Reading Together: “Communitarian Reading” and Women Readers in Colonial Bengal

Hypatia ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 627-643 ◽  
Author(s):  
Swati Moitra
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Reading Aloud ◽  
Silent Reading ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
Women Readers ◽  
Reading Practices ◽  
Feminist Scholarship ◽  
Colonial Modernity ◽  
Woman Reader

In this article, I seek to consider this practice of “communitarian” reading—reading aloud, reading together—as a defining aspect of the cultures of reading among Bengali women in the nineteenth century. I wish to contest the privileging of “silent” reading as a “modern” mode of reading and the subsequent celebration of the protean incorporeality of the “silent” reader, in the works of prominent scholars of readership, arguing that the privileging of “silent” reading as the predominant “modern” mode of reading does not offer a sufficient framework for the study of reading practices of the “historical” “woman reader” in the age of colonial “modernity” in a terrain such as that of Bengal. The article thus engages with alternate frameworks of considering the practice of reading aloud, drawing upon diverse feminist scholarship on practices of reading to argue in favor of considering the practice of “communitarian” reading as a form of female sociality for Bengali women in the nineteenth century, at a time when public spaces remained largely inaccessible to women.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elena Lombardi
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
The State ◽  
Women Readers ◽  
History Of Reading ◽  
Documentary Evidence ◽  
Cultural Events ◽  
Visual Models ◽  
Woman Reader ◽  
History Of ◽  
Female Literacy

This chapter explores a more concrete and historicized figure of the woman reader. It explores the forces that make her appear and disappear, and surveys the state of knowledge on medieval female literacy, and the documentary evidence on women readers. It investigates typically female modes of reading (such as the educational, the devotional, and the courtly) and the visual models that were available to vernacular authors to forge their imagined textual interlocutor. It shows how the protagonist of this book is the product of two cultural events within the history of reading and the material culture of the book: the raise of literacy among the laity and women in the years under consideration, and a changed scenario insofar as theories and practices of reading are concerned.

Imagining the Woman Reader in the Age of Dante

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elena Lombardi
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Mother Tongue ◽  
The Other ◽  
Women Readers ◽  
Literary Authority ◽  
Woman Reader ◽  
History Of ◽  
Female Literacy ◽  
Female Audience ◽  
Shed Light

The literature of the Italian Due- and Trecento frequently calls into play the figure of a woman reader. From Guittone d’Arezzo’s piercing critic, the ‘villainous woman’, to the mysterious Lady who bids Guido Cavalcanti to write his grand philosophical song, to Dante’s female co-editors in the Vita Nova and his great characters of female readers, such as Francesca and Beatrice in the Comedy, all the way to Boccaccio’s overtly female audience, this particular sort of interlocutor appears to be central to the construct of textuality and the construction of literary authority in these times. The aim of this book is to shed light on this figure by contextualizing her within the history of female literacy, the material culture of the book, and the ways in which writers and poets of earlier traditions (in particular Occitan and French) imagined her. Its argument is that these figures of women readers are not mere veneers between a male author and a ‘real’ male readership, but that, although fictional, they bring several advantages to their vernacular authors, such as orality, the mother tongue, the recollection of the delights of early education, literality, freedom in interpretation, absence of teleology, the beauties of ornamentation and amplification, a reduced preoccupation with the fixity of the text, the pleasure of making mistakes, dialogue with the other, the extension of desire, original simplicity, and new and more flexible forms of authority.

Using Books

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abigail Williams
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
North American ◽  
Reading Aloud ◽  
Mineral Oil ◽  
Social Benefits ◽  
Practical Reasons ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
Access To Books ◽  
Oil Lamp

This chapter attempts to recover the history of how and why we read communally. While increasing literacy and access to books undoubtedly made solitary reading possible for some, there were many reasons why individuals continued to read together. Some of these had to do with control over what was being read, and how: the perceived social benefits of being together, of the book as the basis for communal entertainment, performance, and discussion. But there were also straightforwardly practical reasons—light and sight. Up until the advent of the Argand oil lamp, and cheap supplies of North American mineral oil in the early nineteenth century, domestic lighting was primitive, and prohibitively expensive. Another technical obstacle to easy reading was limited ophthalmology. Reading aloud gave those with failing vision access to books and letters, and many read with others' eyes.

Reading Macro and Micro Trends in Nineteenth-Century Theater History

2018 ◽  
pp. 82-102
Author(s):  
Blair Best ◽  
Madeleine G. Cella ◽  
Rati Choudhary ◽  
Kayla C. Coleman ◽  
Robert Davis ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Spatial Analysis ◽  
Network Visualization ◽  
Reading Practices ◽  
Theater History ◽  
Distant Reading ◽  
New York University ◽  
American Theatre ◽  
American Theater

This essay co-authored by Robert Davis and his students in a theater class at New York University describes the interdependence of close and distant reading practices in their creation and analysis of a representative corpus of nineteenth-century drama. With irregular scholarly and theatrical attention given to nineteenth-century American theatre, the archive of plays and productions is frustratingly fragmented with few playbooks and only limited accounts of their staging. This chapter demonstrates how students used corpus linguistic and spatial analysis tools like Voyant, Antconc, and Tagxedo to recover a neglected century of American theater. Students found that the use of digital tools to perform text analysis, mapping, and network visualization sparked new scholarly ideas about nineteenth-century theatre.

Literature in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century British Publishing and Reading Practices

1996 ◽  
Vol 61 (2) ◽  
pp. 170
Author(s):  
Margaret D. Stetz ◽  
John O. Jordan ◽  
Robert L. Patten
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Reading Practices

Improvisations on a Semicolonial Theme, or, How to Read a Celebration of Transnational Urban Community

2000 ◽  
Vol 59 (4) ◽  
pp. 889-926 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bryna Goodman
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
International Law ◽  
Urban Community ◽  
Colonial Modernity ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Foreign Presence ◽  
Over Time

Semicolonialism, as jürgen osterhammel noted, is a label that has been generally applied to China “without much regard for its potential theoretical implications” (Osterhammel 1986, 296). The partial character of semicolonialism—as incomplete colonialism—poses the question of what difference it made that throughout the modern period China never in fact became a subject nation, but retained sovereignty over nearly all of its territory and was recognized as a sovereign nation by international law. The writings of twentieth-century Chinese nationalists and a recent profusion of theorizing about colonialism and “colonial modernity” in China, by emphasizing colonialism (Barlow 1997), have perhaps obscured rather than clarified the answer to this question. Moreover, semicolonialism in China, as a gradual accretion of phenomena associated with imperialism, varied substantially over time. Its significance for understanding nineteenth-century China, when the foreign presence within China was still quite limited, remains unclear. Several decades of research on imperialism in Shanghai have produced much debate, but no clear mapping of“where, when, howand to whateffectdidwhichextraneous forces impinge” on Chinese life (Osterhammel 1986, 295).

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