Skip to main content

Podcasts

Podcasts

Beatriz Lopez – Muriel Spark and Deceptive Sound Technologies

Beatriz Lopez draws on Muriel Spark’s experience at the Political Warfare Executive during the Second World War to explore the deployment of deceptive sound technologies such as the wireless and the telephone in her fiction. Due to their disembodied nature, these technologies rely on the ‘acousmatic voice’ – the voice without origin – to enact their presence, yet their lack of visual references provides opportunities for manipulation and deception.

From Durham University’s ‘Late Summer Lectures’ series, September 2020.

Beatriz Lopez – Muriel Spark and the Scrambler Telephone

Beatriz Lopez explores Spark’s wartime use of a secure telephone and considers the device’s later disturbing reappearance in her novel The Hothouse by the East River (1973) and The Abbess of Crewe (1974).

This talk was given at the Crossed Lines Telepoetics symposium in May 2020. You can read a shorter version of the talk on our blog here.