Actual
As opposed to other things one does or can do with text, its “actual reading” is defined here as the actualization of scriptive (hence phonetic) signals in the construction of its aesthetic as well as semantic force. The silent sounding of literary letters is the base-line of textual generation, thrown into relief by contrast with a parodic story by American novelist Bennett Sims about a film scholar’s willful and absurd lip reading of silent background players in Alfred Hitchcock’s film Vertigo. This satirized overreading of phonic shapes is then entered into the famous terms of debate between Paul de Man and Michael Riffaterre on what “really reading” means, to which, after their fraught example from Victor Hugo, further literary examples from Charles Dickens through Virginia Woolf to Adrienne Rich are recruited to help arbitrate.