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Dinesh

Dinesh club

Posted: 05 Mar 2020

Taken: 05 Jun 2011

2 favorites     2 comments    106 visits

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Excerpt •
Language and Silence •
Author •
George Steiner •
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Downton •
New-Jersey •

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 Dinesh
Dinesh club
Our present concept of literary form is, in several respects, related to privacy. The practice of reading a book to oneself, in silence, is a specific, late historical development. It implies a number of economic and social pre-conditions: a room of one’s own (Virginia Woolf’s significant phrase), or, at least, a home spacious enough to allow areas of quiet; the private possession of books, with the concomitant right to keep a rare book from the use of other men; means of artificial light during the evening hours. What is implicit is the style of life of the bourgeoisie in the industrial, largely urban, complex or values and privileges. That complex crystallized later than is often supposed. It was still customary in the Victorian middle class to read out loud, one member of the family being “reader” to the rest, or the book being passed from “voice to voice.” It is hardly necessary to stress the immense changes which the print book, with its essentially visual code of meaning, brought to older forms of collective, aural literacy. Marshall McLuhan has explored the “Gutenberg revolution” in Western consciousness. What is less generally understood is how much of literature -- and how much of ‘modern’ literature -- was not conceived to be read in private silence; how it was directed toward recitation, the mimesis of the raised voice and the response of the ear. Dickens, Hopkins, Kipling are examples of modern writers whose root sensibility was oral, and who tried to adapt essentially oral means to the silences of print.

The old, natural impulse survives in the process of learning to read: the child and the less literate adult read “half-aloud,” forming words with their lips and, at times, re-enacting the imaginary event on the printed page by sympathetic bodily motion. The man who reads alone in a room with his mouth closed, from a volume which he owns, is a special product of Western bourgeois literacy and leisure. Will he persist in his present guise? -383
5 years ago.
 Jaap van 't Veen
Jaap van 't Veen club
Beautiful work; well seen and taken.
5 years ago.

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