Siegener Periodicum Zur Internationalen Empirischen______Literaturwissenschaft Herausgegeben Von Reinhold Viehoff (Halle/Saale) Gebhard Rusch (Siegen) Rien T
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Siegener Periodicum zur Internationalen Empirischen______ Literaturwissenschaft Herausgegeben von Reinhold Viehoff (Halle/Saale) Gebhard Rusch (Siegen) Rien T. Segers (Groningen) Jg. 19 (2000), Heft 1 Peter Lang Europäischer Verlag der Wissenschaften SPIEL Siegener Periodicum zur Internationalen Empirischen Literaturwissenschaft SPIEL: Siegener Periodicum zur Internationalen Empirischen Literaturwissenschaft Jg. 19 (2000), Heft 1 Peter Lang Frankfurt am Main • Berlin • Bern • Bruxelles • New York • Oxford • Wien Die Deutsche Bibliothek - CIP-Einheitsaufnahme Siegener Periodicum zur internationalen empirischen Literatur wissenschaft (SPIEL) Frankfurt am Main ; Berlin ; Bern ; New York ; Paris ; Wien : Lang ISSN 2199-80780722-7833 Erscheint jährl. zweimal JG. 1, H. 1 (1982) - [Erscheint: Oktober 1982] NE: SPIEL ISSNISSN 2199-80780722-7833 © Peter Lang GmbH Europäischer Verlag der Wissenschaften Frankfurt am Main 2001 Alle Rechte Vorbehalten. Das Werk einschließlich aller seiner Teile ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung außerhalb der engen Grenzen des Urheberrechtsgesetzes ist ohne Zustimmung des Verlages unzulässig und strafbar. Das gilt insbesondere für Vervielfältigungen, Übersetzungen, Mikroverfilmungen und die Einspeicherung und Verarbeitung in elektronischen Systemen. Siegener Periodicum zur Internationalen Empirischen Literaturwissenschaft SPECIAL ISSUE / SONDERHEFT SPIEL 19 (2000), H. 1 Historical Readers and Historical Reading Historische Leser und historisches Lesen ed. by / hrsg. von Margaret Beetham (Manchester) & Sophie Levie (Utrecht) Siegener Periodicum zur Internationalen Empirischen Literaturwissenschaft Contents / Inhalt SPIEL 19 (2000), H. 1 Margaret Beetham (Manchester) and Sophie Levie (Utrecht) Introduction 1 Frédéric Barbier (Paris) History, the Historian and Reading 4 Stephen Colciough (London) Recording the Revolution: Reading Experience and the History of the Book 36 Berry Dongeimans (Leiden) and Boudien de Vries (Leiden) Reading, Class and Gender: the Sources for Research on Nineteenth Century Readers in the Netherlands 56 Margaret Beetham (Manchester) In Search of the Historical Reader; the Woman Reader, the Magazine and the Correspondence Column 89 Titia Ram (Utrecht) The Gentleman's Magazine; or Speakers’ Corner 105 Marita Keiison-Lauritz (Amsterdam) Towards a History of Gay Reading: A Study of Two Early Twentieth Century Periodicals 126 Laurel Brake (London) Gender and the Historical Reader: The Artist and Cleveland Street 141 Lledeke Plate (Utrecht) Women Readers Write Back: Rewriting and/as Reception 155 10.3726/80987_4 SPIEL 19 (2000), H. 1, 4-35 Fréderic Barbier (Chaton) History, The Historian and Reading Dieser Beitrag plädiert dafür, die Realität des Lesens durch die Jahrhunderte hindurch als Gegen stand historischer Forschung zu betrachten. Er zeigt, wie die Buchgeschichte und neuere Ansätze in der Forschung des Lesepublikums Möglichkeiten für die historische Forschung eröffnen. Dabei werden mehrere Aspekte in der Praxis des Lesens und ihrer Erforschung unterschieden. Erörtert werden das Buch als materielles Objekt, Probleme der Interpretation literarischer und kunsthistori scher Quellen vom Klassischen Altertum bis heute, welche über das Buch und seine Nutzer infor mieren, wirtschaftliche und materielle Aspekte, und der soziale Status des Textes und seiner Leser. “Moreover, knowledge is not only acquired by hearing, it is also acquired and en hanced by studying, by reading and by carefully thinking about and reflecting upon what one has read and studied. Books were not given to men for vanity or folly, but out of pure necessity ...” (Guillaume Fillastre, La thoison d'or). The word “writing” refers in the first instance to a physical object - whether manuscript, printed work, book, newspaper, periodical or ephemera - but this object works across the realms of technology, economics and finance (Petit 1997). In as far as it is a commodity, writing may be analysed using the traditional categories of the consumer economy. How ever, it is also a symbolic object on which may be constructed the identity of a culture, a group, or even a nation and it is an object whose form and content are integral to intellec tual history, a history which simultaneously shapes writing and is shaped by it. These dif ferent perspectives are partly why the task of analysing writing is so complex and am bivalent. The rich diversity of possible approaches explains the fascination of the subject for the historian and the despair which it produces because of the apparent impossibility of reaching any conclusion. In addition, books and those who utilise them are constantly changing as new ways of using (or failing to use) the book develop1. Books may be described as “dead” until brought to life in one way or another by those who use them. Print informs the reader in ways which depend upon context, content and form, as well as the particular way in which the reader may make use of it. The uses to which books may be put are not con fined to reading proper and these other uses, for example in magic, each demonstrate a particular way of making sense of oneself and the world. The term reading here will be used to mean the protocols and semiotic practices through which particular readers take what a text offers them and make it their own. Reading involves not only the whole collection of material signs through which the text exist, but 1 The word book here is a convenient short-hand which should not obscure the variety of its many forms. History, The Historian and Reading 5 also the medium itself (whether book or periodical but also the style of writing and so on), the different strategies of comprehension which the reader deploys,2 and the physical circumstances in which reading takes place. For example, the narrator of Proust’s A la Recherche du Temps Perdue, immersed in the reading of a railway timetable, discovered something quite different from what was actually printed. When planning to leave for Florence and Venice, [he says]: “Although my elation was motivated by a desire for aesthetic pleasure, guide books sustained it more than art books and railway timetables even more than guide books” (Proust 1973,1, 391). When agreement was reached on the Balbek journey, so long dreamed of but never un dertaken; 44We would just leave Paris by the 1:22 train which I had so often looked for and found in the timetable and where each time it gave me a feeling close to the happy sensation of departure, so that I could not but imagine that I knew i t ..... ” (Proust 1973, II, 647). As this makes clear, there are few concepts which the historian finds so difficult to ana lyse and so multifaceted as that of reading. Perhaps for the writer there is no “universal reader” who exists beyond “the obscurity of things..... the cloudy ambiguous properties of the words in which it is wrapped”, if so, does reading exist for the historian? (Sartre n.d., 25). Hidden Reading and Rediscovered Reading Approaches to the History of the Book and of Reading.3 The history of writing, of the book and especially of the printed word was, traditionally, first led only by a minority: intellectuals, scholars and the nobility would first be inter ested in rare books, and the collections they built up were study collections or biblio- philia. As a result, the history of the book practically starts with the undertaking of inventories - the production of such and such a period (the incunabula ...), of such and such a famous workshop (the Aides ...), etc. Then, subsequently, and progressively from the 1750s, the status and the role of the printed work shifted profoundly in western society: the democracies being founded, notably in the United States and France, saw in the access to the written word the necessary condition of their stability: “We did not want a single man in the empire to be able to say henceforth, the law guarantees me equal rights but I am denied the means to know them. I must depend only on the law but my ignorance makes me dependent on those around me ... Thus education must be universal, that is it must be available to all citizens ...” (Condor- cet 1792). 2 Four main determinants: peoples' reading abilities, their education, their personal histories, their horizons of expectation on reading the text. 3 A general introduction is provided by Barbier& Bertho Lavenir 1996. 6 Frédéric Barbier In most other politico-cultural geographies, the problem posed is that of the construction of nationhood: the identity of the new Nation-States was based on favouring certain cate gories of writing and reading, first among which were the national language and litera ture. National “book trades” grew up, often following the German model, national librar ies were founded, retrospective or contemporary bibliographies were undertaken. The history of the book then became part of the new cultural model taking shape but reading was still not seen as a subject lending itself to a scientific approach other than in peda gogy (methods of teaching reading, the history of schools and education). With the “new history” of the book, developed notably by Lucien Febvre and Henri- Jean Martin, the history of reading and printing was reintegrated into a global history of society which shaped it but of which it was simultaneously a part. Books were primarily merchandise, and so researchers set about studying production and circulation figures, analysing the technical systems of which book production formed a part, establishing the economic logic behind