ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explains psychoanalytical and phenomenological work that suggests that the voice is the site of the subject's perpetual crossing between semiotic and symbolic, between body and language. Voice, the locus of indeterminacy and intermediality in the human, navigating as it does the in-between of body and language, is the ideal vehicle for exploration of the motility and ambivalence of the origin of writing, emanating from the unconscious body. Voice features as metaphor in a number of the texts. The book shows that, far from 'echoing' other people's words, Sarraute, Duras, Cixous and Renaude each developed a distinctive set of theatrical strategies that would enable each to make the uniqueness of her process as a writer heard as voice in a space of acoustic relationality.
