Resonant Listening: Reading Voices and Places in Born-Audio Literary Narratives

“Audio books remind us of the sound of literature” (90), according to Sven Birkets’s critical essay on the influence of audiobooks on modes of reading. Audiobooks draw attention to the aural aspects of literature, challenging the dominating association of reading with visuality; that is, reading as a process of silently interpreting visual signs on the printed page. Listening to audiobooks thus paves the way for new forms of literary experience and for a new attention towards the significance of sound in literature. We may say that the audiobook implies a return to, and development of, the oral roots of literary storytelling, as it represents what Walter J. Ong calls secondary orality (Bednar); that is, an orality that is dependent on literate culture: “essentially a more deliberate and self-conscious orality, based permanently on the use of writing and print” (Ong 133).

This discussion becomes highly relevant in the context of the audiobook’s current development. Though it is far from a new medium, audiobooks have become widely popular, and are no longer primarily associated with aids for people who have visual impairments or reading disabilities. In the moment of writing, the production and distribution of audiobooks make up the fastest growing area within the international publishing sector.¹ This development may be explained by digitization, which has made audiobooks easier and cheaper to produce, distribute, and access. Digital audiobooks may be consumed on mobile devices, via downloading or streaming, thus making it possible to listen on demand and on the go. Accordingly, digital audiobooks have allowed readers to integrate the consumption of literature into the activities and rhythms of modern everyday life: for instance, while commuting, exercising, or doing housework.

How does this development affect our modes and concepts of reading? How does the audiobook, its mobility and aural effects, influence the aesthetic content and experience of literature? This article investigates these questions, addressing one of the central challenges for Comparative Literature research today: following modern media development and specifically the process of digitization, the printed book can no longer be taken for granted as the primary mediator of literature. Literature today is developed and consumed across different media platforms, and therefore, a comparative approach must not only focus on crosscultural comparisons, reading across different languages, but also on crossmedia aspects, investigating how the textual content and concepts of literature, and concepts of reading, are influenced and transformed by different media and formats. Addressing this situation, N. Katherine Hayles and Jessica Pressman note:

As the era of print is passing, it is possible once again to see print in a comparative context with other textual media, including the scroll, the manuscript codex, the early print codex, the variations of book forms produced by changes from letterpress to offset to digital publishing machines, and born-digital forms such as electronic literature and computer games.

(vii)

While we may question whether the era of print is passing, Pressman and Hayles rightly claim that print can no longer be taken for granted as literature’s primary medium. Consequently, they introduce an approach called comparative textual media, which describes the process of comparing texts presented in different media and formats. However, like most scholars investigating the influences of digitization on literature and reading, they focus on the comparison between printed text and text read on screen, thus remaining within the visual paradigm. By turning towards audiobooks, we can move one step further away from the paradigm of print aesthetics, drawing attention to the effects of aurality not only on the text itself, but also on concepts and modes of reading.

Does listening to audiobooks even qualify as reading? This has been a central question in most existing research on audiobooks-which is, notably, limited-as well as in public debate, in which audiobooks are often associated with a distracted and superficial mode of literary consumption.² Critics such as Sven Birkets argue that precisely because they invite multitasking and mobile listening, audiobooks take readers’ minds off the text. Listeners do not have to concentrate on the task of interpreting the visual signs of the text; according...