Silent reading locates itself, that is, in the conjoint cerebral activity and suppressed muscular action of a simultaneously summoned and silenced enunciation. This somatic locus of soundless reception includes of course the brain but must be said to encompass as well the organs of vocal production, from diaphragm up through throat to tongue and palate. Where, then, does where leave us? The place of reading into which it inquires is none other than the reading body. Alien, because in the standard inquiries into literary activity, the ruling adverbs or relative pronouns holding down the interrogative slot in such a question have usually been, instead, either " why do we read?" (the philosophical or psychoanalytic approach), whom (the literary-historical or canonical), how (the interpretive), whither (the sociological or political), what and when (the empirical), what precisely (the linguistic or semiotic), or which kind or sort (the generic). Leading, because its adverb, where (if anticipating any answer less banal than "in the library"), points away from the usual areas of consideration. In view of this proposed paradox of a silent textual sounding, the title is, at least at the start, rightly a question: Reading voices? It derives from another, perhaps more fundamental, question: Where do we read? This is the leading and alien question around which the following pages have eventually been collected in response. This book is not concerned with our reading of voices, or the voices of our reading, so much as with the reading that proceeds to give voice, or at least to evoke silently such voicing: to evocalize. My title is a hypothetical proposition, a sentence. like the path of sound through the air at every step he pauses and half recedes, and from the retrogressive movement collects the force which carries him onward.Ĭoleridge, Biographia Literaria, chapter 14Īnd strangely on the silence broke The silent-speaking words The reader should be carried forward, not merely or chiefly by the mechanical impulse of curiosity, or by a restless desire to arrive at the final solution but . . . Most of all, for the invaluable aid of a structuralist eye for texts, a polyglot ear, a firm critical hand, a gentle touch, and many an encouraging word, my greatest continuing debt is to my wife, Natasa Durovicová, to whom, once again, more than a book is dedicated. Thanks also to my expert research assistant, Jocelyn Lutz Marsh, and to Robert Pendleton and Donna Rudolph, who helped in preparing the index. Special thanks go to Marie Borroff and Susan Wolfson, who so generously engaged with early drafts of my ideas on rhyme and allied effects in poetry and helped think them through. For timely and time-consuming help on various pieces and stages of the manuscript, I am indebted to Donald Foster, Sandra Gilbert, Richard Helgerson, and Jan Bowman Swanson, as well as to Paul Fry for the shrewd advice of his press reading. For subsequent opportunities to try out my sense of textual voicing on listening audiences, I wish to thank the Department of English at Stanford University and at the University of Utah. For advice on things philological along the way, my gratitude to Hans Aarsleff, Frank Gardiner, Paul Hernadi, and Seth Lerer on matters philosophical, to Timothy Gould and for assorted literary examples, to Kenneth Bleeth, Karen Cunningham, and Linda Kauffman. As if to honor that original venue, I began systematically tracking the argument back to its Elizabethan roots. įormal work on this book began, backward, with a lecture in 1985 on verbal experimentation in Virginia Woolf for the Tudor-Stuart Club of the Johns Hopkins University, at the kind invitation of Sharon Cameron. Reading Voices: Literature and the Phonotext. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.
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