Audiobooks as Artifacts

<p class=ql-align-justify>Their ever-evolving popularity notwithstanding audiobooks remain a rather undertheorized phenomenon. The prevailing handful of existing studies seem to have adopted an inherently historicist approach which fails to identify and scrutinize their aesthetic importance. Thus rather than regarding them as mere recorded 'versions' of existing literary works this book explores them as the unique products of a hitherto undefined artistic genre. As performance-based aural artifacts the very act of listening to them is rendered an aesthetic experience in its own right. By effectively embracing an interdisciplinary approach and introducing a set of aesthetic questions and philosophical conundrums (ignited by a paradigmatic application of the New Institutional Theory of Art) this study establishes a new aesthetic category-which in turn not only classifies audiobooks as artworks to all intents and purposes but also generates the criteria and parameters for evaluating their merit. Since the proof of the proverbial pudding is purportedly in the eating in surveying a series of concrete case studies-each highlighting different degrees of complexities-this study mainly examines first-person narratives as the most natural medium for the aesthetics of the audiobook. As such the investigation herein provides one with comparative close listenings appropriately analyzing and debating their aesthetic properties. Finally in exploring what this study identifies as one's informed intuition and its role in the craft of casting audiobooks this study also proposes a new understating of how aesthetic appreciation works in action.</p>