Special Interest Area Syllabus: Lit Out Loud
Lit Out Loud: Speaking and Hearing Literature from the Romantics to the Modernists
COURSE DESCRIPTIONHow do we engage with and interpret literature differently when we read the words out loud? Eighteenth-century acting and speaking coach Thomas Sheridan thought that oral delivery trained readers to sympathize with others’ emotions. Early twentieth-century schoolbook readers claimed that memorizing and reciting poetry imprinted wise and beautiful words on the mind and thus nourished the soul each day.
Reading texts—poetry, plays, fiction, or the Bible—aloud was a common practice in nineteenth-century schoolrooms, concert halls, pubs, parlors, and city squares. In this course, we will read nineteenth-century literature with our ears tuned in to the influences of these oral reading practices.
The course begins with a work not written in the nineteenth century, but still of utmost importance to nineteenth-century readers and reciters: William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The elocution movement of the eighteenth-century—which taught the “art of oral delivery”—used Shakespearean soliloquies from works like Hamlet to demonstrate their theories of emotive reading. We then move to the practice of poetic recitation, common in nineteenth-century literary circles and the Victorian schoolroom, reading poems and considering how they would have been recited at the time of their initial circulation. Fiction, too, was read aloud, and Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist will allow us to listen in to both Victorian domestic reading practices and Dickens’s famous public Readings. The fascination with the author’s voice, demonstrated by Dickens’s sellout public Reading performances, gained new traction with the advent of sound recording in the late 1870s. We listen to and consider some of the first recorded poets and poems, as well as discuss their fascination and discomfort with hearing their own voices. We close the semester by considering the rise of women’s elocution in the early twentieth century, considering how elocution challenged restrictions on women’s performance and movement, while also supporting classist, racist, and sexist understandings of the body and voice.
Throughout the course’s readings, assignments, and activities you will be asked to enthusiastically participate in voice, body, and mind in order to seriously (and also goofily!) experiment with and consider how reading aloud changes one’s relation to and interpretation of a text.
REQUIRED COURSE TEXTS:
Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. (Folger Shakespeare Library 2012 Edition)
Dickens, Charles. Oliver Twist. (Penguin Classics)
Shaw, George Bernard. Pygmalion (Penguin Classics)
Electronic copies of all other readings will be linked or distributed through our course website. You will be expected to print off and mark up all electronic copies or, if you really do prefer to read electronically, use a note-taking application.