farmer’s seeming ability to be able to tell them their most private goings-on.

Despite written reports, magazine articles and books, several photographs, fur samples and paw prints, voluminous correspondence and signed witness statements, there is still no consensus as to what was really happening to the Irving family.

Hoax? Mental illness? A poltergeist? The possession of an animal by an evil spirit? Now you can read all the evidence and decide for yourself.

Seven years’ research and interviews, photographs (many previously unseen), interviews with surviving witnesses, visits to the site – all are presented here in this new book, the first examination of the case for 70 years.

http://strangeattractor.co.uk/news/gef-strange-tale-extra-special-talking-mongoose/

ABSTRACT Taking a ventriloqual approach to intersectionality analysis, this study investigates the communicative constitution of graduate student parenthood and their work-life negotiations. Analyzing 30 in-depth interviews, we found that figures – ideal graduate student worker norms, gender ideologies of work and family, and cultural values of family and child-rearing responsibilities – intersected with one another in shaping the experiences for graduate student parents. These intersectionalities belong to broader structures that constrain graduate students’ career and personal-life choices to fulfill/disrupt roles in navigating parenthood, yet the interplays of various aspects of intersectionality create space for transformation. The study contributes to an emergent grounded-in-action perspective of intersectionality to uncover systems of interlocking oppressions and lived tensions. The theoretical and practical implications of nonhuman agents acting to enable and constrain sustainable work-life communication are presented.

En el siguiente trabajo analizamos el fenómeno discursivo de la ventriloquización aclarando, en primer lugar, la relación y distinción entre el concepto polifonía y otros cercanos como dialogismo, heteroglosia y dialéctica. A partir de la revisión diacrónica del concepto, estudiamos las facetas del hablante y las situaciones comunicativas que intervienen en los diferentes discursos polifónicos, diferenciando cuatro tipos de misiones polifónicas: 1) discurso referido, 2) enunciados ecoicos,  3) intertextos y 4) ventriloquización. Presentamos una descripción detallada de las principales características de la ventriloquización (mímesis, enriquecimiento semántico, posible cambio de voz –timbre y entonación–, función lingüística predominante y recontextualización). Por último, atendiendo a los dos tipos de ventriloquización (real y simulada), proponemos una clasificación de usos frecuentes a partir de cuatro factores relacionados con los agentes comunicativos.

Samuel Beckett has long been considered a writer consumed with asking questions of what it means, and how it feels, to exist. Spanning over half a century, Beckett’s work explored the experience of ageing, illness and injury as he continued to re-evaluate the failing body, perhaps no more so than in its decline in language. Faced with a language lost, his characters continue to uphold his insistence that in the creative process ‘there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express.’ (1949).

The research of psychologist Professor Charles Fernyhough on the role of inner speech as an aid to cognitive development, self-awareness and expression, gives rise to different ways of thinking about language and language production, as both an internal and external process. This paper builds upon those connections already established between Beckett, language and the liminal body; using his work as a test case by which to better understand the subjective experience of language loss, communication disorders and interrupted inner speech.

Acknowledging the significant role that Samuel Beckett’s works have already played in the medical humanities, I argue for a consideration of new ways in which they can question the predominant discourse of the clinical model, focussed on diagnosis and rehabilitation. As subjects continue to express, and have an ‘obligation’ to do so, can we begin to challenge normative expectations of speech and hence uncover alternative modes of expression which may help us to better understand the experience of losing language?

In this article I offer a preliminary account of the role of metaphor as a representational strategy In Capital Volume One by Karl Marx. While extensive consideration and debate has been concerned with Marx’s writing on politics, philosophy, economics and literary theory, relatively little attention has been given to Capital as a work of literature. I offer a preliminary analysis of metaphor in Capital 1, reading three groupings of metaphors that occur throughout the text. Marx builds up an imagistic, metaphorical level of description that is sufficiently varied, rich and consistent to constitute an important feature of his project to represent capital in this text.

Forthcoming in 'Socialism and Democracy' in 2015.