Call for papers

Dacoromania litteraria, 13/2026
Sound Archives of Literature in East and West
Edited by Céline Pardo, Ligia Tudurachi and Roxana Patraș

The written traces of literature have been maintained as a central preoccupation of Romanian and foreign literary scholarship. Conversely, the quasi-musical nature of speech as well as other aspects related to spoken literature have been almost non-existent in the act of literary cognition. And yet performance has been turned into an everyday poetic experience, and the audiobook is an already naturalized way in which, while we are on holidays or trips, both writers and writings become an integrated part of our leisure time. We have become accustomed to being on the move, in the street, in cars, airplanes or trains, listening to books in authors’ readings, and thus avoiding the effort of the page’s cursory visualization: on the one hand, this practice is a comfort duly offered by technology, on the other, it is a new way of letting literature enter our daily lives. But do we ever question the voice we are listening to? As it happens, we rarely distinguish between a text read by the author himself/ herself and a text entrusted to another reader (be that person a professional actor or not). Because we do not question the sound qualities that qualify a text for a certain musical interpretation or auxiliary, we also build a blurry perception of the literary texts’ musical entourages.

What we propose for issue 13/ 2026 of „Dacoromania litteraria”, Sound Archives of Literature in East and West, is to address historical and contemporary practices related to spoken literature. As it has been proven, every written literary text also implies the existence of an unspoken voice that is heard within us (neurosciences call it subvocalization). This reading done silently, in our heads, triggers an intimate vocal scenography, the creation of an ‘inner phonoscene’ (Szendy, 2022). But any literary text also incapsulates an original ‘reading’ made by the author. When the author himself/ herself reads the text aloud, the primary voice becomes audible. In 1926, Rilke remarked that audio recording would allow the poem to be transmitted in the form intended by the author, while Paul Valéry used the term ‘execution’ in the 1930s with reference to the habit of reading literature aloud. If writers become ‘performers’ of their own texts, then the ideal reader should also be correlated with some sort of ideal listener. Therefore, voiced literature involves not only a phenomenology of reading but also a phenomenology of listening. A few years ago, imagining a literary history that would take into account not only the things written but also the things spoken by writers would have been a challenging object of literary knowledge, yet not quite necessary or timely. However, the recently unveiled relationship between literature and the new media has pushed the topic among the priorities of the research agenda. Indeed, writing and spoken word can no longer be isolated as in G. Genette’s theory (Seuils 1987), which places the latter in the sphere of paraliterary phenomena. The utterance, the way the word is spoken, should no longer be regarded as an accidental and therefore secondary component of the literary act. At the crossroads between written discourse, poetic diction, performance and the materiality of the medium on which it is inscribed, literary creation is nowadays analyzed as a ‘plural ensemble of textual and oral performances’ (Lang, Murat, Pardo, 2020).

As archival objects, writers’ voices exceed a self-implied heritage value. They also deliver themselves as a set of material ‘traces’ imprinted on a specific technical support which records the voice at a certain moment and in a certain environment. We are interested, therefore, in the relationship of the writer’ voices to these supports: wax cylinders, magnetic tape, optical support, digital support – as well as in the literary directions and poetics (mostly experimental) that this relationship entails. For instance, the ‘parasites’ kept as accidental recordings on old wax cylinders would encourage formulae such as ‘a literature made with noises’ (Arghezi, 2012).

A special attention will be paid to radiophonic aesthetics, chiefly with regard to the utterance practices devised by writers in front of the microphone (the possibility of distinguishing several radiophonic styles, depending on the era, but also on the culture that produces them), but also to the newer associated forms of radiophonic literature (Hörspiel, poetry slams, sound poetry, radio theater). Only in recent years, such approach to literature has really become possible due to the opening of radio sound archives. The democratization turn has occurred simultaneously in Romania and across Europe, along with the pressure to digitize older media. A comparative perspective of the ways in which these archives are used in the East and in the West is therefore of great interest. Also, since the methodology required for the proposed theme brings together aesthetics, sociology, literary theory, experimental phonetics, declamation theory, close listening (Charles Berstein, 1998), sound studies, archival and material studies, proposals from fields other than strictly literature are also welcome.

The list of topics comprises (but is not limited to) the following ones:

  • Methods and models suitable for analyzing sound archives of writers;
  • Historical recitation/ declamation practices;
  • Co-influence between a text’s the scriptural/ typographic/ stable version and its sonorous/ ancillary/ secondary version;
  • The phenomenology of (self-)reading and the phenomenology of (self-)listening;
  • Radio aesthetics;
  • Literary forms specific to radio literature: the fundamentally theatrical essence of this literature; the montage; music as auxiliary;
  • The existence and composition of radio edition(s); the prefaces/prefaces of these editions;
  • Illustrating famous writers’ voices;
  • Writers as spectral voices;
  • The mythologizing process in which sound recordings participate: the construction of a Pantheon, other than that of written literature.

Please submit your proposals to the editors:
dr. Ligia Tudurachi, ligia.tudurachi@acad-cj.ro
dr. Roxana Patraș, roxana.patras@uaic.ro

Deadlines for submissions (in English or in French):
Abstracts (around 300 words): December 15, 2025
Full Papers (around 8000-9000 words): February 15, 202

Author Guidelines:
https://dacoromanialitteraria.inst-puscariu.ro/en/nr.php

General Bibliography:
Th. Adorno, La forme du disque, trad. J. Lauxerois, in Les Cahiers de l'IRCAM, n° 7, p. 145.
Tudor Arghezi, Radio-Papagal. Publicistică radiofonică, préface de Paul Cernat, Bucarest, Casa Radio, 2012.
Charles Berstein, Close Listening, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1998.
G. Genette, Seuils, Paris, Seuil, 1987.
Pierre-Marie Héron (dir.), Écrivains au micro. Les entretiens-feuilletons à la radio française dans les années cinquante, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2010.
Pierre-Marie Héron, Marie Joqueveviel-Bourjea, Céline Pardo (éds.), Poésie sur les ondes, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2018.
Pierre-Maria Héron (éd.), La radio d’art et d’essai en France après 1945, Montpellier, Presses Universitaires de la Méditerannée, 2008.
Laurent Jenny, La Parole singulière, préface de Jean Starobinski, Paris, Belin, 2009.
Abigail Lang, Michel Murat, Céline Pardo (éds.), Archives sonores de la poésie, Dijon, Les Presses du réel, 2020.
Céline Pardo, « Penser la radio en littérature : quelques questionnements de radiolittérature », in Elfe XX-XXI, 2019, n°8.
Peter Szendy, Écoute. Une histoire de nos oreilles, Paris, Éditions de Minuit, 2001.
Peter Szendy, Pouvoirs de la lecture. De Platon au livre électronique, Paris, La Découverte, 2022.
Peter Szendy, Laura Odello, La voix, par ailleurs. Ventriloquie, bégaiement et autres accidents, Paris, Éditions de Minuit, 2023.