Book Reviews

61

to linguistic analysis to identify and categorize aggressive behaviours. It is noted that the
context and perception are particularly important because although various linguistic
items exist to help discover meaning, ‘[a] user’s intentions, however, are not always easy
to gauge (by participants as well as researchers)’ (p. 179). While Tagg concludes that
applied linguistics cannot fully explain why users bully and harass each other online, she
reassures us ‘that aggression is not the norm online’ (p. 183). Thus, while antisocial
behaviour ‘stands out’, many studies have recognized the frequency of collaboration,
community, and politeness.
Section C begins the ‘Theory’ section of the book. Here, Tagg primarily turns to theo-
retical ideas to expand on the empirical research of Sections A and B. For example,
‘Multiliteracies’ (Chapter 17) refers to the research about literacy and spelling discussed
in Chapter 2. Similarly, the following chapter adds to codeswitching and ‘translanguag-
ing’ (from Chapter 12), and heteroglossia. The second half of Section C follows this
trend by, for example, discussing the concerns that have been raised about the distortion
or concealment of users’ identities (p. 221) which first appeared in Section B, Chapter
13. The rest of the section re-examines ‘communities’ from a sociolinguistic theory per-
spective (Chapter 21), and discusses virtual communities as ‘personalised networks’ and
‘online affinity spaces’. The section ends rather abruptly on the note that ‘online com-
munity is about what community has always been about – seeking people out, making
connections and showing allegiances’ (p. 238); digital technology has only changed the
resources and ways that connections can be made. Overall, the entire section primarily
reads as a somewhat confusing addendum to Sections A and B, where readers may need
to flip back to Section A to make solid connections.
While the structure of the textbook is at times confusing, Tagg accomplishes her aim
to provide readers with the tools to make informed decisions about digital communica-
tion, and provides a valuable textbook for students and university instructors, and even
for scholars looking to refresh their knowledge about the subject. Furthermore, it pro-
vides a generous glossary of terms, a list of ‘Further Reading’ that engages with relevant
scholarship, and practical tasks to help students engage with the subject on a deeper
level. Thus, she should be easily accessible to scholars both inside and outside of the
discipline because the book does not presume a background in English language, applied
linguistics, or language and new media. The theoretical and practical insights, range of
topics in relation to language and society, and tasks come together to ensure a thorough
textbook well-suited to many.

Edited by Jarmila Mildorf and Till Kinzel, Audionarratology: Interfaces of Sound and Narrative.
Germany: De Gruyter, 2016, pp. viii + 267. ISBN 978-3-11-046432-0 (hbk)

Reviewed by: Charles Briffa, University of Malta, Malta

In literary criticism ‘narratology’ treats both the theory and practice of narrative, dealing
with the organisation, role, conventional standards and thematic bearings of narrative
and the ways these influence readers’ perception. ‘Audionarratology’ follows from this,
probing the interface of sound and narrative in disparate media. Audionarratology:
62 Language and Literature 27(1)

Interfaces of Sound and Narrative attempts, in a series of essays, to provide recent trends
and research material in this expanding field of study. This volume of essays is the result
of an international and interdisciplinary conference held in Paderborn, Germany (11–12
September 2014) on the subject.
The fourteen contributions to the subject found in this book offer an analytical discus-
sion of audionarratological modes used in today’s world. Two key arguments run through
most of these essays: one relating to the comment that audio narratives are still underes-
timated and undervalued in academic spheres; and the other pertaining to the observation
(often based on some case study) that the qualities of sounds can contribute significantly
to the narrative meaning in addition to the qualities of language – that is, apart from its
function as a support to narrative, sound has itself the potential to be a narrative.
In their introductory essay, the editors Jarmila Mildorf (University of Paderborn) and
Till Kinzel (Technical University of Berlin) delineate the meaning of audionarratology,
offering theoretical information on the relationship between sound and narrativity. At the
same time they herald each essay in this publication, and in doing so they consider con-
cepts such as ‘soundscapes’, ‘audioception’, ‘white noise’, ‘situatedness’, ‘experiental-
ity’, ‘auricularisation’, ‘focalisation’ and ‘audioliterality’ (many of which are discussed
in the book’s essays later on) in audio media and genres. Their implied aim is to semanti-
cally regularise narratological language. The volume attempts to explain the behaviour
of terms with respect both to knowledge and understanding, even though there does not
seem to be enough terminological standardisation in this field of study.
The first group of four essays deal with music and storytelling. Audionarratology
demands active reception of sensory data leading to conceptual growth in the form of
assimilation, as new perceptions are integrated into existing schemata through sound.
The linguist M. Dolores Porto Requejo (University of Alcalá) interprets the results of a
research project on digital stories with very specific edifying aims. Such digital stories
are characterised by their emotional and personal content, and by their brevity and con-
ciseness. They involve their target audience with the aid of acoustic aspects that essen-
tially contribute to the structure and meaning of the stories as the evaluative, attentional
and persuasive values of music become factors in the integrative mechanism of the nar-
ratives. Porto Requejo considers issues of interculturalism in the presentation of digital
narratives and discusses creativity in the scriptedness of narratives.
Ballads, as multimodal narratives, avail themselves of acoustic and linguistic ele-
ments to aid the storyworld projection. María Ángeles Martínez (Complutense University)
explores listeners’ responses to different versions of the same ballad which varies accord-
ing to different acoustic and linguistic arrangements of the song, triggering in listeners
dissimilar evaluations of the projected storyworld. In her view, therefore, the choices
made in the composition include diegetic elements which are not mere ornaments but are
important features of the contextual meaning as they guide listeners’ perception and
interpretation.
In making the distinction between the core narrative of country music and the periph-
eral narrative of the blues, Alan Palmer (an independent scholar) contends that this dis-
tinction may be typical of the genres to which the songs belong. ‘The predominantly
white genres of country and western and folk music,’ he writes, ‘have noticeably more
narrativity than the predominantly black genres of blues and soul’ (p. 74). In other words,
Book Reviews 63

white music may be seen linguistically as an elaborate narrative code and black music as
a restricted narrative code, for which Palmer ventures a plausible historical explanation.
But then both of them rely, in their own technical way, on the expressive qualities of
sound (most particularly voice and instrumentation) to convey the workings of the mind
and the heart in popular narrative songs. Palmer believes that we can only understand a
song’s narrative if we concentrate on the fictional minds (or the mental functioning of the
singers and the characters).
In the next essay, Markus Wierschem (Paderborn University) discusses a concept
album as a unified work of art into which the audience are immersed. And in ‘its holistic
delivery of aural, visual, and literal stimuli’ (p. 85) the concept album is viewed from a
dialogic perspective, explaining the interplay between a multiplicity of voices. This per-
spective is determined contextually, extra-linguistically and intra-linguistically so that
the refined interaction of music, visual aspects and lyrical elements supply the narrative
polyvocality of the entire work.
The second group deals with sound art and this section contains five essays. Elke
Huwiler (University of Amsterdam) concentrates on the stylistic and representational
devices of radio plays as dramatised and purely acoustic performances. Her concept of
radio drama is ‘an independent art form that is still developing and in search for new ways
of expression’ (p. 100). Besides language, there are other aspects that can express narrative
meaning in radio plays and she lists voice, music, noise, fading, cutting, mixing, position-
ing of the signals, electro-acoustic manipulation, actuality and silence. These contribute, in
their own way, to the narrative structure and enrich the presentational style making radio
drama lively and flexible. Huwiler’s analytical descriptions stress the fact that sound is a
significant feature of narrative in audio art. Although on the physical level radio drama is
auditory, it can still be a powerful imaginative force on the psychological level.
Then Bartosz Lutostański (University of Gdańsk) employs indicative tools to map out
a radio play’s narrative pattern. These tools can be medium-specific (like space terms)
and medium-free (like the narrator). Lutostański makes an interesting point when he
argues that the microphone is an active shaper of a play’s narrative pattern as it orches-
trates the positions of voices and the qualities of sounds.
Also focusing on radio drama Lars Bernaerts (Ghent University) presents a discussion
on an anti-narrative radio play based on an experimental novel. He treats the notion of
voice in unnatural narratology, and considers the plurality of voices that can create a
particular impression to defamiliarise the sound experience. Experimental radio plays
can utilise voice and sound creatively, and a discussion about how this can be done can
provide additional insights into the workings and functions of narratives.
The next essay focuses on performance poetry. Zoë Skoulding (Bangor University)
looks at noise not as an inconvenience to communication but as a companion to music to
stress the confluence of different environments and narrative in performance poetry.
Skoulding reflects on sound performances of poetry to show the tension between script-
edness and aurality/orality’s immediacy of place so that, even in translation, poetry when
performed in space can be heard as part of the environment.
An uncommon idea comes from Thijs Festjens (Ghent University) who focuses on a
new narrative genre, the mobile phone theatre. In a project (‘Call Cutta’) call-centre
employees in India guided participants to explore Berlin through mobile phone
64 Language and Literature 27(1)

directions and narratives. The essay discusses the fusion of sounds, voices and spaces to
create theatrical energies that make call-centre employees aural tour guides by mobile
phones. Social theatricalisation in this project turned employees and participants into
actors, and the mobile phones helped to create a shared acoustic space characterised
simultaneously by remoteness and nearness.
The last part of the volume contains four contributions discussing sound, narrative
and immersion. Sebastian Domsch (Greifswald University) talks about how video games
can convey narration at the acoustic level. Most interesting is his concept of a ludic–
diegetic sound (i.e. a sound associated with artistic elements that exist within the story-
world depicted in the narrative, showing spontaneity and undirected playfulness). Since
‘sound provides a communication feedback to the player’ (p. 197) there can be narration
even in a game set entirely in the dark.
A different tack is taken by Ivan Delazari (Hong Kong Baptist University) who shows
how the indeterminacy of the main characters’ conversational voices in sung narratives
is applied to obscure their racial identities. His aim is to show that racial stereotyping is
not always linked to voice qualities. However, there is the implication that voice qualities
inscribed in fiction become operative in the audience’s imagination.
Audiobooks are a main feature in audionarratology. Anežka Kuzmičová (Stockholm
University) starts by distinguishing between silent print reading and audiobook listening,
and she proceeds to talk about audiobook experiences to dismiss common misconcep-
tions about silent reading and to delineate convergent aspects between silent reading and
audiobook listening; namely, the enactive nature of the audience’s mental imagery, the
relative poverty of the audience’s attention and the richness of the audience’s conscious-
ness. Her conclusion is that audiobooks facilitate ‘the recipient’s wellbeing through day-
dreaming, fluency, and overall aesthetic pleasure’ (p. 234).
The final contribution in this volume, by Jarmila Mildorf, investigates pragmatically
the interconnection of sound, verbal texts and pictures in museum audio guide narratives.
Such audio guides include speech qualities and background music as essential affective
features, and sometimes music assumes a narrative function to create the atmosphere of
the storyworld and to serve as a coda to an incomplete story.
The book provides the stimulus for further thought. For instance, what can audionar-
ratology contribute to people with sensory impairments (most particularly the deaf and
hard-of-hearing)? Will the ongoing move from analogue to digital technology open up
new avenues to audionarratology? What implications do the above ideas have on the
translation of sound-based material in, say, audio drama and performance poetry? In the
translation of songs the music/sound is untranslateable and the target text words have to
match the music; so linguistically there could be some translation loss as sound is given
priority over language.
All the researchers in Audionarratology: Interfaces of Sound and Narrative are at the
cutting-edge of audionarratology, which is still in its initial scholarly stages. The book
shows that audionarratology has an important role to play in cognitive stylistics, espe-
cially in cases where sound merges into the fictional semantics of narrative. It is at present
experiencing an unprecedented boom of interest, despite the fact that there are still a
number of problematic issues to be tackled (for instance, how audionarratology can help
the deaf and hard-of-hearing, and what role can translation play in audionarratology).