Entangled Voices

In this book Ruf tries to understand how the concepts of voice and genre function in texts. To this end he joins literary theorists in the discussion about narrative. Ruf rejects the idea of genre as a fixed historical form that serves as a template for readers and writers; instead he suggests that we imagine different genres whether narrative lyric or dramatic as the expression of different voices. Each voice he asserts possesses different key qualities: embodiment sociality contextuality and opacity in the dramatic voice; intimacy limitation urgency in lyric; and a magisterial quality of comprehensiveness and cohesiveness in narrative. These voices are models for our selves composing an unruly and unstable multiplicity of selves. Ruf applies his theory of voice and genre to five texts: Dineson's Out of Africa Donne's Holy Sonnets Primo Levi's The Periodic Table Robert Wilson's Einstein on the Beach and Coleridge's Biographia Literaria. Through these literary works he discerns the detailed ways in which a text constructs a voice and in the process a self. More importantly Ruf demonstrates that this process is a religious one fulfilling the function that religions traditionally assume: that of defining the self and its world.