What is Seen Reading?
1. I see you reading.
2. I guesstimate where you are in the book.
3. I trip on over to the bookstore and make a note of the text.
4. I let my imagination rip.
5. Readers become celebrities.
6. People get giddy and buy more books.

The Seen Reading blog is not only a very intriguing concept, but what is of particular interest is how it makes use of the podcast to transform what is solely a visual/textual dynamic (a person reading book watched by Wilson who in turn writes a blog entry recreating the experience) into a spoken/aural one.

But why do this for a site that is about the visual/textual — ‘seen reading’? The answer may lie in Wilson’s recommendation to listen to the podcast while riding the subway or bus, two of the numerous sites where she indulges in her ‘literary voyeurism.’ The ideal setting for listening to the Seen Reading podcasts, that is, are those very scenes of reading being described in the podcasts. The effect could be quite stimulating: listening to Wilson describing her acts of voyeurism while at the same time engaging in these same acts oneself, perhaps while one of the other people watching readers is Wilson herself, or perhaps wondering if Wilson is watching you listening to her talking about watching someone reading while watching someone reading.

Does Wilson ever imagine herself being seen reading, and imagine what story the watcher may be constructing around what she is reading?

(Thanks to Carolyn Black for bringing Seen Reading to my attention, and who can be heard reading from Lydia Davis’ Break it Down in an installment of the ‘Readers Reading’ feature on Wilson’s blog.)

I was encouraged in my rationale for using this blog as a repository for my research data on performative speaking by an interview in the Chronicle of Higher Education‘s Wired Campus news digest. The interview (“Bringing Tenure into the Digital Age,” December 10, 2008)  is with Christine L. Borgman, Professor of  Information Studies at the University of California Los Angeles, and author of Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet (2007). Here’s the book’s amazon.com url.

Here’s the most relevant exchange:

Q. In your recent book, “Scholarship in the Digital Age,” you contend that the tenure system needs to reward people for contributions to collaborative digital projects instead of recognizing only those who publish books and articles. Why?

A. Data is becoming a first-class object. In the days of completely paper publication, the article or book was the end of the line. And once the book was in libraries, the data were often thrown away or allowed to deteriorate.

Now we’re in a massive shift. Data become resources. They are no longer just a byproduct of research. And that changes the nature of publishing, how we think about what we do, and how we educate our graduate students. The accumulation of that data should be considered a scholarly act as well as the publication that comes out of it.

Exactly!

Teachout uses the example of hard-boiled detective fiction writer Raymond Chandler, whose voice sounds nothing like what one might imagine his character Sam Spade would sound like: less like Humphrey Bogart and more like Elmer Fudd (although here, Teachout conflates a character’s style of speaking with the narrative voice, which aren’t the same).

Teachout theorizes that Sam Spade was a form of wish-fulfillment for the Fuddesque Chandler, but there is a simpler explanation: Chandler was writing within a genre that had a certain style, and the fact that he is one of the defining masters of the hard-boiled detective genre shows Chandler’s greatness as a writer, in that he was able to imaginatively project himself into a milieu that was far removed from his everyday experience.

Regarding performative speaking, Chandler’s writing career contrasts interestingly with two other writers mentioned by Teachout: George Bernard Shaw and Max Beerbohm. Teachout finds that their actual voices do meet expectations of what they should sound like, based on their writing.

I think this is due to the fact that both men cultivated a public authorial persona that was integrally related to their writing. Shaw (whose voice I found surprisingly high and reedy when I first heard it) often spoke publically at meetings on political and social issues, and being hectored by him at a public meeting must have been very similar to the hectoring the reader receives as she/he reads the prefaces to his plays. And then one gets hectored in dramatic form in a tone of voice that differs little from the voice of the prefaces. It’s Shavian through and through, something which irritated Beerbohm to no end.

For Beerbohm, it was very much the same, although he was not as strident as Shaw. A gently ironical, gently satirical, always self-possessed dandy, caricaturist and writer, there is a continuity of voice, or style, in his fictions, his dramatic criticism, and in his radio broadcasts (collected together and published as Mainly on the Air [1946; enlarged edition 1957]). Neither of these men were confessional writers, but their fictional writing style — their ‘voice’ — was synonymous with the performative speaking of their public personae, either as public speakers, or dramatic critics/journalists, or radio broadcasters. It is a type of fiction writer you don’t often see very much today: one who writes from a public, performative sense of speech-based style, and in this case, ‘style’ is synonymous with ‘voice.’

(Thanks to Katherine Parrish via Carolyn Black for alerting me to Teachout’s article.)

Chair: Jason Boyd, University of Toronto

Panel Summary: These three papers explore the practice of recitation and its influence on personal and social identity. More particularly, they explore how Victorian recitation operates both as an instrument of social control and conformity and as a medium of self-expression, self-knowledge and empowerment for women, children, and the ‘common man.’

Reforming the Stage: Genre, Gender, and Parlor Recitation (Susan Schuyler)

During those decades when the public theatre was considered a dangerous space, rather than banish theatricality altogether, the middle-classes indulged in alternative types of performance which were considered appropriate for the production and consumption of “respectable” Victorians-particularly bourgeois women. The parlor recitation, a form of parlor drama, was a generic compromise; in this form of entertainment, poetry, prose, and drama, reading and spectatorship intersected. At the same time, parlor recitation effected an ideological compromise by using the bourgeois female, the embodiment of middle-class domesticity, to challenge the allurements of the “public” actress of the large, commercial theatres.

The growing industry of parlor drama manuals and collections made domestic recitation a central part of the theatrical experience of the middle-class. For example, volumes such as Charles Tennyson Turner’s Small Tableaux are intended to be read only; Turner’s volume of poems does not include any performance instruction. At the same time, however, we cannot conclude that dramatic performance was always subordinated to reading, or that performance and spectatorship were merely supplements to reading practices. Since the texts of these guidebooks were dramatic in nature, they implicitly authorized dramatic performance.

Parlor recitation is a particularly interesting form of parlor drama because it most obviously merges genres and the practices with which they are associated. The divorce of poetry and drama-the replacement of poetic verse drama with melodramatic prose-was one of the most common themes of the ubiquitous nineteenth-century assertions of the death of the British Drama. Although it claimed to be non-theatrical, recitation is, of course, a performative act, and some parlor recitation handbooks, including manuals written by elocutionist Alexander Melville Bell, used rhetorical theories influenced by Francois Delsarte to reinvent performance as recitation. Dramatic recitations and parlor poetic dramas therefore restored the traditional union of poetry, drama and performance, lending recitation an increased level of respectability.

Domestic performances, particularly of parlor tableaux, a form of bodily display frequently accompanied by recitation, can be seen as part of a larger political project. While reform movements such as the Women’s Christian Temperance Union publicly protested the existence of commercial tableaux vivants, private theatricals re-formed the tableau, replacing the arrangements of working-class bodies in sexual display with the respectable bodies of bourgeois women positioned for the expression of moral values. Like the rest of the genre, these recitations with tableaux focus on the female embodiment of bourgeois morality.

As genres intersected, so did gendered notions of art. Parlor performances were, ultimately, an ideological compromise. In the space of the parlor, women exercised rhetorical power as authors, producers, and orators; this power, however, was used for the expression of female submission. At the same time, there is something interesting in the fact that dramatic recitation allowed women to participate in a male rhetorical tradition; this fact complicates the conservative construction of gender put forward through the recitation texts and the accompanying tableaux.

“Who in the World Am I?”: Recitation and Identity in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Joanne Nystrom Janssen)

At the Mad Tea Party, the sleepy Dormouse tells Alice about three sisters who draw “everything [...] that begins with an M,” including “memory and muchness”-words that appear haphazardly chosen, but that connect significantly to Carroll’s narrative. In taking place in dreams, which double and repeat lived happenings, Alice draws attention to memory, and in portraying Wonderland as a place of excess, the text depicts muchness. Most importantly, though, Alice faces several tests of memory based on her above-ground lessons, which she utterly fails; instead of reciting the memorized verses accurately, she offers completely new rhymes without understanding their origins or significance.

In altering Alice’s recitations, Carroll subverts both grammatical rules and behavioral maxims-which Jean-Jacques Lecercle suggests are central to nonsense literature. While the puns demonstrate Carroll’s playful suggestion that recited material lacks creativity and relevance, Alice’s response is much more subdued: instead of expressing amusement at her revised recitations, she fearfully questions her identity. For example, when she botches a didactic Isaac Watts poem-turning an industrious, altruistic bee into a manipulative, dangerous crocodile-she experiences an identity crisis; she asks, “Who am I?,” believing she may have turned into her less intelligent friend Mabel. Figuratively, Alice seems to have experienced the violence that the recited poem describes: like the hungry crocodile consuming the naïve fishes with his cavernous jaw, Alice’s own mouth recites the distorted poem, which devours her sense of herself. By losing her words, Alice starts to lose her identity-a process that she continues to negotiate as she faces further tests of memory.

Nineteenth-century philosophical understandings of memory begin to explain this link between recitation and identity. The representative theory of memory-which dominated Western thought for centuries-imagined the mind as a storehouse where thoughts, feelings, and experiences accumulate. English philosophers, such as John Locke and David Hume, added to the theory by asserting that people gain understanding of their identities through the stored memories. Within the context of nineteenth-century education, which relied heavily upon the mechanical exercise of students’ memories in the home and the schoolroom, this theory has especially poignant implications. If the memory is like a room, then Victorian children fill that chamber with memorized selections. And, if people form their identities by referring to stored thoughts and impressions, then these children gain their sense of themselves, at least in part, by referring to the memorized information stored in their minds-a reality that Alice experiences.

Alice in Wonderland, then, both mocks the mind-numbing nature of nineteenth-century rote learning and suggests that recitation can tenuously constitute a child’s identity. Tracking Alice’s progression-from initially asking “Who am I?” to assertively answering “Here” when her name is called at the trial-reveals that Wonderland provides Alice with an alternative education: one that not only allows her to differentiate between sense and nonsense, but also to identify a self that is independent from her memorized recitations.

Declaiming and Reclaiming Shakespeare (Daniel Pollack-Pelzner)

It is tempting to view the scene of Victorian recitation as a site of discipline and punishment. Catherine Robson, in her study of the Victorian memorized poem, has emphasized the connection between school recitation and bodily suffering: the thrashings and floggings that followed botched deliveries, especially after recitations of English Literature became a mandatory part of the educational code in 1875. When Matthew Arnold insisted that learning literature by heart offered “an excellent discipline” for pupils, it is easy to hear the pedagogic virtue of the phrase drowned out by its punitive overtones, especially with Tom Brown’s Schooldays in mind.

Fictional narratives, which D. A. Miller has portrayed in collusion with disciplinary social forces, seem to reinforce the coercion of recitation. Not only do they frequently depict the punishments meted out for flubbed lines, they also ridicule more creative, deviant reciters, exercising a Bergsonian comic discipline to expel the threat of rival authorities, especially those who challenge Shakespeare, the most esteemed source of passages for oral delivery. Dickens’s Sketches by Boz portrays an amateur theatrical performance of “Othello” gone awry when the lead player misses a line and gets heckled into failure; across the Atlantic, Twain’s imposter Duke in Huckleberry Finn delivers a mongrel version of Hamlet’s soliloquy that the reader’s laughter must expose as another instance of his charlatanism.

And yet, this paper argues, nineteenth-century representations of recitation reveal its empowering potential as well. Challenging the Foucauldian model, I suggest that recitation-especially of Shakespeare, as he became the democratic national poet-offered the imaginative, performative power of assuming another voice, of resisting another’s discipline. Two Victorian Shakespeare reciters provide case studies for a more democratic understanding of declamation.

First, the young street reciter whom Henry Mayhew interviews in London Labour and the London Poor (1861) offers an instance of emancipation by Shakespeare. The boy runs away from his restrictive herring-store master to make his own living performing “Othello’s Apology” and Hamlet’s “To be or not to be,” turning his penny copies of Shakespeare into shilling incomes, and even endures a beating by casting himself as the soliloquizing Hamlet so that he can “bear those ills we have.” Forging an alternate identity through recitation, he usurps his source material-at least for his auditors, who “call me Shakspeare by name.”

Second, the title character of Wilkie Collins’s 1851 Christmas book, Mr Wray’s Cash-Box, a Bardolatrous elocution instructor, shows the power of appropriation by recitation. Mr Wray believes that he can adapt the Shakespeare he knows by heart to any situation that arises-an impulse to appropriate and possess “our divine Shakespeare-the poetic bond that unites all men” that has also led him to make a clandestine cast of Shakespeare’s Stratford bust. Collins adapts a King Lear plot by having Mr Wray’s Cordelia-esque granddaughter help the destitute, raging old man find peace and prosperity by selling copies of the bust, thereby making Shakespeare ownership universal in an extension of the Shakespearean recitation program that Mr Wray has taught.

English lecturers returning from an American tour. One of them was described as Leonard Smyth, apparently a minor poet, but something of a major journalist; long-headed, long-haired, perfectly dressed, and perfectly capable of looking after himself. The other was a rather comic contrast, being short and broad, with a black, walrus moustache, and as taciturn as the other was talkative. But as he had been both charged with robbing and praised for rescuing a Roumanian Princess threatened by a jaguar in his travelling menagerie, and had thus figured in a fashionable case, it was naturally felt that his views on God, progress, his own early life, and the future of Anglo-American relations would be of great interest and value to the inhabitants of Minneapolis and Omaha.