The Life of Voices

The Life of Voices illustrates how human voices have special significance as the place where mind and body collaborate to produce everyday speech. Hannah Rockwell links Russian semiotician Mikhail Bakhtin's philosophy of dialogue with French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty's views of the relation between bodies and speech expression to develop a unique theory of communication and bodies. By introducing readers to actual human subjects speaking about how their identities have been shaped and transformed through time, the author explores how discourses reproduce ideology and social power relations. Readers are challenged to consider complex influences between human subjects and institutionalized discourses through critical-interpretive analyses of transcribed speech.

The Life of Voices has an interdisciplinary flair grounded in careful research.  Scholars in communication, sociology, philosophy, psychology, linguistics, anthropology, gender studies and identity politics will find valuable insights, methods and examples in this work. It is essential reading for anyone who is interested in discourse studies and the body's relationship to speech or human identity formation.

Preface Acknowledgements Introduction Chapter I: Living Language Chapter II: Dialogue, Organic Bodies and Consciousness Chapter III: Communicating Bodies: Worldliness, Values, Ideology and Dialogue Chapter IV: Bodies as Memory Sites Chapter V: Organic Bodies and Symbolic Lives Chapter VI: Speaking Subjects as Limbs of Social Bodies Chapter VII: Embodied Feeling and Collective Values Chapter VIII: Shared Humanity and the Power of Dialogue Appendix i: Methods