Keynote speakers

Memoirs in Sound: “Reading” Anthony Joseph’s Auto/Biographical Jazz Poetry

In recent decades, oral poetry performance has become a popular medium of autobiographical narration, to the extent that critics have identified “authentic” self presentation as spoken word poetry’s dominant mode (Ailes). Frequently, spoken word’s aesthetic of authenticity is tied to the speaker’s marginalized social identity and conceived as literally “giving voice” to their experiences and concerns: it is predicated on a rhetoric of confession and sincerity, a clarity of expression, and direct address.  

This lecture centers on two auto/biographical poetry collections by award-winning Trinidadian-British poet Anthony Joseph – Bird Head Son (2009) and Sonnets for Albert (2022) – both of which have been published in different audio formats and with the backing of jazz musicians. In 1989, as a young man, Anthony Joseph immigrated to the UK, leaving home and family behind to make a name for himself as a writer and spoken-word vocalist not long after. In 2023, he won the prestigious T. S. Eliot Prize for Sonnets for Albert. In contrast to the ‘slammy’ rhetoric of much contemporary spoken word, Joseph’s performances are delivered in a distinctly ‘jazzy’ mode that underscores the lyricism of his poetic memoirs. This performance style, together with the musical backing, results in an elusive quality that reflects the themes of his life narratives in interesting ways. The question at the centre of this lecture is how we can “read” poetic life narrative in its oral mode, especially when it is accompanied by music. The example of Joseph’s vocal performance of his memoirs will demonstrate how orality and music can add to, or detract, from textual semantics and how sonic collaborations can probe the boundaries of autobiographical subjectivity and authorship. 

Julia Lajta-Novak is Associate Professor for Anglophone Literature and Mediality at the University of Vienna, Austria. She is an editor of the European Journal of Life Writing and has published extensively on biographical fiction and on poetry performance. Her (co-)edited books and journal issues include Imagining Gender in Biographical Fiction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), a special issue of Life Writing on the theme of “Life Writing and Celebrity” (Taylor & Francis, 2019), and Experiments in Life-Writing (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). She is the author of Gemeinsam Lesen (Lit 2007 – a book on reading groups) and Live Poetry: An Integrated Approach to Poetry in Performance (Brill | Rodopi 2011). Since 2021, she has been directing a 5-year research project titled “Poetry Off the Page: Literary History and the Spoken Word, 1965-2020” (supported by the European Research Council and the Austrian Science Fund), which focuses on spoken word poetry in UK and Ireland.  

Fraudiobooks?: Audio Fraud from the Analog Era to AI

This presentation traces the long history of deception in recorded voices, from the earliest days of the phonograph to the emerging challenges posed by AI voice synthesis. Beginning with the late-nineteenth-century scramble to capture the voices of celebrities such as Queen Victoria, William Gladstone, and Oscar Wilde, it shows how the allure of “authentic” voices has repeatedly been exploited by collectors, counterfeiters, and impersonators. Moving into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, it then looks at how audiobooks have reshaped the “autobiographical pact” into the “audiobiographical pact”—a tacit promise that narrators are who they claim to be and that their stories are true. The presentation finishes with a consideration of contemporary risks posed by AI-generated voices, arguing that the audiobook’s promise of unmediated access to an author’s voice has always been a potentially fraudulent experience.

Matthew Rubery is Professor of Modern Literature at Queen Mary University of London. His books include Reader’s Block: A History of Reading Differences (2022), The Untold Story of the Talking Book (2016), and Audiobooks, Literature, and Sound Studies (2011). He also co-edited Further Reading (2020), a collection of essays for the series Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature. 

A Life in Music: Ror Wolf’s Radio Ballad Leben und Tod des Kornettisten Bix Beiderbecke aus Nord-Amerika

Ror Wolf’s radio ballad Leben und Tod des Kornettisten Bix Beiderbecke aus Nord-Amerika, first broadcast in 1987 and awarded the prestigious Hörspielpreis der Kriegsblinden in 1988, tells the life story of jazz cornet player Bix Beiderbecke in unconventional ways, using a collage of voices and original music while constantly crossing narrative boundaries. Günter Rinke (2018: 75) uses Wolf’s ‘liberal’ approach to facts in his radio piece as an example to reflect on the relationship between ‘truth’ and fiction in audio biographies and on the question whether one could posit a ‘radio drama pact’ between author and audiences analogous to the ‘fictional’ pact pertaining to prose fiction. While the notion of a ‘radio drama pact’ is perhaps difficult to uphold in an effectively multi-authorial art form such as radio drama, the author’s own (radio-) poetological reflections are worthwhile taking into account to elucidate the expectational frames surrounding an audio biography such as the one analysed in this talk. Wolf’s choice of the label “radio ballad” underlines his resistance to generic pigeonholing and deliberate deviation from radio genre traditions such as radio drama or the radio feature, as he also pointed to in his award acceptance speech.  

Taking my cue from Rinke, I analyse the radio ballad from audionarratological perspectives (Mildorf and Kinzel 2016, Bernaerts and Mildorf 2021, Mildorf 2025) against the background of some of its paratextual contexts, exploring what one might call the “artistic truth” (Zuidervaart 2004) of this audio biography. The audiophonic design of Wolf’s radio piece is shown to create a complex narrative situation achieved through multiple perspectives and different narratorial voices, the characterisation of Beiderbecke through voice, imaginary dialogue and music, as well as occasional metaleptic jokes that have a comic relief function while simultaneously bringing home even more forcefully the tragic dimension of the musician’s short life and career. Especially the use of original music, I argue, not only serves the function of providing ‘local colour’ for Beiderbecke’s life story or of making it more ‘authentic’, but demonstrates that music in fact was his life, thereby engaging in meaning-making that cuts across the documentary and the artistic. By telling a life in and through music, Wolf creates “resonance” (Schmitt 2017) with audiences in every sense of the word, which is prefigured by the significance of jazz and Beiderbecke in post-war Germany (Poiger 2002) and in Wolf’s own life story as told in interviews. 

Jarmila Mildorf is Professor of English Philology at the University of Paderborn. Her research focuses on life storytelling in oral history and autobiography, second-person narration, dialogue, audionarratology, radio drama, literature and medicine and the medical humanities. She is the author of Storying Domestic Violence: Constructions and Stereotypes of Abuse in the Discourse of General Practitioners (University of Nebraska Press, 2007) and Life Storying in Oral History: Fictional Contamination and Literary Complexity (De Gruyter, 2023), and co-editor of numerous collections and journal special issues, including Audionarratology: Interfaces of Sound and Narrative (De Gruyter, 2016), Audionarratology: Lessons from Radio Drama (Ohio State University Press, 2021), Narratives and Mental Health: Reimagining Theory and Practice (Oxford University Press, 2023), Word, Sound and Music in Radio Drama (Brill, 2024), and most recently, Performing Selves in the 21st Century (Partial Answers 23.2, 2025) and Life Storytelling across Media and Contexts (forthcoming in Narrative Inquiry). Mildorf serves on the editorial boards of the book series Narratives and Mental Health, Jahrbuch Literatur und Medizin and the journals EON and Re:visit.   

Slow Listening: How to Study Audio Recordings as Vocal Performance?

This workshop will introduce Slow Listening methods and an extremely user-friendly, state-of-the-art, open-source tool, called Drift, for the purpose of studying audio recordings of speech as performance. Such recordings can range from poetry readings to podcasts, stand-up comedy to audio books, radio drama to political speeches. Drift, available at https://drift4.spokenweb.ca/, was developed over the last decade, with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities in the U.S. and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. It allows artists and humanities scholars, with no background in linguistics or signal processing, to easily upload audio or video files and visualize and analyze aspects of speech as performance. Participants are encouraged to bring a laptop and a short audio or video clip of interest. Questions? Reach out to Marit MacArthur at mjmacarthur@ucdavis.edu.

Marit MacArthur teaches writing, and occasionally performance studies, at the University of California, Davis. Her collaborative, interdisciplinary research in digital voice studies and Slow Listening has been published in PMLA, Digital Humanities Quarterly, the Journal of Cultural Analytics, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Sounding Out!, Stanford’s ARCADE Colloquy, The Paris Review Online, Jacket2 and Literature in the Digital Age (edited by Adam Hammond). Her recent work on AI and writing has appeared in Frontiers in Communication, Computers and Composition, AI & Society, Inside Higher Ed, and Digital Rhetoric Collaborative, and is forthcoming in Bad Ideas about AI and Writing. She is series editor for the journal Critical AI on the topic of generative AI and writing in higher education.  

Robert M. Ochshorn, one of Drift’s primary developers, is an artist, engineer, and cultural theorist based in Brussels and New York City. He is co-founder and CEO of Reduct.Video and a researcher at KASK School of the Arts. Working collectively, collaboratively, and in correspondence, he makes software and interface that offer new tactility and perspective to media and archives

Don’t forget to register if you plan to attend the workshop! Here is the registration link: https://forms.cloud.microsoft/e/DKGR0i8sCV