„Powiem głośno: oto co czyniłem, co myślałem, czym byłem”. Głos, pismo, audiobiografie

In this paper, I reflect on the source of insufficient research on spoken autobiographies and audiobiographies. Tracing the source of the genre’s oversight as a stand-alone genre worthy of in-depth research that benefits from the achievements of orality studies, I point to Jean Jacques Rousseau’s modern metaphysics of voice. In this paper I argue that audiobiography is neither a fictional creation nor a testimony. It is a genre of verbal creativity that demands in-depth research examining its cultural location and socio-political functions. To study audiobiographical performance, I argue, one must see voice and the genres based on it as a medium full of ambivalence, tensions, and negotiations happening within the field of social institutions and their actors. It is also necessary to see in it the artful practices of word art: vivid, variant improvisations that, drawing on linguistic and extra-linguistic means at any given moment, construct a life story that is, in this sense, a form of oral creativity in that it is not the only possible work of coherence, torn from the relations of the subject.