Stewart, Garrett. Reading Voices.
Stewart discusses the somatic and cerebral affect of silent reading, the reading of what Tennyson calls “silent-speaking words.” Or, Stewart argues, of “silence speaking,” as, in the imagined aurality of Tennyson’s coinage, the t fuses with the s to form the homophone ce. For Stewart is interested in phonemes that misbehave, phonemes that “will not stay put within the morphemes apparently assigned by the script” (5). His model of “phonemic reading”—which attends not to the presence of voice in text, but rather to the “presence to evocalization of any text when read” (3)—recuperates stylistics and the aural by responding to and incorporating concerns raised by deconstruction and post-structuralist linguistics. This reading takes as its primary concern what Stewart calls the “phonotext”: not the graphic marks of linguistic signification, but that “latent musculature of silent enunciation” (29) that, in its momentum, causes slippages, drifts, and elisions at the sites of lexical borders. Stewart takes Shakespeare as his proof case for this “transegmental drift” as he examines the different but ever-present phonemic ambiguities in Shakespeare’s sonnets and Hamlet, a prompt text for literal voicing. He then devotes a chapter to the “unique sort of rhyme” (66) made audible in these transegmental slippages, a rhyme that does not “toe the line ends” (67), but rather echoes in phonemic clusters that lurch backward (or, more rarely, forward) across the lexemes on the page. After contextualizing his method of phonemic reading in a dense genealogy of linguistics, Stewart turns to examples of what he calls “over(r-r)eading” (145)—when a sound overtakes another in a sequence, blurring words’ adjacent edges—in poetry and prose.
This book is a concerted example of a theoretically engaged model of reading. He productively opens up close reading to include consideration of what is heard between words. And even while Stewart defines his phonemic reading as a method concerned “not with reading orally but with aurally reading” (2), his attention to the slippages of silenced enunciation is also relevant in occasions of literal voicing. I, for one, am interested in considering occasions for such slippages in elocution practice, for example, the enunciation exercises and “oral gymnastics” prescribed by elocution manuals like Bell’s Standard Elocutionist.
