Quote:
Originally Posted by issybird
AFAIC, the text is neutral from any author's narration; it was the author's responsibility to express his meaning in the words alone...
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I would say not exactly. I think, because we're mostly much more used to reading texts than listening to unabridged audiobooks, both singularly, culturally and historically, that in a discussion such as this we've become blind to the visual interpretation as well, and that it's somewhat beside the point to dwell on a narrator's reading as 'interpretation', or many people's difficulty in focusing as well on an audiobook simply because they're not nearly as used to them.
There are visual differences in text that can affect our view of a work, such as font, sizing, spacing, typos and errors, quality of paper, cover, binding, device, etc. We can be just as annoyed by too-small text in a pbook or typo-riddled text in an ebook as a grating narrator in audiobook. Pictures and illustrations in a book can really affect our intake of the material; would you consider reading a text without pictures any more 'reading' than reading the exact same text with a big pictures illustrating the story every other page?
If you argue that a colourful narration can be influencing on a larger scale, then (1) we're beginning to discuss degrees of influence rather than assuming there are no visual influences, and (2) this is a choice by listeners since, as Catlady pointed out, it is definitely possible to listen to an audiobook by a monotone or even robotic narration which takes out any possible colourful interpretation.