Hello all,
I've started this blog as a space to discuss common reading and formulate some of our goals for the conference at Rutgers on February 11.
Let me start by reminding you of the call for papers that I generated for the purpose of soliciting graduate student work:
Recent scholarship in media theory, digital culture, and the history of the material text has opened up new ways of thinking about intersections of pen, print, sound, and performance in the early modern period. The categories of “new” and “multi” media, in particular, gather special relevance in the multifarious literary and performative terrain of sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century Britain. This conference offers an opportunity for graduate students in disciplines including English, Music, History, and Performance Studies, to address the following questions:
How can scholarship on acoustic and performative multi-media in early modern Britain contribute to or intervene in methodologies associated with the history of the book? How can we theorize the categories of “book” and “text” in relation to the circulation and performance of sound? How can studies of the early modern acoustic world nuance the received wisdom about bibliographic and literary cultures and traditions? What media technologies and protocols were understood as new during this period, and how were they associated with literary, musical, or theatrical collectives? What does early modern aural performance tell us, or ask us to reconsider, about the hybridity of media from Gutenberg to Google?
I've discovered in email correspondence with some of you that it may help to elaborate on the "recent scholarship" that I had in mind, so let me try to do so here.
It's probably clear enough to us what the "history of the material text" entails; cf. the well-known "The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text" by Peter Stallybrass and Margreta de Grazia (Shakespeare Quarterly 44, no. 3, Autumn 1993) that helped to instigate what is generally called the history of the book. But recall also that the Penn Press "material text" series includes Gina Bloom's Voice in Motion: Staging Gender, Shaping Sound in Early Modern England (2007), which seeks to expand the category of the "material" so as to include sound.
It may be less clear what I mean by media theory and digital culture, but one place to start is the current issue of Shakespeare Quarterly, "Shakespeare and New Media," whose online, "open" peer review is available here. Katherine Rowe writes in her introduction that “The advent of electronic textuality presents us with an unparalleled opportunity to reformulate fundamental ideas about texts,” and I think Alan Galey's essay "Networks of Deep Impression" begins to take up that challenge.
Scholarship on new media and history includes but also goes beyond the role of online tools in scholarship (EEBO, ECCO), asking how (for example) theories of embodied virtuality or authorship in the blogosphere challenge our understanding of textuality and mediation in other periods. N. Katherine Hayles, Friedrich Kittler, and Mark Hansen have discussed such problems in contemporary culture (I've found Hayles's My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts clarifying). In terms of literary history, Lisa Gitelman's Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture serves (I think) as a good example of the ways in which the question of media "newness" can help to produce valuable insights into the interaction of technologies and what Gitelman calls "protocols" of mediation in the question of what counts (and does not count) as literature. Given our focus on acoustic media in particular, I would also recommend Francis Dyson's Sounding New Media: Immersion and Embodiment in the Arts and Culture (2009) as a recent and relevant book.
Above all, I want to draw attention to the work of those who will be involved in this conference, since we're lucky to have leading figures in early modern British sound and performance studies "in the flesh"! Relevant work includes (for example) Bruce Smith's The Acoustic World of Early Modern England: Attending to the O-factor (1999) and The Key of Green: Passion and Perception in Early Modern Culture (2009); Christopher Marsh's "The Sound of Print in Early Modern England: The Broadside Ballad as Song," in The Uses of Script and Print, 1300-1700 (2004); Juliet Fleming's Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England (2001); the collection Embodied Voices: Representing Female Vocality in Western Culture (1994) that Leslie Dunn edited, and which includes her essay "Ophelia's Songs in Hamlet: Music, Madness, and the Feminine"; Gary Tomlinson's Metaphysical Song: An Essay on Opera (1999); R. Malcolm Smut's "Art and the material culture of majesty in early Stuart England," in The Stuart Court and Europe: Essays in Politics and Political Culture, as well as his edition of the highly multi-media spectacle The Magnificent Entertainment for King James in the new Oxford Middleton; Alastair Bellany's "Singing Libel in Early Stuart England," in Huntington Library Quarterly 69, no. 1 (2006); Ann Bayne Coiro's "Anonymous Milton, or, A Maske Masked," in ELH 71, no. 3 (2004). And see "Five Pictures of Pathos," by Gary Tomlinson and "Hearing Green," by Bruce Smith, both in Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion (2004).
This collected work provides an excellent background for thinking about acoustic mediation and multi-mediation during the period. I was recently struck by a sentence in an essay (which I would recommend) by W. B. Worthen:
"Where once plays were seen as tangential and troublesome elements in the history of print, texts whose collaborative or communal character intrudes a sense of accidental and irregular inconsistency into the reiterative mode privileged as print’s proper history, it’s now the case that insofar as ‘playtexts . . . are designed to change as the conditions of performance change,’ they are exemplary of the condition of print in which (recalling the influence of theorists like D. F. McKenzie, Jerome McGann, Peter Shillingsburg and others), texts cannot be seen as ‘independent of [their] material embodiment,’ an embodiment which is at once the record of their individual and cultural fashioning, a semantically rich context of signification, the moment and mode of their irruption into history." (“Prefixing the Author: Print, Plays, and Performance,” in A Companion to Shakespeare and Performance, ed. Barbara Hodgdon and W. B. Worthen (Blackwell, 2005)).
Worthen is discussing the relationship between printed drama and performance in the English Renaissance, but it seems to me that his comment is astute and challenging in the broader context of hybrid textual, acoustic, gestural, visual (and so on) production throughout the early modern period. What counts as the "embodiment" and "irruption into history" of a broadside ballad, a courtly song, a Magnificent Entertainment, or other early modern forms that were much more than writing? How did such events, iterations and practices come to be described or understood as works or idealities?
My comments here undoubtedly reflect my own interests: perhaps others would care to respond with additional scholarly contexts or help shape the conversation in another way?
