Short Media History ZSF Klausur PDF

Short Media History -- Zusammenfassung Mithilfe seines Buchs, Mitschriften, und der VL Media history can be roughly divided into **three ages of media history:** - **performance-based media (since c. 70,000 BCE)** e. g. singing, dancing, theater, oral poetry communication of bodies - **m...

Short Media History -- Zusammenfassung Mithilfe seines Buchs, Mitschriften, und der VL Media history can be roughly divided into **three ages of media history:** - **performance-based media (since c. 70,000 BCE)** e. g. singing, dancing, theater, oral poetry communication of bodies - **media of representation (since c. 1500 CE)** e.g. print involving storage and release - **media of connectivity (since c. 1850 CE)** e. g. new media (social media) one-to-one communication at a distance, connection **[TIMELINE (BCE)]** ** c. 3000: cuneiform** (= Keilform) **writing on clay tablets (Mesopotamia)** ** 2100: Gilgamesh** ** 1900: oldest written papyrus scroll** ** 1600: parchment** (invented early but really only becomes the standart around 200 BCE, is associated with the rise of Christianity) ** 1300: wax tablet** ** c. 1000: oldest sources of Hebrew Bible** ** c. 800: Homer, Iliad and Odyssey** (written on papyrus scrolls) ** 300: Library of Alexandria** ** 200 : punctuation (Rome)** ** 197: Library of Pergamon** ** 170: perfection of parchment production in Pergamon** **[TIMELINE (CE)]** ** 65-150: New Testament** ** 150: codex** ** 675: word separation (Ireland)** ** 1078: first European paper mill (Sativa, Spain)** ** 1450: printing press, metal type, oil-based ink (Gutenberg,** **Mainz)** ** 1450--1501: incunable period** **...** 1. [Introduction] **Why not just "literary history?":** - **different emphasis** - **recent developments in the field:** the rise of '**new media' - focus attention on older media as well** the physical **material text** '**materialities of communication' (Gumbrecht/Pfeiffer)** **book history** Literature and Media - **Literature develops** in tandem, in concert or competition with different **materials, means, and modes of communication** connection between texts and media - **Material Forms**: There is no content without form; the information or message a medium can provide depends on the nature of that medium, not on its content - There is „**old"** (print-newspapers, radio, film, book) -\> one-way communication, limited interactivity,.. **and „new" media** (modern forms of the digital age, like the internet, social media) -\> very interactive and accessible, real-time communication - **Walter Benjamin -\> *Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit* (1936):** - **The way humans exist changes,** and so does their **mode of perception --** and the **medium in which** human perception **occurs** - **Umberto Eco**: Optimistic that the book as an object would not be much affected by the new technological changes: "**Once invented, it cannot be improved. \[...\] Perhaps it will evolve \[...\], but it will still be the same thing"** -- This view of media history opposes the pessimism/nostalgia of some, who cannot see benefits from cultural and media change *Key Terms:* **„Medium"/"Media"** *Raymond Williams, Keywords (1976)* - **Latin *medium* = middle** - in English, used since 16^th^ century - **16th/early 17th century**: It is "**an intervening or intermediate agency or substance"** - **18th century**: word applied to **newspapers**: **"through the medium of your \[...\] publication"** - Plural form "media" came in the **20th century** with **broadcasting** Terms like "**mass media", "media studies**" evolved from this - two senses of media: - There is a **strong sense of 'media' "as something with its own specific and determining properties"** -- in this technical sense, the medium is the message - \ "**a social sense of media in which the practices and institutions are seen as agencies for quite other than their primary purposes"** -- practices and institutions may have multiple, even contradictory purposes and different functions for and impacts on society (e. g. newspapers: media of information/important in modern democracies, but also media for advertising/linked to capitalism that pays for and profits from disseminating the news Three important lessons from *Raymond Williams*: - **there is no single or simple definition of 'media'; umbrella for many different practices, material forms, sign systems and institutions** - **there is a distinction between physical media as related to the senses (sight, sound, touch...) and technical media (print, broadcasting...)** - **there is a debate about the extent to which (physical and technical) media determine the content of what is being communicated** Another famous expression from *Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980):* - **media as "the extensions of man"** - **media introduce "a new scale \[...\] into our affairs" and change "time and space factors in human association"** - **"the 'content' of any medium is always another medium"** e\. g. the content of the telegraph is print, the content of print is writing, the content of writing is speech **"Communication"** *Raymond Williams, Keywords (1976)* - Its meaning has extended **from "lines of communication" (roads, canals, railways...) to "means of passing information and maintaining social contact"** - It still has **two possible meanings: to "transmit" or to "share"** -- the direction of c can be **one-way or participatory** - To speak of '**media configurations'** is a way of signaling that media form complex networks. - **literary studies / media studies**: There cannot be a neat separation between literature and media - literature and media always belong together, they interact with and affect each other. - Distinction between "**representational"/"-graphy"** They involve the storage and deferred release of information, involve "two places at two times" (e. g. television: recorded at an earlier place/time/etc, no connection/no way you can interact with it) **vs. "connective"/"tele-" media** **(Trotter 2017)** emphasis "on instantaneous, real-time, and interactive one-to-one communication at a distance" (e. g. on your phone), "two places at one time" Where both come together: multiplayer games, 1 to 1 time but also stored information (setting etc) The **distinction between media and mass media** from ***Niklas Luhmann (1927-1998)*** - **"Whatever we know about our society, or indeed about the world in which we live, we know through the mass media."** when he wrote this in the 1990s, thinking of television and the early internet we-feeling only mass media allows us to acquire knowledge across wide distances and from \'so many strangers\' - **media as "a plastic set of possibilities into which forms are temporarily fixed" (Luhmann 1987, 81)** not in the sense of "plastisch" e\. g. if language is a medium, we can use the same words with the same meaning to form many different sentences - There is the study of **Multimedia, intermediality, ekphrasis, adaptation, media ecology, book history**,... **"Literature" *Williams, Keywords (1976)*** - **"a difficult word"** Quote: **"**What literature is has no one true definition, but that\'s part of the fun, literature itself is not a medium". Literature is not a static object or medium, but its meaning has changed and it has throughout history been associated with various media - Firstly used in the **late Middle Ages,** it meant **"literacy", "learning"** - **18th century:** Now used to refer to books and **"the practice and profession of writing",** much **later 'imaginative literature'** - The notion of **English literature** is very young, associated with the rise of nationalism of the **late 18th ct. onwards** ***Niklas Luhmann (1927-1998):*** - for him, **imaginative activities open up a "second reality**". The simplest kind of such **second realities are games**, they have rules according to their own conditions. In this view, **entertainment,** including a novel, **functions this way because it inserts a second reality into a "usual" reality.** Unlike games however, novels do not require readers to play by rules; they require and work with information. Entertainment, for Luhmann, creates a second reality that enables the distanced, reflective observation of actual (first) reality. **Literature**, in this view, is **a form of second-order observation:** (he skipped this slide) - **second-order observation = an observation that observers other observers** - **example: lyric speech in poetry -- the lyric speaker vs. the poem's textual composition that can show his/her blind spots** - **literature is never merely about information, it's performative: imitation, mimesis, fictional reality** - **Luhmann: art gives us "a position from which something else can be determined as reality" / alternative possibilities** - **the content of literature is its form** 2. [Voice and Hand] ***André Leroi-Gourhan, Le geste et la parole (1964):* cultural anthropology, human evolution and technological progress** - Gave a synthesis of then current knowledge about human evolution - His idea: Since we learned to walk, humans were given the freedom to use hand and face at the same time - His *Gesture and Speech* resembles **Kubrick's** similarly ambitious **1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey.** Origins: - **c. 70,000 BCE: the cognitive revolution** - **35,000 BCE: first graphic symbols** e\. g. lines engraved in bone or stone these first signs represent "rhythms rather than form" not pictures, but they represent a very early form of writing: About first graphic symbols circa: Leroi-Gourhan: **"symbolic transposition, not copying of reality; distance between a drawing of a bison and the bison itself, like the distance between a word and a tool. Both examples show how the motor system (the way we move and express) gradually adapts to more precise signals from the brain. The earliest paintings are simple shapes or marks with no clear description, representing an ancient form of communication that we can no longer understand."** The symbolic world that is created here depends on imagination, its symbols are abstractions from reality, constituting a "second world"/ "second reality" Prof: "Maybe a symbolic world which existed parallel to the real world" Leroi-Gourhan circa: **"Tools have evolved over time. Initially, tools were extensions of our hands, but eventually developed into independent machines. Now, speech and vision are going through a similar change due to technology. Language now, too, using technologies like recordings and films to communicate. This represents a significant shift where technology takes over those intimate, personal ways of sharing language and experiences."** -\> Prof: the origin of literature (oral literature long before writing - poems, stories) **Example: GILGAMESH** - it\'s about king Gilgamesh and his friend Enkidu, they kill a monster, Enkidu has to die, \... - they come from a city in todays Irak, which had a long tradition of literacy (cuneiform -- "Keilschrift") - very similar to the (later) Illiad and Odyssee - Important to English Literature: - Ancient Origins - one of the oldest known works of literature, dating back to ancient Mesopotamia. key text for understanding the roots of storytelling and human thought - Themes of humanity, influence on later literature, cultural significance, literary techniques - Gilgamesh as a bridge between ancient and modern literature - The "old" form of "books" (in form of scrolls) - "Volumen" (volume, as in Lotr Vol. 2) is the latin word for scroll  Papyrus is a plant that grows in wetland areas, particularly along the Nile River in Egypt. The stem of the plant was used to make a type of paper-like material for writing. To create papyrus, the stem was cut into thin strips, which were then pressed together and dried to form a smooth surface for writing or painting. It was commonly used for scrolls, documents, and other written materials in the ancient world before modern paper was invented **Parchment**  - New form of "books" now -\> Not scrolls anymore, now stacked sheets of Parchment - made from prepared animal skin, typically from sheep, calves, and goats - commonly used in ancient and medieval times for important documents, manuscripts, and religious texts - Vellum = finer quality parchment made from skins of young animals like lambs and young calves - Why **preserving information in the form of a book**? Very practical, longlasting and safe, more durable than papyrus (stronger and more flexible) \ However, books must be safe from fire, physical destruction **Orgins of "English" and its Society**  **Christianization** - **597: arrival of Augustine of Canterbury; converts King Æthelberht of Kent** - **664: Synod of Whitby (established Roman practice as the norm in Northumbria,** the early medieval Anglian kingdom that is now Northern England and South Scotland) Society/Living: - you have to imagine a society based on networks (of supporting each other), the greatest fear is being an outcast/exile - very few could read/write (readers/writers usually in administrating or religious life) - **oral culture** - **scop ('maker', poet)** - **scribes** (specialized monks) **write on parchment (sheep- or cowskins) or vellum (calfskins)** vellum is more precious, tender and softer - **a complaint about writing** and the damage it does to "every place of his \[the scribes\] body \ **the near-magic powers of writing** (the ability to preserve speech for others) and celebration of writing - (the handwritten) **manuscript books are expensive and rare**, these texts are kind of valuable because it takes a lot of work to copy them - **several texts are collected in a codex (book)** - **some 400 old manuscripts survive, often only in a single copy** (perhaps some 400, sample of what originally was there, some were destroyed in fires etc.) - **surviving material mostly written during 10th and 11th centuries** **Old English Literature** - **"English was spoken by the ordinary population, and used for the oral recitation of poetry, but it was originally not considered a language suitable for writing"** -\> Latin was the language for writing **Anglo-Latin writing:** - **Latin is lingua franca of medieval Europe** - **Many Latin manuscripts produced in England (e.g. Codex Amiatinus, early 8th ct.)** - **King Alfred of Wessex (9th ct.): revival of learning, writings in old English** - **Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (begun in 890s)** - collection of annals in Old English, chronicling the history of the Anglo-Saxons - **four major manuscripts: The Beowulf Manuscript, the Junius Manuscript, the Vercelli Book, the Exeter Book** - **Old English Poetry:** - **probably the earliest form of Lit, recited by a scop** - **some 30,000 lines of OE poetry survive in four major manuscripts** - **most poems are anonymous; only two poets are known by name: Cædmon and Cynewulf** - **original date of composition of many poems is unknown** - **Common poetic devices: alliteration, variation, repetition, formulas and type-scenes, poetic diction, compounds (**compounding existing words together or by altering the meaning of existing words)**:** like **gūðcyning (battle-king), medobenc (mead-bench), kennings** (= expression that replaces a simple noun with a compound phrase, often consisting of two words that metaphorically describe an object/concept)**:** like **hron-rad (whale-road) = the sea; sæ-hengest (sea stallion) = a ship** - **Old English Prose:** - **Latin: *proversa oratio* ☞ prosa ('straightforward discourse')** - **surviving OE prose/poetry ratio is 10/1** - **great variety of text types** - **prose flourishes c. 800-1000 CE** - People did **not read texts in private/silent, textual communities** - **Old English rædan = 'to give advice or counsel', 'to explain something obscure** **Old and middle English special letters:** Example: **The Story of Caedmon** - e**arliest surviving old english text: Caedmon's hymn (730s)** most poems originally had no title, as is true for Beowulf - The monk (Mönch) **Bede** tells us in his **Historia** the story of Caedmon and the short Old English poem Caedmon's Hymn - attributed to Caedmon: - **Story: Cædmon: an illiterate cowherd in the service of a monastery,** Caedmon is a bit shy, he escapes when it\'s his turn to sing, has a dream where he has to sing a song, doesn't think he can sing, but this voice of authority repeats, C has to sing of Gods Creation, he writes his original poem which now goes by \"Caedmons Hymn\" -- the people wonder if C is more than a one-hit-wonder and he is Monks are fluent in Latin etc and C isn\'t, but he is incorporated in the Community. He becomes a kind of mediator, reachs more people and spreads the christian message **Example: The Beowulf Manuscript** - Survives in a single manuscript**,** now in **London, British Library, dated c. 975-1025** - ***compilatio*** composite of texts that have nothing to do with each other at first sight - **written by two scribes** (in mid-sentence, the second one takes over) - **common concern with monsters or the marvellous?** - **In it is the most famous epic poem *Beowulf*** - **Also contains Life of St. Christopher (incomplete), Wonders of the East, The Letter from Aristotle to Alexander and Judith (incomplete):** - **Part of the Manuscript: Judith** - **retells the biblical story of Judith and Holofernes** - **identification with the oppressed Israelites and early Christians** - **adds a battle scene including a 'beasts of battle' type-scene** - **female warrior heroine** **Beowulf -- Heroic Epic** - **narrative poem (3,182 lines)** - **Germanic and Christian elements:** **Syncretism** in Beowulf = the blending or merging of different cultural and religious elements within the poems, in this case between the pagan traditions of the Anglo-Saxons and the Christian elements introduced by the later scribes who transcribed the poem, the poem reflects both the pagan heritage of its characters and the Christian influence on its final form **-- two levels of wisdom: pagan "natural wisdom" + Christian "revealed knowledge", singing about creation (Genesis) Germanic monsters, Beowulfs death compared to the sacrificial death of Christ, problem of vengeance: compromise between Germanic lex talionis** (blood feud -- an eye for an eye, have to take revenge immediately) **and Christian forgiveness** - The theme of **insiders/outsiders:** highlights the importance of community and loyalty. Insiders are those who belong to a group and follow its social codes, like Beowulf (although at first an outsider, but proving his worth). Outsiders are often seen as threats, like the monsters (Grendel, his mother, and the dragon) who disrupt social order - **heroic plot:** Beowulf comes to the aid of the Danish King Hrothgar to defeat the monster Grendel. After Grendel is killed, Beowulf later battles Grendel\'s mother and, finally, a dragon in his old age **(focus on Beowulf's courage, wisdom and self-sacrifice)** - **digressive narration (side stories)** - **not concerned with individuality, but with communal values** 3. [The medieval book] - **1066 The Battle of Hastings**: Battle that ended in the defeat of Harold II of England by William, duke of Normandy (coming from France), and established the Normans as rulers of England - With this event **the rise of Middle English**, - **Language spoken and written in England from c. 1100 to late 15th ct.** - **Strong influences of French and Scandinavian languages** - **Texts in Old English were no longer copied** - **Much regional variation (dialects)** - **Loss of inflections, simplification of verb forms (only past and present tense)** - **Limited function (e.g. Latin again becomes the language of history-writing, French is used in legal texts)** - **Anglo-Normal Writing** - **Many genres from chronicles to saints' lives and works on agriculture and hunting,** heroic stories about knights - **Chivalric romance (from Old French "romanz"** "romanische Sprache" **= French vernacular (**= Roman)**): e.g. Tristan, by Thomas d'Angleterre (**Thomas of England)**; Roman de toute chevalerie by Thomas of Kent** - **Romance with local English settings: Boeve de Haumtone (Bevis of Hampton), Waldef (set in East Anglia)** writers living in England but writing in French - **Women as authors, patrons and readers; e.g. Marie de France (fl. 1160--1215)** - **Anglo-French becomes increasingly provincial, English takes over in 15th ct.** - **The "tremulous hand" of Worchester: 13th-century monk: marginal notes or glosses in late Old English in manuscripts, distinctive handwriting** (trembling in the hand), praising old English monks and complains about English losing its importance Examples: - **The Owl and the Nightingale** - **debate between two birds, overheard by human narrator** - **Outcome remains open,** unclear who wins - **based on Latin and French models** - **octosyllabic couplets, nearly 1,800 lines** - Touches on a lot of different topics - The song **Sumer is icumen in"/"perspice christicola"** - both/either is the title, is a canon in latin and English, can choose between the latin religious or folksong sacular lyric - **Laȝamon's brut** letter yogh is like a y - Something very English rather than french - **16,000 lines of alliterative verse, laid out as prose** - narrates a fictionalized version of the history of Britain up to the Early Middle Ages, the first work of history written in English since the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle - **Arthurian narrative** (king Arthur of the round table) - **archaic expressions; similarities to Beowulf** - **Laȝamon presents himself** not as an author, but **as faithful chronicler** of history - probably a text that was meant to teach about the value of chivalry to knights (to english men of higher rank?) - **Sir Gawain and the green knight** (Prof talked a lot about this -- his highlight of english Lit.) - **most famous Middle English Arthurian poem (chivalric romance),** only rediscovered in the 19^th^ century - only surviving manuscript is the **Cotton Nero A.x, in c. 1400,** were all copied into one manuscript - Plot: about Sir Gawain - Sir Gawain is not a knight but a peasant who is the only one who dare to get involved with the mysterious green knight. He accepts a the green knights challenge: Gawain must strike the knight with an axe and receive a return blow in a year and a day He concludes two kind of contracts: "**Beheading game**" with the green knight, and the **exchange of winnings** (welcomed by lord in **Castle Hautdesert** who wants to hunt with him) **Gawain returns humiliated but the knights all praise him for his courage, Gawain is embarrassed by his dishonesty "the invention of embarrassment**" (the story is not so much about heroism but about getting embarrassed and losing the fight with the green knight, also his being a ladiesman backfires here Gawain survives at the end but has to make compromises that he doesn\'t like and he has to live with his failure -\> makes this a modern relatable kind of story) - There were some other Gawain stories out that that the audience knew about - also remarkable: the way landscapes and characters are described in an elaborate technique - written for aristocratic audience, also concerning chivalry etc - **Northwest Midlands dialect** author came from there - written in a weird/funny kind of way - **structure: four "fitts", alliterative verse, 101 stanzas, 'bob and wheel'** (= term for a pairing of two metrical schemes) high awareness of form, closure (as the last line is the same as the first one) - **number symbolism: 2525 lines + final 'bob and wheel'** the main symbol is the symbol of infinity, number 5 (the poem is full of number symbolism) - -\> number five reflected in **Gawain's shield: the pentangle or "endeles knot":** i. **fraunchyse (generosity)** ii. **felawshyp (friendliness)** iii. **clannes (purity, chastity)** iv. **cortaysye (courtly behaviour)** v. **pité (piety)** - **John Gower's *Confessio Amantis*** - **narrative poem, collection of stories (1390, 1392)** - di**alogue form: Amans (the lover), Genius (a priest)** - **moral instruction**, advice for a ruler - **survives in 49 manuscripts** -- popular -\> 49 different copies were transmitted - '**mirror for princes'** - **source for Shakespeare's Pericles** -- Protagonist/ narrator John Gower 4. [The Medieval and the Early Modern Book] Book -\> Performative medium (inviting activity) What changes (medieval book) manuscript -\> Printed book The **most famous Middle English writer**: **Geoffrey Chaucer (early 1340s -- 1400):** - **Soldier, member of parliament etc., he travelled a lot** - **Well documented life: 493 items in the 'Chaucer life records'** - **Buried in Westminster Abbey (initiates later 'Poets Corner')** -\> Other poets were buried next to him - ***Troilus and Criseyde* (c. 1385)** - ***The Canterbury Tales* (1388 -- c. 1395)** - It's a collection of stories, consisting of **24 tales** (**incomplete, no manuscript from Ch's lifetime**), told **by pilgrims (example: The Knight, the Wife of Bath, The Pardoner, The Parson) traveling** to the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket in Canterbury. The pilgrims come from **various social classes**, providing a vivid snapshot of medieval English society - Storytelling contest, the best one will receive a free meal -\> It's a frame narrative, where each character tells their own story. - The tales **vary in style/genre, including romance, fabliaux, miracle stories** (comic tales), sermons, and moral lessons - **There are modern revisions of *The Canterbury Tales*** - Example: **The Miller's Tale** - It's about a carpenter named John, his young wife Alisoun, and two men who desire her. John's apprentice, Nicholas, tricks John into thinking a flood is coming, so John hides in a tub. Meanwhile, Nicholas and Alisoun have an affair. Another suitor, Absolon, also tries to woo Alisoun. In the end, John is fooled, and the lovers get away with their deception, leading to a comic and chaotic conclusion - Kind of medieval smut - Told by the drunken miller to "requite" *The Knight's Tale* -\> Wordplay across different stories **The Devonshire Manuscript (1530s -- 1540s)** - Different writers (men/women) collecting love poems in one book - **C. 200 items, mostly love lyrics attributed to Thomas Wyatt (c. 1503 -- 1542)** - not intended to be read by people outside the court (of Henry 8th\'s) coterie (private circle) Late 16^th^ Ct. -\> Sonnet as popular lyrical form - **Sonnet sequences in English include *Shakespeare's Sonnets (1906), Spensers Amoretti (1595),...*** - **'sonnet craze' in the 1590s: more than 20 sequences; 30 between 1603 and 1612** **[Printing]** **The first English printer: William Caxton (c. 1415/20 -- 1491):** - Bought printing press and brought it to England -\> Influenced by Gutenberg - 1476 set up printing shop in Westminster -\> Preserved important texts by printing them ( Chaucer = English Homer would not have been possible without print... and in the 19^th^ Ct. William Morus made own printed versions of Chaucer ) - Continuity between manuscript and print (no direct cut), some genres only manuscripts - How a hand-press works: http://atlas.lib.uiowa.edu/bookmaking.php - Printed books: - (the first) large red letters are painted in - Woodcut -\> Illustrations - Some include blank pages for reader's notes - - **Early modern typefaces:**  - Gothic/Black letter standard for English Texts - Mix of typefaces -\> Possible to emphasize passages - **Key Terms and Conventions** - **[Foliation:] leaves in a manuscript or printed book are numbered on one side only; the front side is *recto*, the back *verso* : e.g. "[fol. 12r]" or "fol. 12v"** - **[Pagination]: page numbers, as in modern books: e.g. "p. 12"** - **[Signatures]: many early books consist of 'gatherings' or 'quires' (groups) of three or more sheets, each gathering marked by a letter (A, B, C, etc.). The 'signature' consists of this letter and a number to identify the page: e.g. "[sig. B6v]" refers to the verso of leaf 6 in quire B. (Very long books can have quires marked by several letters, e.g. "BB"** - **Early modern print formats** - **[broadsheet]: only one sheet with one page of printed matter; a.k.a. broadside; often posted on walls or used for ballads (text + image)** - **[folio]: large book, single sheets are folded once to make four pages; three sheets (i.e. six leaves) sewn together in a gathering = folio in sixes** - **[quarto]: smaller format, sheets folded twice to yield eight pages** - **[octavo]: even smaller, sheets folded to make 16 page** The first printed collection: **Tottel's Miscellany, 1557 -\> Bestseller** - **Songes and Sonettes, printed by Richard Tottel, 1557, is the first printed anthology of poetry in English** - **it contains poems by Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, Thomas Wyatt, Nicholas Grimald, Thomas Norton, John Heywood and others** **Thomas Wyatt: From manuscript into print** - **Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503--1542): courtier, diplomat and poet; one of the two 'fathers' of the sonnet in English** - **156 poems can be securely attributed** - **123 are in the Egerton Manuscript, some in Wyatt's hand: this is "Wyatt's personal commonplace book"** - **Many are also contained in the Devonshire manuscript, an "informal coterie manuscript" in many hands** - **Example: "They flee from me" - three early versions** (in Egerton ms., Devonshire ms. And Tottel's Miscellany) - Example Egerton ms.: Secretary hand -\> special handwriting, could not be deciphered by everyone - **96 poems are printed in *Songes and Sonettes* (='Tottel's Miscellany', 1557)** - Example from *Tottel's Miscellany*: poem, function: reading aloud to people -\> Punctuation marks = places where one should take a breath 5. [Theatre and Drama] When a new form of media is introduced, the use of media does not change over night **Forms of "Literature" in the late middle ages/ early modern period** - **manuscripts (presentation copies, letters, diaries, miscellanies, commonplace books** (sort of notebook where people would enter for example poems **...)** -\> manuscripts circles around people who knew each other - **printed texts (books \[folios, quartos, octavos...\], anthologies, chapbooks, broadside ballads...)** -\> Print is open to "everyone" - **performances (recitation, song, theatre...** -\> theatre is meant to be played **Early forms of Drama** (= one of the earliest forms of Literature) - **religious drama (liturgical drama)** - **Æthelwold's Regularis concordia c. 970** rulebook of benedictine monks - **no records of secular drama before c. 1400** It is likely we would have street performers entertaining by either improvised or scriped performances, but nothing survived **Religious Drama: The "Mystery Play" Cycles** - Why MYSTERY plays? two theories: - \"mystery of the faith\" -\> Purpose: Explain biblical stories - or it comes from the latin word Ministerium - Wagons would follow a specific route in the day on Fronleichnahm (= The Feast of Corpus Christi) , a scene (from the bible, e. g. Noahs Ark) would be performed on the wagon and then the wagon would move on and the next one would come - performed and organized not by professional people -\> the nail makers would make the crucifixion, the bakers would do the last supper, and so on - **performed by local guilds** - **pageants (scenes mounted on mobile wagons)** - **some cycles include more than 50 plays** - **women's roles performed by men** - **Surviving "mystery play" cycles:** - **York (c. 1467)** - **Towneley (c. 1500) / Wakefield** - **Chester (1591-1607)** - **N-town (c. 1468-1500)** **The Wakefield Second Shepherds' Play:** - **also known as *Secunda Pastorum*** (Pastor means Shepherd in Latin) - **from the Towneley cycle** - **author unknown ('Wakefield Master')** -\> Someone from Wakefield wrote this - **Christmas story (Nativity) with realistic pastoral elements** -\> Presentation of the birth of Christ **The Morality play** (or the Moral play): - **only five medieval English morality plays survive** - **allegorical content** Protagonists representing Principles, about what it means to be human, Complexity of Human Life, Struggle between Good and Evil, Temptation -\> there is a religious context to these plays as well - **personifications (vices and virtues)** - **Examples: *The Castle of Perseverance* (c. 1405), *Mankind* (c. 1465-70)** - **elements of the morality play survive into the Renaissance (e.g. Marlowe, Doctor Faustus)**, especially the villains **Interludes (kind of subgenre of the moral plays):** - **performed in halls** (so indoors) **of manor houses, London livery companies or halls of a royal palace** - 15^th^ and early 16^th^ ct. - **socially diverse audience** - **topics: good government, role of aristocracy** - **John Skelton, *Magnyfycence* (c.1519-20); Henry Medwall, *Fulgens and Lucres* (before 1501)** - **after the Reformation: anti-Catholic plays** (almost propaganda plays, similar things happen in Scotland at the same time)**, e.g. by John Bale (*The King's Two Marriages*** -- it's about the divorce of King Henry VIII. **\[1530s, lost\]** **From Middle Ages to early modern** - **mystery plays suppressed after the Reformation** by the new protestant authorities **("because they be Disagreinge from the sencerities of the Gospell", 1567** -\> they are "too flashy, catholic, etc.) - **drama as ephemeral and occasional** -\> written for one/a few performances, no one thinks very much about preserving original manuscript -\> only when printed they are safe in the archive - **collaborative effort** - **c. 2,000 English plays known by title (1533-1623)** - **c. 700 plays printed (1580-1660), c. 500 still extant** (so a quarter of all the plays known by title) **16^th^-Century theatrical culture** - **variation and experimentation** - **style depends on performance situation and audience** - **early 16th century: no fixed locations for performances, "strolling players", insecure social status (actors = vagrants)** - **control: public performances had to be registered; no public performance allowed in London city jurisdiction** **The first English playhouses** - 1567: to turn this more into a business -\> **John Brayne converts an inn into a theatre (the Red Lion) in Whitechapel** - **1576: James Burbage builds *The Theatre* in Shoreditch (a 'liberty' outside London city jurisdiction)** - Theatres would be built outside of the city walls (of London)  - The *Shakespeare's Globe* Theatre is a reconstruction of the original *Globe Theatre,* a theatre associated with Shakespeare **The first English tragedy: *Gorboduc* (1561)** - **or *Ferrex and Porrex*; by Thomas Norton (1532--84) and Thomas Sackville (1536--1608)** - **in blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameters)** - **first performed at the Inner Temple and Whitehall for Queen Elizabeth in 1561, first printed in 1565** - **about a legendary king of Britain who divides his kingdom between his sons** - **link between earlier moralities and interludes to later neo-Senecan tragedies by Marlowe and Shakespeare** **Early drama theory:** - **Aristotle, *Poetics* (Περὶ ποιητικῆς, c. 335 BCE) : not translated into French until 1671 and English 1789** - **dramatist Ben Jonson (1572-1637) owned a Latin translation** - **Aristotelian ideas also mediated via Philip Sidney's *Defence of Poesie* (c. 1579) and Horace's *Ars poetica (or Epistula ad Pisones,* c. 19 BCE; first English translation 1566)** **Christopher Marlowe (1564--93):** One of the most famous Elizabethan playwrights (poet, and translator) - ***Tamburlaine the Great (1 and 2)*** - ***The Jew of Malta*** - ***Edward II*** - ***Dido Queen of Carthage*** - ***The Massacre at Paris*** - ***Doctor Faustus*** **Renaissance dramatic genres:** - **'mixed mode'** - **no fixed rules** (for what a play has to look like, mixtures/blends between different forms (especially between Tragedy/Comedy) -\> different from French drama and other forms at this time)**, but attuned to audience expectations** - **genre as "a technique of multi-layering"** - **labels ('comedy', 'tragedy', 'history') are flexible** - **visual, acoustic, spatial codes** - **effects "achieved not by rhetoric alone, but by the combination of eloquent speech and 'lively' (lifelike) acting"** **Metatheatre and metadrama** -\> A drama that reflects its own conditions of existence: - **Robert Weimann** (he was the most important Shakespeare scholar in the DDR): ***locus/platea*** -\> distinction between *locus* (the space of representation, e. g. for Julius Caesar this would be the roman forum) and *platea* (the actual space-\> we\'re in the globe theater seeing a stage and actors pretending) - **"breaking the fourth wall"** -\> -\> breaking up the illusion that performers and audience are separated \"by a wall\" - E. g. in Hamlet: Performing a play (Julius Caesar) within a pay -\> -\> J. C. also by Shakespeare, also: the same actor as Polonius (old man) who is talking here could/would probably have played Julius Caesar as well - A character might, for example, **refer to characters in a different play** -\> Metadrama (as when Polonius in Hamlet 3.2.104--112 mentions a play about Julius Caesar); **Metadrama** - or might point out that they have **acted in such a play**, breaching the distinction between character and actor (as Polonius also does, linking Hamlet to Shakespeare's Julius Caesar). **metatheatre** **Fiction/reality breakdown** - The stage may add to the impression that what we witness when we watch a play is separated from the everyday world and is thus fictional, a **"second reality" (Luhmann);** - in such a setting, the **"aesthetic screen" (Morton)** of theatrical fiction may **break down** - E. g. in **Francis Beaumont, *The Knight of the Burning Pestle* (c. 1607)** - Metadrama and metatheatre can be connected to what Thomas Corn has called **"multilayered mimesis" --** By allowing different roles to comment on eachother, Shakespeare and others made use of **theatrical** **mimesis** and metatheatrical references, to explore the performative conditions and the possibilities for transformation that are deeply imprinted in human nature. - Many plays, but perhaps particularly Shakespeare's, **oscillate between *representation and performance,*** between showing something that may already be known in other ways or based on history and expanding the known by creating new, startling, or surprising experiences for the audience (e.g., feeling 'sympathy for the devil'), bringing a play to life - What happens on stage/ In the connecting space between actors and audience, is not merely the representation of an external reality, but the creation of a genuinely new social space of communication and aesthetic experience. **theatre as "simulation of social communication" (Schwanitz) but also *stimulation* of cognitive and emotional responses** **Drama's Duality** -\> changing the architecture later on (sitting in the dark, behave very quietly) and moving indoors changed the behavior/interaction between audience and performers - **performance vs. literariness** - **'closet drama'** (in an inclosed space at home)**, e.g.** - **Mary Wroth** *Love's Victory* **(c. 1620** - before 1660, women were not allowed to perform, but there are some plays by women which sometimes were printed but (only) performed at home**)** - **Elizabeth Cary** *The Tragedy of Mariam* **(1613)** - **later plays by Byron, Shelley (early 19^th^ century)** - Most plays at those times were in blank verse - **modern plays in verse: T. S. Eliot** *Murder in the Cathedral* **(1935),...** - **fragile media conditions for early modern theatre: "A play did not 'symbolize' reality; it created reality through its conventions"** **Theatre and new media:** - **The close-up** proto-cinematic before the invention of cinema - **E. g. Mr Garrick** (most famous 18^th^ century actor) **in Hamlet** -\> Scene where Hamlet first sees the ghost of this father -\> Like a freeze frame, as if "time had stopped**"** **Nowadays:** - **Shakespeare and Cinema: Early silent films, and also later (many under Kenneth Branagh)** - **Theater broadcasts,** Theatre also broadcast their performances now in cinemas **"Virtualization of liveness"** - **Integrating film projection into stage performances** -\> combination of film and theatre **II. The Age of Representation (since c. 1500 CE)** 6. [Print Culture in the Long Eighteenth Century] Why are Shakespeare's plays also published in books now? Is he also a \"literary\" dramatist? -\> there is an audience beyond the theatre - the printed plays are being sold around the playhouses, probably to make people able to read along while watching the performance - printed texts sometimes are longer than the performances -\> idea of second, literary audience - otherwise there would be no need for longer texts - Some plays (like Shakespeare's) are then collected in a Folio (a large very expensive book) **-\> S.'s first Folio (1623)** came out 7 years after S. had died -\> Some actors edited this Folio and wrote an "intro" - At this time, this is published for a market where books are still a luxury entertainment (unlike Theater/Drama) - Prints are becoming a profitable commodity The economy of Literature in the Shakespearen time: **Patronage** -\> not like todays modern marketplaces - Inherited from the middle ages - **Dedicating works to a patron** (publically in the work itself -- dedication or poem etc.) \ Author would hope to get some kind of **Reward (financial or other)** it's a kind of patron-client relationship - Other reward: Gives writer access to more elite social circus, liberary, other patrons, official job like secretary,... - **Part of a gift economy** (reciprocity) - With drama, the patronage is on a different level - So **why print? -- by choice, for fame or fortune** - at this time, there is no kind of Royalties (rules how authors get paid fairly depending on how many books are printed etc.) -\> why would authors go into print? -\> main point: they don\'t do it for money because there isn\'t really any (or none at all) money earned! Early on, publishers would get the main payment - Quite risky of course for the publisher - Example**: John Milton's contract for the publication of Paradise Lost (1666)** - selling the copyright for 10 pounds (today probably 1,500 pounds), this is actually not that much another model that comes up at that time -\> the subscription model: - What's new: the publisher here has secured a number of financial securities (some subscribers pay before book gets published and they get recognized in the book) - Subscription could also signal political allegies - example: **Jacob Tonson's accounts with John Dryden for printing his Virgil translations, 1697--98, p.1** - Dryden made for today's worth around 220 000 pounds, so a large amount of money (only a few writers made that much money by publishing) A part of public takes over the role of the patron **Samuel Johnson (1709--1784)** - Probably the most famous anecdote about the change from patronage to professionalism concerns him, the most famous man of letters in eighteenth-century Britain - A leading figure of literary life/kind of celebrity of his time - mostly famous for: - **Dictionary of the English Language (1755)** - **Lives of the Poets (1779)** - **Life of Johnson (1791) by James Boswell** - Also: Early in his career, **Samuel Johnson** set a trend by publishing, anonymously, ***An Account of the Life of Mr Richard Savage, Son of the Earl Rivers (1744*),** possibly the **first full-length literary biography in English** - Was a kind of "strange" person -\> may have suffered from Tourette's syndrome - **Johnson's letter to Lord Chesterfield** -\> Was very opinionated (Claims LC had never helped him when he needed him) iconic for independence of Patrons -\> Has a mythic status (\ is this really historically accurate? Still an important document!) -- Johnson was an ambitious young hack at the beginning - **"The Age of Authors"** -- Johnson makes fun of the class devisions of the time -- his complaint here really is about the openness of the literary marketplace to anyone who can write -\> mass media have very little control about this To this multitude, one needs to add another conflict: a controversy about the relative merits of 'ancient and modern learning'. This led Jonathan Swift to write The battle of the book... **Jonathan Swift** - Irish satirist and author - Mostly famous for\... - ***The Battle of the Books (wr. 1697, pr. 1704)*** - \"The Battle of the Books\" is a short satire published as part of the introduction to his A Tale of a Tub in 1704 - In this piece, there is an epic battle fought in the royal library when various books come alive and attempt to settle the arguments between moderns and ancients - ***A Tale of a Tub (wr. 1697, pr. 1704)*** - ***Gulliver's Travels (1726)*** **Publishing in the 18^th^ Century** (he talked a lot about this) - Until then, only four cities were allowed to have printing presses - **Licensing Act expires 1695: no** more **effective censorship, more printing presses** -\> more books - A bit different for plays - licensing also reintroduced later - **libel laws** (= Verleumdungsrecht)**, obscenity ('disturbing the King's peace')** sometimes writing could have severe consequences - **Copyright Act (Statute of Anne), 1710** - **Donaldson v. Becket, 1774** All these legal acts etc. serve to regulate the marketplace of book publishing **Newspapers** - Newspapers boomed during the English Civil War (1642-1651): fourteen different papers were on sale in England in 1645, mostly pamphlets from both sides of the political divide - The first (regular) newspapers circulating - The first regular newspaper: **The Parliamentary Intelligencer, 1659** - Followed by **The Oxford Gazette, 1665** - **The Daily Courant, 1702** - there would be mail coaches that would take these three times a week to the countryside **Coffeehouses** - become really fashionable in cities with the circulation of newspapers - go there to meet other people, have a chat, read/get news - coffee was still very recent in Europe and had become really popular - they develop the art of civilized conversation - **Coffeehouse/newspaper constellation: *face-to-face interaction linked with distant print communication:* the public sphere** Also **essay periodicals** -\> the birth of content - \"A periodical essay is an essay (that is, a short work of nonfiction) published in a magazine or journal\--in particular, an essay that appears as part of a series. The 18th century is considered the great age of the periodical essay in English.\" - Examples: - ***The Review* (1704-1713): Daniel Defoe** - ***The Tatler* (1709-1711): Richard Steele** - ***The Spectator* (1711-1712): R. Steele and Joseph Addison** - **The Rambler (1750-1752) and *The Idler* (1758-1760): Samuel Johnson** **Grub Street** -- see wikipedia - This was a real street in England - A hackney originally is a horse you can rent - **"hackney for bread"** - this is a writer who writes only for the highest bidder, independent of his own morals aligning - **"drudges of the pen, the manufacturers of literature, who have set up for authors"** - **'hack' writers as slaves to booksellers - or respectable members of the literary trade?** This is a bit of a debate at that time - **"Originally the name of a street in Moorfields in London, much inhabited by writers of small histories, dictionaries, and temporary poems; whence any mean production is called grubstreet"** **James Ralph, *The Case of Authors*, 1758** - **debate about literature as a "profession or trade"** in which he demands fair payment for writers - he makes a contrast between **jobbing authors vs. "gentlemen writers" like Alexander Pope** (that already have enough -\> he says that these people create unrealistic expectations, upper-class authors look down on those who write for money -\> a lot of snobbery) **Gray's Elegy written in a country church yard (1751) (**-- er hats geskippt, aber selbst lesen/erarbeiten) - In the 18^th^ century, the 'lives of the poets' became amenable to being turned into literature; but there was also a clear awareness that fame would not be available to everyone-- most authors, like most people, would be forgotten - A focus on transience and mortality is notable in 18^th^ century poetry of the so-called 'graveyard' school - One poem stands out: **Thomas Gray's** (1716--1771) ***Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard***, printed as a seven-page pamphlet in **1751**. Gray's "Elegy" achieved immediate fame showing how poetry, in eighteenth-century print culture, could be a popular literary genre, rivalling the novel - The poem marks a shift from neoclassical lucidity towards the obscure and the sublime around mid-century - the poem also reflects the more complex media situation of literary writing in the eighteenth century by evoking its multiple dimensions: public writing, primary orality (the illiterate villager speaking), secondary orality (the poet's interior speech and poetic composition which follows oral patterns of memory), poetic literacy/intertextuality (levels of intertextual allusions to older poetry, and finally print, the medium in which Gray's poem was published 7. [Paper Worlds: The Novel as Object and Form] - In the 18^th^ Ct., printed texts came to dominate public forms of communication - Professional practices of authorship and publication were strengthened - The growing print industry created an ever-increasing demand for paper - Production sped up with the invention of the Fourdrinier (machine, which allowed paper to be produced in a continuous roll instead of single sheets, from 1807 onwards. Machine-made paper became common in the 1830s) - Not only books, but also: handbills, newspapers, and magazines,... - Very little fiction around 1700 Change: Circulating libraries: - What aided the wide-ranging circulation of novels among potential readers was Francis Kirkman's (1632-- c. 1680) idea to open the first commercial circulating library in 1661 - This created possibilities for distributing books to readers who could not afford to, or did not want to, buy them but were willing and able to borrow books for a fee - Provincial bookshops soon caught on, and by the end of the eighteenth century there were circulating libraries all over the country, creating a much larger market for novels Due to economic, legal, and social changes, the market for books grew steadily in the 18^th^ century. **The "rise of the novel"**  - Market/newspapers/magazines rise Literary market place begins to differentiate itself Example: **"Adventures of a Quire of Paper"** (1779) - paper = narrator, example of IT-narrative (story told by an object, popular genre in the 18th century - Content: purports to be narrated by the very paper it is printed on, recounts the entire production process of paper from flaxseed to linen rags as a cruel experience Readers of this 'it-narrative' were pointed to the history of the very stuff they were holding in their hands while reading, turning the material text into a selfconscious medium **New reading habits and Novels** - Most novels were written because there was popular demand for some light reading. Novels were soon forgotten and replaced by new ones. - **demand for "continuous supply of new novels"** -\> about new works/themes, no works reprinted -\> Consumption/consumer society, "The slaughterhouse of Literature" - Reading became **extensive rather than intensive**, a **reading as an entertainment** rather than learning, and a mode of distraction instead of focused attention \ (Still, facts -\> history and travel literature were also in great demand! -\> The novel profited from this, too, -\> it grew **more 'realistic\"** - **"particular individuals having particular experiences at particular times and at particular places"** - **New: "formal realism" -** key feature of the novel: techniques of writing that evoked an atmosphere of credibility, authenticity, and verisimilitude (e. g. the eye-witness or survivor narrative formed the basis of travel writing, but they were also prominent in early novels like **Aphra Behn, *Oroonoko* (1688); Daniel Defoe, *Robinson Crusoe* (1719)** - less about the exotic and fantastic and more about real social life, with plausible characters, settings, etc.) Summed up by **William Congreve in 1692:** What eighteenth-century readers looked for in a novel - novels were presented as more familiar, more credible, and more down-to-earth than other literary forms; but the keyword here is, above all, "pleasure" **Novels and Novelty**: Genres - **amatory fiction, sentimental novels, Gothic novels, historical novels, Newgate novels, silver-fork novels, bildungsromane, sensation novels, detective novels, science fiction novels,...** **Samuel Richardson (1689-1761):** - novelist, printer who owned three printing houses - Goal: entertainment, moral instruction (complex society), promote virtue - Known for: - In the same year he wrote and published a conduct book intended for readers from the lower ranks of society: ***The Apprentice's Vade Mecum; or, Young Man's Pocket-Companion* (1733)** - A series of 'familiar letters' that he composed on the problems and concerns of everyday life was published as ***Letters Written to and for Particular Friends, on the Most Important Occasions. Directing Not Only the Requisite Style and Forms to Be Observed in Writing Familiar Letters; but How to Think and Act Justly and Prudently, in the Common Concerns of Human Life* (1741)** (form: letters/combination of letter + novel = epistolary novel) - These "familiar letters" inspired Richardson to write a novel in letters -\> ***Pamela* or *Virtue Rewarded* (1741)** became a massive hit - Content: It combines the form of fictional letters with the titillating story of a fifteen-year-old servant girl who must defend her virtue and virginity against her employer and molester, Mr B., sense of urgency/realism - **six editions in one year** - **enormous success: the Pamela 'media event' (Warner 1998)** - Pamela merchandise, Pamela Parodies ( show the novel struggling for its place in culture and argue about its literary respectability, *more read down...* - Pro-Pamelists \ Anti Pamelists Debate - **followed by *Pamela in Her Exalted Condition* (1741)** Richardson built on earlier romance fiction, he adapted these stories, in which womenwere regularly seduced and abandoned by men, for the moral benefit of his readers-- or so he claimed **Richardson, *Clarissa or the History of a young lady* (1747--1748)** -\> essentially about rape The conflict that came to a head with Pamela: - Was reading novels meant more for the mind or for the body? - Were its pleasures cognitive or emotional, even physical? In other words, was novel-reading good or bad? - panic about novel corrupting society, man/women This question was to pursue the novel for quite a long time and has never disappeared entirely Furthermore: The first publisher to introduce a uniform 'edition binding': John Newbery (1713--1767) - also considered the father of children's literature because he published the first books specifically for children *A Little Pretty Pocket-Book* (1744) and ***Goody Two-Shoes*** (1765). - He must be one of the first publishers to think of product placement - He also sold a patent medicine, Dr. James's Fever Powder, and in the children's book Goody Two-Shoes the heroine's father is "seized by a violent Fever in a Place where Dr James's Powder was not to be had, and where he died miserably" Already in the mid-18^th^ century, some novelists were aware of the strangeness and newness of this form of communication, addressing a large number of readers, even creating a new form of social community through novels: **Laurence Sterne (1713 -- 1768)** - Like Richardson and Fielding, he used the novel as a testing ground for ideas of human nature, perception, individuality, and virtue that were currently being debated in society - Richardson saw himself as "introduc\[ing\] a new species of writing" - Known for ***The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759--67)*** -\> In this, he reflected in a parodic and playful manner on the novel's forms of mediation, its dependence on the printed page - Playful with form, printing etc. (e. g. wrong page numbers) - Black pages in order to mourn characters death - Marbled pages (unique handmade specimen -\> visual experience) **The 19^th^ Century: New technologies** - **lithography (Alois Senefelder), 1798** - **use of stereotyping, early 1800s (invented 1725)** - **Fourdrinier machine (papermaking), 1807** - **first steam press (at The Times), 1814** - **paper made from wood pulp, 1843** - **photomechanical reproduction of photographs, end of 19th ct.** - **The Railway** - **1848: W. H. Smith introduces railway station bookstalls** - **"Railway literature"-\> cheap books sold at railway stations** - **Routledge's *Railway Library* series** - **'railway novels': sensation novels (e.g. *The Woman in White*, 1859--60, *Lady Audley's Secret*, 1862)** - **'three-decker' or 'triple-decker'** - **format introduced for Walter Scott's *Waverley*, 1814** - **price: 31s 6d** - **favoured by circulating libraries** One of the most famous circulating libraries was **Mudie's Select Library** - **founded by Charles Edward Mudie in 1842** - **1875: 125 branch libraries across UK** - **1850s and 60s: adding up to 100,000 volumes per year** - **excluded "novels of objectionable character or inferior ability"** - **until 1937** Alongside the commercial libraries, public libraries were established in many places from 1850 onwards Increased access to literature was also provided by **Reprint Series** - reprint editions and cheaper popular fiction - There was a growing market for single-volume reprints of older novels, like **Bentley's Standard Novels (1831--1856; 126 titles)**, **price 6 shillings** each (£ 30 in today's money), and **Routledge's Railway Library (1849--1898), 1277 titles, price 2s -- '**known as **yellowbacks'** because of their colored paper bindings - Even cheaper were the "**penny dreadfuls"**, popular fiction and periodicals aimed at a working-class audience, which were sold for **one penny** (less than 50p today) **Victorian novelists** - **about 3,500 novelists between 1837 and 1901** - **c. 50,000 novels** - **in 1890s, 2,000 novels per year** - by far the most successful of all Victorian novelists: **Charles Dickens (1812 -- 1870)** - In Germany, the Leipzig publisher **Tauchnitz** made an enormous fortune by reprinting English-language books for a European and later global market, starting his ***Collection of British and American Authors*, 1842 - 1939** The publishing of **novels in parts** or periodicals - serial publication: in periodicals or parts - Had consequences on **plot construction: "make 'em laugh, make 'em cry, make 'em wait" (Wilkie Collins)** - If authors wanted to get their readers hooked, they needed to create suspense, '**cliffhangers'** - **mystery or detective novel (e.g. Collins The Moonstone, 1868)** **George Gissing, *New Grub Street* (1891)** - Like the old term 'Grub Street' for hack writing, writing for money is the key theme of the novel New Grub Street, too - as **emerging writers like Jasper Milvain and Edwin Reardon** must learn to curb their idealism as artists and cater to the audience and to the powerful institutions of publishers and libraries etc. in order to sell **Milvain: writing is "a trade", "a business"** - '**middlebrow' writing** **Early 20^th^ Century** - **end of the three-decker in 1890s** For the wider public, there were even more outlets for books in the first half of the twentieth century - **'mushroom libraries' (e.g. Boots Booklovers' Library)** - smaller + cheaper libraries - The libraries received competition from **book clubs,** which sold books to members at discount prices, such as the **Times Book Club (1904), Book Society (1929), Left Book Club (1935)** - class division in book clubs (e. g. income/politics) - However, the invention of the mass-market paperback, killed book clubs **the paperback revolution: Penguin, 1935 (Allen Lane at The Bodley Head "We do not need pretentious books for the wealthy, we need more really well-made ordinary books"**  8. [Voice and Breath in Poetry] - In the history of changing cultural practices, forms of mediation in the mode of performance (like the human voice) have never completely disappeared - Listening to the voice of a poet, a bardic singer, or a storyteller is among the oldest experiences of literature. - Moreover, we experience listening as more immediate than silent reading **"Voice" in Literature** - The concept of 'voice' in literature is nowadays used in a metaphorical sense In poetry, the term 'voice' is also used figuratively for the poem's speaker **'voice' = speech, speaker** Different speaking situations in various forms of Literature (e. g. Lyrical I) - In general, it seems there is a mental process that occurs **in reading we "infer a voice even though we know that we are reading words on a page"** - For poetry, there is a long tradition of hearing a bard or a poet sing or recite poems aloud **poetry: reading aloud; elocution** Poets who failed to recite their poems convincingly could be subjected to scathing critique: - An early example: We hear from **Roger L'Estrange** in **(1686),** about a weak performer of his own verses: **John Dryden (1631 -- 1700)** - a French visitor in the 1690s who vents his astonishment about the English habit of reading poetry aloud in a tuneful tone of voice: **François-Maximilien Misson, 1719** - **Edgar Allan Poe** was referred to as **"The jingle man"** for writing poetry that depended on sound and melody for much of its effect (one of Poe's fantastic tales: **"Loss of Breath" (1832)**) For poetry, a new tradition emerged in the 18^th^ century - shifted the focus from a rhetorical mode composed for public performance towards a more interiorised form of speech (verbalised thoughts rather than words spoken aloud and addressed to an audience) - a conventional view of this lyric 'voice': it is a representation of the poet's own thoughts and feelings; thoughts are expressed spontaneously, in solitude, and are meant to be sincere-- not made to impress an audience but spoken/written as if there were no audience - **"all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" -- William Wordsworth** - And Shelley's comparison of the poet to "**A poet is a nightingale who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an [unseen] musician, who feel that they are moved and softened, yet [know not whence or why]." (Percy Shelley)** Poets are "unseen" because they are absent from the text, and the readers are "moved" by this "melody", but they do not know where the music is coming from. They do not even know why they are moved by it. The modern textual environment does not easily allow for such effects to happen (limitations of print) The voice of the poet had yet another specialty: It could speak to animals and address inanimate objects as if they were human **Apostrophe: Say "O"** - In this mode, the poet did not speak directly to an audience or readers - E. g**. Oh Rose... Oh Hope.. O England... O reader!\... O! How I love, Oh, when I...** and so on - Apostrophe = Rhetorical figure -\> turning away from sth. -\> in literature expressed by O(h) -\< Accompanying for shortcomings of print culture - **Jonathan Culler, "Apostrophe" (1977): the 'O' as an invocation of poetry itself, an expression of poetic presence: "the pure O of undifferentiated voicing"** - **"O Poesy! for thee I hold my pen" (Keats)** **Or "Ah" Ah! Sunflower!\... Ah, child, thou... Ah! why will...**, and so on Example: **Percy Bysshe Shelley - Ode to the West Wind (1819)** - Starts with "O, wild west wind,..." - Wind = breath of nature - Wind shall listen to poets voice - Hope of freedom/equality - Romantic poem - Kind of political state of winter The negative space around poems visualizes value of poetry **Radical Subjectivity** - **Romantic poetry often celebrates the individual as opposed to a group or crowd: "I wandered lonely as a cloud" (Wordsworth) etc.** - Possibly, this indicates an **increased focus on solitary (self-)experience in nature:** an in **Rousseau, *Reveries of the Solitary Walker* (1782)** The Romantic ideas of radical subjectivity and self-expression had their precursors in the mid-18^th^ century, most notably in the idea of the **"original genius"**, as proposed by the poet **Edward Young** in his essay **Conjectures on original composition (1759)** - **"original genius"** - **"mental individuality"** This powerful idea is also known as **"expressivism"** - For some later poets it followed that authors expressed their individuality in their works - This idea made it possible for **Wordsworth** to write an epic poem about "himself" which we now know as ***The Prelude*** - This earned him the scorn of **John** **Keats**, who referred to this as **"the egotistical sublime"** - the "quality" that "went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature" was not mental individuality but **"negative capability"** (that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries etc., without any irritable reaching after fact and reason) - In another letter, he wrote about the **"poetical Character"**, saying that **"it is not itself -- it has no self -- it is everything and nothing -- It has no character"** For Keats, what is decisive for literary creativity is not the presence of something in the poet's mind but an absence, a lack of definite characteristics **Idea of "Genius"** - The confictiing theories about "the poet's mind"/"the poetical character" become caught up in the **"paradoxes of inspiration and expression"** - is the poem the experience that the poet has *before writing it down* ( written text only a copy of the experience) or is the linguistic expression *identical* to the poet's inspiration (something given to the poet by a higher power than his "own voice" not an act of self-expression at all?) In other words: - Is the **genius** defined as **autonomous or heteronomous?** - Is it characterized by **personality or "impersonality" ?** - Towards the end of the 18^th^ century, the **"myth of lyric voice"** was established **as "a medium that vibrates forth from the irreplaceable singularity of the speaking body" but also "coincides with a universality"** - For Keats, the poet's voice and breath had an intensely personal and physical significance. (died at 25, suffering from tuberculosis) Example: **Alfred Lord Tennyson, *In Memoriam A. H. H.* (1850)** - tried to achieve even a universal significance or wisdom in this long poem, when he speaks on behalf of the entire human species - trying to come to terms with mortality at a time when conventional Christian piety was challenged by scientific discoveries in geology and zoology - **"O friendship, equal-poised control, O heart, with kindliest motion warm, O sacred essence, other form, O solemn ghost, O crownèd soul! \[...\]"** A \[spiritualist\] 'medium' is exposed as a sham (Schein) in **Robert Browning - "Mr. Sludge, the Medium" (**Dramatis Personae**, 1864)** - The dramatic nature of this poem, spoken by the medium himself, Mr. Sludge, is immediately evident from the start: his most recent client has discovered that it's all a trick, this speaking with the dead - Ch-ch! (different use of breath in poems) the poet's ability to speak in the voices of literary characters was perfected in a form known as the **Dramatic monologue** - **borrowed voices - a new pathway for lyric speech** - **towards the modernist ideal of the poet's 'impersonality':** - **"different voices" in Eliot's *The Waste Land* (1922)** - **stream-of-consciousness technique in the modernist novel (e.g. Joyce, *Ulysses*, 1922)** **\ ** **II. The Age of Connection (since c. 1850 CE)** 9. [Touch: Literature as Telecommunication] Idea that Literature is communication from a distance - spiritualist practices-- automatic writing, but also to some extent poetry-- could be used to establish communication with the beyond/ the dead: - He has this sense/feeling of connection - Overcoming time and space At this point (1850), Victorian poetry met modern telecommunications (not only in the form of spiritualism but), also in the technology of the telegraph: **The telegraph** - Telegraph offices in most cities made it possible to send and receive messages called telegrams -- in code across a difference - The first transatlantic cable (British Isles and North America) in 1858 - Morse code invented in 1838   this cables stuff we know have with internet etc. / very new and fascination technical possibility of sending and receiving (telegraph) /stuff is really starting here, first/steam globalization - Poems written to praise this achievement: E. g. one by the British **("the third-greatest physicist of all time") James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879)** in 1860**: Valentine from a Telegraph Clerk ♂ to a Telegraph Clerk ♀** - Maxwell chose the valentine, a conventional love lyric associated with Valentine's Day, for his telegraphic poem (the valentine has been/is a popular genre of the love lyric) - Poem is remarkable for its daring combination of conventional love imagery with technical words and objects (e. g. the telegraph's "needle", "the line", "currents"), --many of these are themselves metaphors (taken from natural language and adapted to scientific phenomena) - tries to bridge distance (physical separation needs to longing and poems) -\> here with the technical aspect In the early modern times, **the distance** that needed to be **bridged** (for intimate **lyric communication** to take place in writing) was that **between the heart and the pen or quill** Connection that (love) lyric is supposed to establish - Example: **Sir Philip Sidney, *Astrophil and Stella* (1581--1582), Sonnet 1** - Astrophil = Starlover, Stella = Star - negotiates between emotional authenticity ("Loving in truth") and the inevitable reference to literary ante cedents for inspiration - ends with the Muse's exhortation to "look in thy heart, and write" the irony being that this was, at the time, already a literary cliché - **Stella's Eyes**: **Sonnet 9, II. 12-14** - rhetorical figures repetition/antanaclasis (?) - touch and Touch (once as noun and once as verb) meaning the same thing: figura etymologica - Example: **Shakespeare's sonnet 141** then goes on to riff on the other senses, including "base touches" Touch: - In the hierarchy of the senses, touch was always 'base' (dirty/ignoble) - This changes somewhat in the 17^th^ ct. with Milton's *Paradise Lost* (he connects "the sense of touch" to human procreation) - Long line of literature which explores the fusion of the spiritual and the erotic on the basis of the sense of touch - E. g. **Laurence Sterne**, whose ***Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768)*** gave a name to an entire genre of 'sentimental fiction', he celebrates this fusion [Back to the 19^th^ ct].: Idea that the world was ready for technology before it arrived: - **connectivity precedes connection** - **e. g. Anthony Trollope's short story "The Telegraph Girl" (1877)** - It is a story set in the midst of a communications revolution - **The widowed printer Abraham Hall, falls** **in love with Lucy Graham, a 25-year-old 'telegraph girl'** - **context: Telegraph Bill of 1868, Universal Education Act of 1870** - **technological change: acoustic system replaces needle-punch codes** (requires her to listen to rather than read her telegraphic literature) challenges the girl -\> pressure on this young employee (part of her motivation to leave service and marry A. H.) - difficulties of communication which can be overcome: **establishing a connection means "getting the message through"** (e. g. cannot send a marriage proposal via telegram!) - The **short story** is, in Tr. words, a piece of **"telegraphic literature"** Late 19^th^ ct. - End of the romantic era - **Example: Tennyson, "the Kraken" (1830)** - submarine cables have invaded this alien space with frantic if invisible human activity - **Rudyard Kipling, "The deep-sea cables" (1893)** - No more underwater monsters, religion, kraken, there is a mythic theme though - This doesn't refers to the transatlantic cable, but more likely to the expansion of British cable to other continents (in the 1870s): Expansion of British cables to other continents - **Connecting the Empire** - **"Let us be one!"** - **space of separation** (between Britain/its colonies) **transformed for near-instantaneous communication and connection by deep-sea cables** - **sacred time** (as the father of "the timeless Things") **replaced by "merchant's time" : "measurable, oriented and predictable"** - Famous/skeptical motto: **"Only connect" - E. M Forster, *Howards End,* 1910)** the telegraph also inspired anxieties (as in "The Telegraph Girl") - *Late Victorian gothic fiction* picked up such anxieties of communication with an invisible world: The genre slowly developed towards modern horror fiction **Wiress Horrors** - **E. g. Arthur Machen, "The Great God Pan" (1890/1894)** - horror story, the effect will not be anything good - mysteries of reality, literary realism/fantasy, the unseen - **Gothic fantasies of "the unseen" - hidden (occult) connections between "the world of matter and the world of spirit" (Machen), "behind the veil" (Tennyson)** - **e.g. George Eliot, "The Lifted Veil" (1859); Kipling, "The Mark of the Beast" (1890); Richard Marsh, The Beetle (1897)** by 1900 we get the next step from telegraphy to wires to wireless telegraphy through electromagnetic waves -- this triggers even more anxieties - **E. g. Kipling, "Wiress" (1902)** - For Kipling, they made an interesting metaphor for the sources of literary inspiration: "Where does literature come from? What is its channel or medium? How does it get its message through?" - Story of a dead poet from the past being \"induced\" and ending up like a parasite: **narrator visits chemist friend; chemist's nephew experiments with radio signals, "this Marconi business" and "Hertzian waves". Chemist's assistant, Mr Shaynor, is "induced" by radio waves to (re-)write a poem by John Keats** Suffers from consumption just like Keats, girlfriend has the same name, and other stuff just like Keats\... some message must have gotten through and he has turned in a \"human kind of receiver\" when having experienced with those waves - **"odds and ends of messages coming out of nowhere", "something coming through from somewhere"; "subconscious thought"** - **"situating the wireless at the origin of the impressionist subject" (Fielding 2015, 27)** - A similarly destructive view of new technologies of communication in **E. M. Forster's "The Machine Stops" (1909)** - science fiction short story - **dystopian future** - **'the machine' offers global connection but results in isolation** - **books are a thing of the past, "a survival from the ages of litter"; there is now only "the Book of the Machine" (a handbook on how to operate it)** - **anxieties about technology and its (negative) effects on society; science fiction as key genre for this c. 1900 (compare H.G. Wells, The Invisible Man 1897, The Island of Doctor Moreau 1896)** 10. [Sound: Phonography, telephony, radio, noise] The Victorians and Edwardians were fascinated by technologies of communication: - **The Telephone - Bell's first telephone transmitter (1876)** - **The Phonograph -** Invented a year later **- Thomas Alva Edison with his second phonograph, 1878** new technology of recording voices and sounds is represented in late 19^th^ and early 20^th^ -century literature in many novels and stories such **Literature's Fascination with recorded sound** - **Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, L'Ève future (1886)** - **Jules Verne, Le château des Carpathes (1893)** - **Arthur Conan Doyle, "The Japanned Box" (1899)** - **James Joyce, Ulysses (1922)** - **Thomas Mann, Der Zauberberg (1924)** The first recorded poet: **Browning** reciting **"hoe they brought the good news from ghent to aix"** into an Edison maschine at a dinner party -- **forgets** his text after a mere three lines **(1889)**  Among the oldest surviving phonograph recordings is - **Tennyson reciting** from his poems, e. g. **"the charge of the light brigade" (1890)** The new medium quickly created fantasies and anxieties, as when the magazine ***Punch***, in **1878**, published a **cartoon** by **George Du Maurier** (1834--1896) claiming that soon "the work of 'our best poets' could be publicly disseminated by young women using phonographs, taking the place of the 'hirsute Italian organ-grinders' who walked about the streets of London" Audiobooks were being imagined long before they became technically possible, as in a drawing from the ***Daily Graphic* (New York), April 2, 1878**: "The phonograph at home reading out a novel" **The first audiobooks** produced by the American Foundation for the Blind in 1932, using texts that were in the public domain and thus could be reproduced without costs - **1932: 'Talking Books' for the blind (USA)** - **1952: Caedmon records** was the first company to publish dramatizations/readings of literary works commercially on long-playing records - **release first LP with a reading by Dylan Thomas** **The voice and the machine** - Traditionally the **voice** was seen **as sign of presence** - Now, the possibility of the recorded, phonographic voice was perceived as lacking emotion, being speech without (physical) presence: - **the phonographic voice "speaks of mechanical reproduction and threatens an absence at the heart of speech"** - **"the phonograph is incapable of reproducing the human voice in all its strength and warmth. The voice of the apparatus will remain shrill and cold; it has something imperfect and abstract about it that sets it apart"** - It is a speech without presence, one that is outside the normal experience of temporality: a recorded voice is disconnected from its origin; it can be played back more quickly or more slowly, and it will persist in time, possibly beyond its owner's death There is, then, a connection between the phonograph and memory, an uncanny effect of lifeless life beyond mortality Example: **Arthur Conan Doyle, "the japanned box" (1899)** - widower is held back from relapsing into alcoholism by listening to the phonographic record of his dead wife's voice -- servant think there must be a ghost - At the end, **supernatural voice revealed as effect of recording technology** Example: **Dracula -- Bram Stoker (1897)** - Here anxieties about the undead - Vampire hunters use all the available modern technologies to fight them - Dracula is **"that perennially misjudged heroic epic of the final victory of technological media over the blood-sucking despots of old Europe"** The first commercial model of the typewriter was introduced in 1874: **The typewriter** Changed the very experience of writing - revolutionising office work and creating new jobs for women - **Early adopters of typewriters or typewriting services: Mark Twain, Friedrich Nietzsche, Oscar Wilde, Henry James** - **Twain, Life on the Mississippi (1883): first literary work to be sent to a publisher in typewritten form** - many modernist authors feared the mechanisation of culture and the **"industrialization of writing": distancing author from text and utterance from person** Disruptions in the natural order of things also occur in **The inheritors (1901) by Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford** - which imagines a **woman from the future** invading the present - **'Fourth Dimensionist'** = future version of humanity with fewer scruples/ethical concern - **anxieties of 'degeneration' (e. g. H. G. Wells, The Time Machine 1895)** - Narrator remarks on her **"expressionless voice" like "a phonograph reciting a technical work"** In the future human voices will have assumed the qualities of the machine Technology could also become a danger to humanity in its own turn **Literature and the Telephone** - new technologies of the telegraph, phonograph, typewriter, and wireless radio waves were viewed as ambivalent in their potential benefits and risks (dissociating communication from human bodies, even further than writing already did, and threatening to dissolve the boundaries of space and time) - They were frequently not imagined as establishing connectivity but as metaphors of dissociation, - as in **Ford Madox ford, *Some do no*... (1924)** - Here, the shell-shocked protagonist feels disconnected from himself. He hears his own voice as coming through a telephone, from a distance: In literature, the telephone is probably more often depicted as a medium of disconnection and dissociation than one of connectivity - **"the 'blindness' of telephonic communication lends itself to deception, and easily generates confusion, misunderstanding and alienation between the participants"** - The "narrative potential" of this medium quickly exploited in the novel, **e.g. Evelyn Waugh, Vile Bodies (1930); Muriel Spark, Memento Mori (1959)** - **"in literature, a telephone call is usually bad news"** **The BBC (British Broadcasting Company, later British Broadcasting Corporation)** - **founded in 1922** - **mission: "to inform, educate and entertain"** - **turned radio into the first acoustic mass medium** - **public funding** - **Programme Board** - **concerned about morality and religion** - **Broadcasting plays** -- began in the mid-1920s -\> Well received - **A Comedy of Danger by Richard Hughes (1924): first play written for radio** - **new form: radio drama (1927)** - **BBC Drama department (1927)** - **1940s: soap operas** - **1935: 98% of UK population had access to a radio set** - **Writers working for the BBC: Louis MacNeice (1907--1963), George Orwell (1903--1950)** **Radio plays** - **US: The War of the Worlds (1938) adapted by Orson Welles from the 1897 novel by H. G. Wells -- so realistic it caused panic** - **Samuel Beckett, All That Fall (1957) and others** - The most famous radio play is **Dylan Thomas's *Under Milk Wood* (1954)** - **fictional Welsh village of Llareggub** - the play follows the dreams and thoughts of the inhabitants - originally titled **"The Village that was Mad"** - Called **"a play for voices"** **Sound and Noise in the "Jet Age"** In wartime/postwar Britain, technologies and literary responses to sound changed considerably towards thinking more about the relationship between (meaningful) sound and (meaningless or disturbing) noise - One example of this is the response to the technological realisation of the '**jet age'** and supersonic flight (1940s) - Flying faster than the speed of sound became a cultural obsession in the 1950s, manifested for example in **David Lean's (1908--1991) film The Sound Barrier** - **Iris Murdoch, The Bell (1958)** includes a rural idyll that is disturbed by the "stattering" roar of jet planes flying overhead "noise and speed and beauty", fascinating, physical sensation/ecstasy - **Agatha Christie, *4:50* *from Paddington* (1957)** -- even a rather staid detective novel contains a reference to jet planes reference is a signal to contemporary readers that Christie is still up to date (despite long career in the prewar 'Golden Age' of detec. fic.) The speed of these developments and cultural changes challenged the usually more sedate pace of literature (pressure un stuff like ideas of belonging and social class) Jukebox invented in 1927, mentioned in - **Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (1957)** - **Thom Gunn, "Elvis Presley" (1957)** Earlier cultural panics about new media - Technological optimism and cultural pessimism coupled in the 1950s - Condemning modern phenomena like rock'n'roll, jazz music (racist discourse) Even more provocatively, the tables are turned when, in **Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange (1962)** the 'ultraviolence' of youth gang member Alex is triggered not by rock music, but by listening to classical music on a stereo system But perhaps the one postwar writer whose work is most symptomatic of the engagement with new technologies of sound, and its concomitant phenomenon of noise, is **J. G. Ballard (1930-2009)** - unique way of combining modern technology, social satire, and surrealism in his fiction - e\. g. his science fiction story **"The Sound-Sweep" (1960):** Ballard envisages a culture in which classical music is replaced by "ultrasonic music"(that transcends the rage of human hearing) **Les Murray (1938-2019) "Bats' Ultrasound"** Poetry: Imagining/imitation even sounds associated with forms of life/ways of experiencing the world that are entirely alien to us 11. [Vision: Text and Image] The connection between **Literature and Visuality** is a very old one, goes back to ancient times - **Ut pictura poesis (Horace, Epistula ad Pisones/Ars poetica)** - **'painting is silent poetry, and poetry is a speaking picture' (Simonides of Ceos)** relationship between poetry and painting -- he basically said the same thing as Horace - In the early modern period, these words were frequently quoted in the ***paragone*** (or **competition between the arts)** - **Lessing,** talking about **Laocoön (1766): painting = static, narrative = dynamic** expert/talking about relationship between literature and arts, stories develop over time - **telling vs. showing / mental visualizations while reading** when creative writing, you should show, not tell -- a lot like daydreaming, different from what you would see in real life And the relationship between **Seeing and Knowing** Seeing long been associated with ideas of truth and knowledge - **Greek "I know" = "I have seen" (οἶδα), Proto-Indo-European \*weyd = to see** - **"the ocular proof" (Othello 3.3)** about his wife's infidelity -\> "Seeing is believing/knowing" - **"see things as they are" -** preference of sight over other tastes, the appeal of images is much stronger than words, seeing becomes a metaphor for \_\_ (knowing?) In the modern world, however, the connections between seeing and knowing have come under intense pressure and have in many cases been entirely severed: - **John Berger, Ways of Seeing (1972): "It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world: we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. Each evening we see the sun set. We know that the earth is turning away from it. Yet the knowledge, the explanation, never quite fits the sight."** - in this time still/for a long time drawing was THE skill for a visual representation? (not like today with simply photographing) - Based on relationship between viewer and view Now to literary forms that combine visual and textual forms: **Text-Image Combinations** - Medieval **illuminated manuscripts** --illuminated with colourful visual elements or pictorial illustrations - once we move to the age of print: some images still added by hand, e. g. **ballads printed on 'broadsides'** - another popular form: **emblem books: pictura (allegorical image) + subscriptio (title/explanation); e.g. Alciati, Emblemata (1531) --** combining woodcut images (picturae) with a text and title on to the romantic era now: A special place in this history belongs to **William Blake (1757 -- 1872)** - romantic poet and also an engraver, a visual artist as much as poet - produced his books privately and in small numbers, had control over every step of the process - Developed a technique of "illuminated printing" (combining text and illustrations during the printing process) Now to the 19^th^ Ct.: now even more **Victorian Illustrators** **William Makepeace Thackeray** - Author of **Vanity Fair (1847/48) -- Pen and Pencil Sketches of English society** worked as his own illustrator - sketches are part of the aesthetic program of this novel **William Wordsworth contra *Illustrated London News* (1846)** - Sonnet complaining about popular newspapers and illustrations, the I. L. N. is one of his targets - Gives history of what happened before - He view printing exaggeratingly positive - it\'s the fact that newspapers containing images now instead of simply text, Wordsworth is really critical about this **The "Art of Fiction"** - **novels become 'respectable' in late 19th ct.** - **Walter Besant, Henry James (1880s): the "art of fiction"** -- there is a fear among these authors that illustrations would rob the novel of some of its key strengths, they are seen as competition - **illustrations seen as debasement - relegated to the margins (popular entertainment)** Henry James offers the best illustration of this competition between literature and photography: **Henry James (143 -- 1916)** - ***The New York Edition*** of his novels and tales ***(*1907 -- 1909)** was expected to feature illustrations on the frontispiece to each volume. - This gave James anxiety, because..... - Henry James had taken it for granted that each volume of his definitive edition would have a frontispiece - He had always resented illustrations, as they delayed publication, and pictures combined with text were an afront to the written word, was jealous of illustrations, \... - James met photographer **Alvin Langdon Coburn (1882 -- 1966)** in 1905 James warmed to the idea that, instead of having drawings, Coburn could add his photographs to the edition - **James** introduces the point of view in **The Golden Bowl (**in the preface**)**, one of his signature novels: - "**The essence of any representational work is of course to bristle with immediate images"** - Admits **Coburn's photographs not as illustrations but as "mere optical symbols or echoes, expressions of no particular thing in the text"** James's evocation of the visual sense may sound like an echo of a famous phrase by **Joseph Conrad** some years earlier (1897) on the novelist's "task": **"My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel, -- it is, before all, to make you *[see]*" (1897)** **Modernist typography** - In an even more basic sense, printed literature was designed for the eyes to take in by means of typography - After 1900, writers and artists began to pay more attention to aspects of design and layout - Many modernists made the typography of their texts a part of their artistic intention, at times disrupting the reader's experience e\. g. The Italian futurist **Marinetti** - with his poem *Zang Tumb Tuuum*, scattering words and letters across the pages. - In his manifesto **Typographic Revolution (1913),** Marinetti calls for a revolution "**against the idiotic and nauseating concepts of the outdated and conventional book"** Conrete poetry had existed before, e. g. **George Herbert, "Easter Wings" (1633)**  In France, we have **Guillaume Apollinaire (1880 -- 1918), *Calligrammes* (1918)**   The same thing being done in Germany, etc. British artists are not really \"on top of\" this movement, the only really English contender is the magazine **Blast**, only two issues of this were ever published, also associated with another art movement \"**Vorticism**\":  Short-lived movement called Vorticism; the War killed many of its key members. As Pound writes in 1914, in an essay titled "Vortex", which was published in the first issue of Blast: **Ezra Pound, "Vortex" (Blast I, 1914)** He defines vortex as: **The vortex is the point of maximum energy.** **It represents, in mechanics, the greatest efficiency.** **We use the words "greatest efficiency" in the precise sense -- as they would be used in a text book of MECHANICS.** **\[\...\]** **All experience rushes into this vortex. All the energized** **past, all the past that is living and worthy to live. \[\...\]** **\[\...\] All the past that is vital, all the past that is capable of** **living into the future, is pregnant in the vortex, NOW.** **Eric Gill (1882 -- 1940)** - usually we are not, but in this case we should be concerned with the way a text is printed -\> does have an effect on the way the text is perceived - at this time, you would have radical left- and right-wing politics with their own design choices, trying to leave established and outmoded - suggestion: we need modern plain efficient modern typography without being fancy The modernists' fascination with form and vision, even with the visual shape of letters, also shows in Ezra Pound's interest in Chinese characters: - Poets like **Ezra Pound (1885 -- 1972)**, working together with **Ernest Fenollosa** - Were really into typography -  **1919** - Longing for concrete things and objects - A word could be like a Chinese character and could contain one (like Chinese?) image (?) They called themselves the "Imagists" **Imagism** Idea that - For Pound, the power of poetry lay in the energy and luminosity of such a single, powerful image **"An 'Image' is \[...\] It is better to present one image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous works."** - **Ezra Pound (1913)** - Against this Victorian survival, the Imagists promoted a distinctly modern style of poem: - e\. g. **D. H. Lawrence** poem: "**The morning breaks like a pomegranate/ In a shining crack of red /The sky was apple-green, /The sky was green wine held up in the sun"** The kind of poem that Pound wanted to write, and wanted others to write: **In a station of the metro -- Ezra Pound - 1913** This is the entire poem: - This poem no longer a conventional lyric speaker, does not contain a single verb Instead -\> Montage - This is an attempt to "free" poetry from the perspective of first point view - Spacing emphasizes individual (sets of) words - the idea is: to have an impersonal vision of things that is then really \_\_\_ -\> He does this in this poem and others do it as well! **T. S. Eliot (1888 -- 1965)** Ezra Pound's influence on T. S. Eliot is best seen in ***The Waste Land* (1922)** -- a long poem - In The Waste Land, Eliot becomes a sort of master at this technique - Among its famous phrases are \"April is the cruellest month\", \"I will show you fear in a handful of dust\", and \"These fragments I have shored against my ruins\" - *The Waste Land* does not follow a single narr