The Book out of Bounds out of Book the Claus Schatz-Jakobsen, Peter Simonsen and Tom Pettitt and Tom Simonsen Peter Claus Schatz-Jakobsen
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
The Book Out of Bounds - Essays Presented to Lars Ole Sauerberg The Book Out of Bounds It is becoming increasingly likely that from the perspective of a not too distant future the period Essays Presented to Lars Ole Sauerberg from the late Renaissance to the beginning of the 21st century will be seen as dominated and even defined by the cultural significance of print – not least in the form of the mass-produced book which is virtually synonymous with Western culture. It accordingly seems appropriate to designate this period, roughly corresponding to the half-mil- lennium from 1500 to 2000, “the Gutenberg Pa- renthesis”. Lars Ole Sauerberg Edited by: Claus Schatz-Jakobsen, Peter Simonsen and Tom Pettitt The Book Out of Bounds Essays Presented to Lars Ole Sauerberg The Book Out of Bounds Essays Presented to Lars Ole Sauerberg Edited by: Claus Schatz-Jakobsen, Peter Simonsen and Tom Pettitt Institut for Kulturvidenskaber Syddansk Universitet Aktuel forskning. Litteratur, kultur og medier The Book Out of Bounds: Essays Presented to Lars Ole Sauerberg Marts 2015 Redaktion: Claus Schatz-Jakobsen, Peter Simonsen og Tom Pettitt (Kulturvidenskaber) Udgivet af Institut for Kulturvidenskaber Syddansk Universitet Campusvej 55 5230 Odense M © Forfatterne The Books Out of Bounds er et særnummer af tidsskriftet Aktuel forskning. Litteratur, kultur og medier Udgivelsen er fagfællebedømt Aktuel forskning ved Institut for Kulturvidenskaber Tryk: Print & Sign, Syddansk Universitet Sats og layout: Kurt Kjær Olesen Omslagslayout: Kurt Kjær Olesen Oplag: 200 ISSN:1903-5705 Table of Contents Preface 7 Carl Bache The narrative 'when' enigma 9 Susan Bassnett A Story of Losing and Finding 23 Benjamin Boysen How to Read a Book that is Really not a Book at All: On Reading James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake? 35 Marianne Børch Beyond or Below the Horizon? Sublime and Subliminal Challenges in Stewarding the Literary Canon 49 Søren Frank Melville’s Broad Present: Nostalgia, Presentiment, and Prophecy in Moby-Dick 67 Jan Nordby Gretlund Madison Smartt Bell and his Devil’s Dream 87 Clara Juncker The Intermedial King: Screen Adaptations of Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men 93 Svend Erik Larsen Unpredictable Networking, or When Hobart and Reykjavik Became Neighboring Cities 103 Charles Lock Enter the Title: Books, Catalogues and Title Pages 113 Anne-Marie Mai What Was Hidden in the Publisher’s Archive: Tracing Literary Histories Beyond the Boundaries of the Book 127 Sten Pultz Moslund The Text and its Sensuous Geographies: An Analysis of Imperial I/eyes and Revolting Bodies in J. M. Coetzee’s Dusklands 137 Nina Nørgaard Notes on the Semiotics of Paper in the Novel 149 Tom Pettitt The Parenthetical Turn in Journalism Studies: The Role of the News Ballads 161 Claus Schatz-Jakobsen You Can’t Burn Books! 171 Inge-Birgitte Siegumfeldt The Bind of the Book 179 Peter Simonsen Wordsworth’s Bibliographic Imagination: Inspiring Books 185 Christen Kold Thomsen Music as Remembrance in Poetry 197 Select Bibliography of Papers and Publications by Lars Ole Sauerberg 213 List of Contributors 217 The Book Out of Bounds __________________________________________________________________________ Preface The Book Out of Bounds presents 17 commissioned essays written and assembled to honour Professor of Literature at the University of Southern Denmark, Lars Ole Sauerberg, who incidentally turns 65 upon publication in March 2015. Contributors were encouraged to perceive their essays as in some way celebrating Lars Ole’s decisive role in the development of the ‘Gutenberg Parenthesis’ concept and in the exploration of its literary and cultural perspectives, by thematising any aspect of book or print culture, including, naturally, its ‘dehors’: the book as material object, the book as cultural icon, Great Books Culture, the book as contested (and occasionally conflagrated) medium, print vs oral and digital media/culture, etc. To remind readers of his own fair share of books, we include a select list of Lars Ole’s publications at the end of this one. The editors are honoured to be the colleagues of a distinguished academic who incorrigibly persists in expressing his love for books not only by reviewing them, critically analysing them, and historically surveying them, but also by writing them himself. And while it has only one dedicatee, having already read it several times we are confident that this particular book will be appreciated by more than one reader. Claus Schatz-Jakobsen Peter Simonsen Tom Pettitt 7 The Book Out of Bounds __________________________________________________________________________ The narrative 'when' enigma Carl Bache When discussing the 'Gutenberg Parenthesis' and the impact of printing on culture, it is only natural for a grammarian like myself to ponder how language has been affected by the genre development, refinement and proliferation ensuing from the printing revolution. The distinction between speaking and writing immediately springs to mind as relevant, although writing clearly eludes the parenthetical bounds of printing. But with his invention Gutenberg boosted writing very effectively: he paved the way for almost unrestricted facilitation and distribution, thereby creating a vast new platform for linguistic creativity to unfold independently of its immediate reception, and at the same time enriching the empirical basis for linguistics (not to mention the basis for intense 'on-record' interscholarly communication!). Many linguists have therefore been concerned with the characteristic features of spoken and written language, and the effect of either on the other. Spoken language is often considered more 'natural', 'basic' and 'genuine' and therefore granted priority in linguistic descriptions (especially following Saussure), but it is also more prone to exhibit 'grammatically irrelevant' performance features resulting from memory limitations, distractions, shifts of attention, etc. (see e.g. Chomsky 1965: 3ff). Nevertheless a full account of language usage must draw on insight from studies of both spoken and written language, and it must take note of the many significant differences (cf. e.g. Halliday 1985). As a first step, it is necessary to refine the distinction: one must separate 'medium' from 'channel of communication' (Lyons 1981: 18). A letter (written medium) can be read aloud (spoken channel of communication), and a conversation (spoken medium) can be transcribed (written channel of communication). Dialogue in a novel simulates the spoken medium in a written channel. So, more specifically, a top priority in linguistic discussions of speech versus writing is to consider medium (of course in conjunction with its natural channel) rather than simply channel (unless of course one is concerned with e.g. speech disorders or orthography). While much research has shown that writing is not just the representation of the spoken medium in a new channel of communication but rather a medium in its own right, this paper points to a case of the two media sharing a particular phenomenon but with writing (especially writing in printed form) reinforcing and perhaps even extending and generalizing its manifestation. But let me first whet your appetite with an illustration of this point from a different area of English grammar. It has been shown that the use of tense forms in English narratives (whether in the spoken or the written medium) differs significantly from their use in non-narrative contexts. Take a spoken (medium) example like: 9 Essays Presented to Lars Ole Sauerberg __________________________________________________________________________ (1) 'The other day this tall heavy bloke with tattoos all over suddenly comes up to me and says: "Do I know you?" It was really spooky.' Here comes and says are present tense forms expressing events in the past relative to the speaker's moment of communication (which is made clear by the adverbial The other day and the subsequent comment It was really spooky). Present tense is here chosen to convey narrative intensity – a well-known stylistic phenomenon. A less dramatic alternative would have been the past tense forms came and said – a choice in concord with the time of the events expressed but stylistically more neutral. What probably originated as an effectful use of the present tense for a past event in oral narratives ('the historic present'), has not only been adopted in the written medium as a marker of intensity in the narrator's building up of a storyline mainly in the past tense but has become a conventional tense option for the whole storyline, with entire novels being written primarily in the present tense with no implication of deictic present time (i.e. present time relative to the moment of communication) nor with any particular stylistic effect after the first few sentences (for extensive discussion of the use of tense forms in English narrative and non-narrative contexts, see Bache 1986, 2008: 175-194). Let us turn now to the phenomenon I intend to examine more closely in this paper: 'narrative when clauses'. Consider the following example: (2) I was walking down Glebe Street after dark, when a big Mercedes suddenly pulled up behind me with its headlights turned off. In this sentence the italicized clause initiated by when is a narrative when clause, and this particular occurrence of when is an instance of the narrative use of when. To get a sense of this special construction, it is useful to look first at the much more frequent use of when clauses (henceforth: w-clauses) as temporal adverbials: (3) I entered the building when I received the signal. In this sentence the w-clause offers a temporal specification of the event referred to by the main clause I entered the building. It does so by relating it to another event in the context ('me receiving the signal'). In the traditional (still widely accepted) analysis, the w-clause is a subordinate clause serving as a time adverbial in the sentence as a whole. Within the subordinate clause when is analysed as a subordinating conjunction. The superordinate main clause conveys the main message (what the speaker asserts) in conjunction with the subordinate clause (which conveys presupposed supplementary information).