In the first of these two lectures Denis Donoghue examines the embarrassment readers feel when they can't ascribe printed words to any particular voice, real or imagined. He studies some of the relations and discrepancies between an oral culture and a culture of print; and certain recent attempts to undermine the privilege of voice and the definition of presence in terms of speech uttered and heard. In the last part of his lecture he considers the three voices of grammar, active, passive, and middle, and opts for a social determination of language within which the notation of a particular voice speaking is only one of the available resources.

In The Question of Voice Professor Donoghue pursues there discrepancies further; examines the rivalry of voice and text, the different rhetorics of authority, Joyce's stereophony, the question of tone (as in tone of voice), anonymous and pseudonymous styles, parodic voices, his own proposed distinction between epireading and graphireading, and Derrida on writing.