Den talande bokens poetik - Doria

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attention to specific problems and questions to explore, and this challenged the
informants’ understanding of the text. In that way, existential meetings were
created, where “arch after arch opens up indefinitely” (an intertextual reference
to a poem by the Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer, 1989).
The meta perspective is reported in Chapter 7. The informants in the reference
group had clear preferences for how the talking book should sound. Listening to
a talking book should as far as possible resemble reading to yourself. Everything
that disturbs the concentration must be taken away. The listeners preferred and
wished to listen to a pure and simple recording that gave the opportunity to
create their own interpretations without interference from, for example, sound
effects. The voice that read should just be there and demand no attention or
engagement from the listener. One important thing that the listeners mentioned
as important was presence – you should notice that the person that reads really
wants to do what he or she is doing. The voice should also be ordinary; it should
not be too educated and trained and it should not have any voice problems or be
too special in any way. The informants in the special group could not discuss the
question about form. They wanted to be normal and wanted kind voices on the
tape like in real life. For them it was also important to know who the person that
read was. It helped them to concentrate better.
The question about how the talking book should sound seemed to be partly a
matter of taste. The female informants preferred a female voice that was not too
educated but natural, while the male informants preferred a male voice that was
not too emotional. Also the analysis of the meta perspective to reception showed
two distinct discourses. The informants in the reference group could discuss the
question of form because they had a literary competence that helped them to
judge what was good and what was not. The informants in the special group
sometimes had problems to keep fiction and reality apart. When it came to the
question about voices, they referred to how they wanted voices to sound in their
real life. They interpreted from the perspective of a life world discourse also the
question of form.
A poetical didactics for reception of the talking book
A model describing the analytical steps and concepts in use was a result that can
serve as an outline of a poetics for the talking book. The model is shown in
Figure 2. Unexpected research results were how important the guided
conversations about literature turned out to be in order to realise the affordances
given by the texts regarding exploration of existential themes in the young
adults’ life worlds.
Thus, the result of the research project can be positioned as a piece of
emancipatory research stressing the importance of including this group of young
adults in society’s conversation about culture and meaning.