Thinking about reading tonight. In my eighteenth-century novel course we are about to discuss the Ian Watt chapter ìThe reading public and the rise of the novel.î I also recently read the chapter ìReaders and the reading publicî in John Brewer‘s The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century. Both authors look to connect demographic data and evidence of social change to the practice of reading, and in Watt’s case, to make connections to the development of the genre of the novel. Written forty years apart, the two chapters draw strikingly different conclusions from largely the same information. Watt, for instance, writes that there was clearly a substantial number of women with the leisure time to read novels, so novel reading was a largely female practice. Brewer looks at the same evidence (the number of references to and representations of female novel reading) and concludes instead that there was a great anxiety about women reading novels. Of course, Brewer can also draw upon forty years of research into such topics as library lending records to point out that men read novels just as much as women.

The other kind of reading I’ve been thinking about is blog reading (and writing). What will happen if I start to devote more blog space to my research and teaching, a subject with a perhaps more limited potential audience than the trips that I take from time to time or the occasional blogging squabble? And will this make blogging seem more like work and less like the enjoyable process it feels like, now? And why is it I think I should be doing this?

Well, it’s not an either/or proposition.

It’s the end of a long day. You’re driving home. Turn on the radio. Find a song you know the words to. Sing along in the voice of:

• Ethel Merman, or
• Elmer Fudd, or
• The cat from the Meow Mix commercial, or
• The distinctive celebrity voice of your choice.

One of the most interesting things I’ve been reading lately is Oral and Literate Culture in England: 1500-1700 by Adam Fox (Clarendon Press, 2000).

This is a very well researched and nicely written book on speech, manuscript, and print practices in this time period. Fox argues that during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries all three media

ìinfused and interacted with each other in a myriad ways. Then, as now, a song or a story, an expression or a piece of news, could migrate promiscuously between these three vehicles of transmission as it circulated around the country, throughout society and over time. There was no necessary antithesis between oral and literate forms of communication and preservation; the one did not have to destroy or undermine the other. If anything, the written word tended to augment the spoken, reinventing it and making it anew, propagating its contents, heightening its exposure, and ensuring its continued vitality, albeit sometimes in different formsî (5).

Others have made this observation before (most notably, for me, D. F. McKenzie in “Speech-Manuscript-Print,” an essay reprinted in a few places but perhaps easiest to find in the collection Making Meaning: “Printers of the Mind” and Other Essays (University of Massachusetts Press, 2002). However, Fox provides an amazing amount of detail: this is more a work of history than of theory.

The issues he raises inevitably encourage thought on how late twentieth-century new media might affect existing forms of communication. For example, there are frequent laments for the demise of the printed book in the age of the Internet, but I have never been persuaded that that such a demise is underway or that the Internet is responsible for it if it is. More interesting would be to consider the ways in which the Internet is changing, not replacing, our use of manuscript and print. Amazon.com, anyone? or 1000 Journals? This was, in part, what was at the root of my earlier post on “tracking and exchanging physical texts.”

(And now I find that Fox has co-edited The Spoken Word: Oral Culture in Britain, 1500-1850 (Manchester University Press, 2003). Looks like I’ll be using the interlibrary loan office, soon.)

I started playing chess with L a few weeks ago (I’d never played before). Tonight was my first victory. I won’t gloat, though.

(Yippee!)

Update: It has been brought to my attention that I failed to mention that L does not have a great deal of experience playing chess. I did not realize this and offer my humble apologies.

I’ve always worked hard to be able to get to know my students’ names relatively quickly during the semester. I think I may have finally hit upon a successful way of doing this within the first two weeks (short of taking postage-sized sticky photos of each student and practicing at home).

On the first day of class, I have students get into groups of four or five, pick a spokesperson, and introduce themselves to each other. They have to tell each other their names, their major, and one thing that they think is interesting about themselves or otherwise important for the class to know. Then it is the spokesperson’s job to introduce the members of the group to the whole class. This way, shy students aren’t forced to talk when they don’t feel comfortable doing so.

I’ve also been taking roll by having students sign in on a sheet I pass around each day. I finally realized they should write their interesting/important thing next to their names. For whatever reason, the combination of three items (face, name, thing) allows me to remember them more quickly than the combination of only two items (face, name). So as I sit here, for example, I can picture the student who is going to the Renaissance Fair in costume, but I can’t remember her name. A quick check of the latest sign-up sheet, however, fills me in.

Remarkably few of the students remember each other’s names or interesting details, however. I’m going to keep calling them on that, I think.