dichiarazione di intenti

da un po'di tempo volevo decidermi ad aprire un blog, ma com'è noto ai meno (dato che sono un'abile venditrice di fumo) tendo ad essere una persona classificabile sotto l'insieme non fare oggi quello che potresti fare domani. in effetti, potrei ricominciare questo post così

ciao sono elisa, vi ricorderete di me per serie come "non fare oggi quello che potresti fare domani" o "venditrice di fumo, un mestiere che terrò in considerazione" (più in senso figurato che letterale, perchè rende più soldi, come i politici italiani ci insegnano). ho alla fine aperto un blog perchè uno dei miei corsi qui a ny richiede che io abbia un blog e che ci posti cose attinenti a quello di cui si discute a lezione, ovverosia la questione dell'alfabetizzazione (e, aggiungerei io, dei rischi di colonialismo culturale legato alla necessità di mantenere vivo il nostro allegro e soddisfacente sistema economico).

di conseguenza, il mio blog avrà per un po'di tempo dei post in inglese di cui probabilmente fregherà qualcosa solo ai compagni di corso, ma col tempo spero sarà in grado di ospitare anche post in italiano su argomenti non dico più triviali, ma trattati con più autoironia, altrimenti rischio di suicidarmi per la visione troppo negativa che ho del mondo ma, soprattutto, rischio di rendere altamente inutile quello che vedo leggo e ascolto perchè a nessuno ispira particolarmente leggere qualcosa di accademico, a me per prima. inoltre, cercherò di far sì che il blog diventi uno spazio di diffusione di idee di cui l'accademia si appropria e di cui secondo me deve essere disappropriata, che magari possono essere uno spunto per chi legge come lo sono state per me. per finire, spero che la mia pigrizia contemplativa mi consentirà qualche lampo di produttività facendomi caricare anche podcast video immagini e ya mama. la finalità di tutto ciò è liberare me stessa da quello che mi intasa il cervello, e impantanare la testa di qualcun altro. molti lo seguiranno il blog eh!

Workshop at the Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University

Medieval manuscripts from the IX century onwards are repositories of the evolutions in the evaluation and use of the written language in Europe. In the introduction to his study Space Beween Words, Paul Saenger reports that “[in] the West, the ability to read silently is a result of the historical evolution of word separation that [began] in the seventh century;”¹the manuscripts kept in the Rare Book & Manuscript Library of the Columbia University allow to follow how long it took to this separation to come along, and under what pressures it took place. Allowing to assess the progressive changes that lead to a different balance between oral and written culture, they suggest the evolution of a different conception of the notion of literacy, and a parallel evolution of controlling means to check the impact of a diffused literacy.

One of the most remarkable differences between ancient and contemporary texts is the way in which a written text used to be structured in Classical time and in the Middle Ages. Saenger reports that the adoption of vowels in Greek written alphabet provided “a complete set of signs for the unambiguous transcription of pronounced speech,” (Saenger 9) and that this exhaustive symbology allowed to record spoken acts as fluxes of letters whose discrete elements where not represented by spaces between words, punctuation, or any other textual clue, but only by the very presence of vowels; this scriptura continua was meant to be read out lout, and the performance relied on the reader's good knowledge of the text at hand. The logic that underlaid this seemingly impractical writing system uncovers what Saenger identifies as the concrete “advantage[s]” (Saenger 11) for the ancients, linked to rooted linguistic behaviors: the obviousness of a limited access to reading decoding abilities and the reliance on oral diffusion of contents; the existence of a limited number of contents that could be meaningful for the large public; an unchallenged elitist conception of culture. These elements were part of an approach to literacy that excluded the possibility of silent and individual reading, and the approach itself was strongly influenced by the media available to diffuse content: ancient texts were mostly recorded on fragile papyrus, either used in scrolls or codices, and papyrus did not prove practical enough to encourage or justify a different organization of writing and reading practices.

The manuscripts of the Middle Ages bear witness of a tension between these deep-seated habits and the changes that took place in the modes, instruments, and practices of literacy. Manuscripts form France, Italy, Germany, and England, ranging from the IX to the XV century were realized on leaves of parchment, treated animal skin that was more practical and easier to handle and organize than papyrus. Until XIII century, the realization of manuscripts was prerogative of the monasteries, where the scribes would copy religious texts as the Bible, theological and exegetical documents, Psalters and missals. Even though the writing continued to be strongly influenced by the traditional patterns of the scriptura continua, some clues for deciphering started to appear: one of the documents of the Columbia Library, an ancient codex form the late IX century, presents some red 'annotations' that seem to gloss the text in order to facilitate its reading; moreover, two scraps of a X century Bible show that grouping grammatical units was spreading as a practice of writing. Nonetheless, the extreme slowness of these changes reflected a still strongly limited access to the written text, that continued to be an instrument available only to the high spheres of society, interested in a controlled production and impartation of sense, meaning, and culture.

After the XIII century, manuscripts began to be produced also outside monasteries; some of the exemplars of the Library show that the new public was composed by wealthy people, in large part the nobility, and some representatives of the in-the-making merchant class. In this period the hornbooks, used to teach reading to children, began to appear, and also small personalized learning books, containing the alphabet and some well known prayers. From this time on, silent reading evidently gained more and more ground, and with it the writing strategies changed, word separation being progressively employed also outside Ireland, where the scribes had adopted it in the early Middle Ages (Manguel, Saenger). With the diffusion of literacy, many examples of individual note books can be found, and their content is telling in respect to which strata of society literacy reached: commonplace books or recipe books are two of the example that point at the merchant class as the new sector of society form whom literacy represented a tool and a weapon.

The document written under the command, but not by the hand of Philip Augustus in 1207, is telling of the ancient widespread conception of the writing tool as a subordinate instrument, and of the status of the people who could master this tool as mere laborers serving a cause on which they could not nor were supposed to participate. However, this trend began to change with the diffusion of schooling and of a more intimate perusal of the written text, that contributed to the development of written awareness among an increasing number of people. It would be interesting to assess how the notion of authenticity, that will be pivotal after the invention of printing, started to develop during these first stages of written awareness, and in which sense it influenced the value of literacy. I would also like to see how the issue of authenticity, linked to that of authorial rights, proved to be a powerful mean to restrain the revolutionary access to and diffusion of the written word once this was freed by extra-monasteries production, printing, and widespread literacy.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Manguel, Alberto. A History of Reading. New York: Viking, 1996.

Saenger, Paul. Spaces Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading. Standford: Standford University Press, 1997.

Discussion Forum: A History of Reading Chs. 1 & 2 by Alberto Manguel

I have a couple of thoughts to share in respect to Manguel’s “The Silent Reader,” and I’ll start by quoting him when he writes: “following the teachings of Aristotle, [Augustine] knew that letters, “invented so that we might be able to converse even with the absent”, were “signs of sounds” and these in turn were “signs of things we think.”(45) The idea of the written text as capable of conversing with its reader is quite a curious one for me; of course the text keeps alive and brings far words of its absent creator, but a text does not allow questioning and may frustrate any need of answer on the doubts its generates. So I have thought how much, back in the days of oral riding (talking about Europe), more than the necessity of questioning a text there was the necessity of performing it, at least to the general audience to whom this text would provide meanings, symbols, and a certain form of understanding.

Therefore, I’ve started thinking a little bit about performing a written text, and I’ve reflected on my very way of reading and understanding a text as a silent reader. I’ve noticed that sometimes while reading some complicate sentences not only do I read them out loud, but I accompany my reading with gestures that I would probably make while explaining what I am reading to a possible audience (I’m my audience, in that context. Not that I generally have any kind of audience, by the way) – these are gestures which generally go with oral expression, speech. I remember attending a linguistic class last year, and the professor gave us some hints in respect to gestures and speech, explaining that oral expression needs fewer words than written expression does, as it complements itself with gestures and interactions with the environment. These gestures are considered to serve as aids to the expression of thoughts, both abstract and concrete, and range from very individual to very codified ones. So, reading a sentence like “the reader had the duty to […] allow [words] to become […] verba, spoken words – spirit” (45) I’ve started wondering how much the performative act of reading out loud a text would imply a form of literacy: either from the public, in respect to codified gestures of the reader (which could help to get a certain commentary on the read material), or from the readers, who could maybe find in gestures a strategy to better remember how to read/perform a certain text written in scriptura continua. It would not come as a surprise that such an handy tool as gesture was used both for remembering ( = easily reading) and for connoting a text; it would not surprise neither that an audience could get more out of a reading if it (it? I mean the audience) could properly interpret the gestures and grimaces of the reader. If they didn’t gesture at all, this would not surprise me as well, because for instance my granddad didn’t use to gesture when he read me Collodi’s Pinocchio. But he did a lot of grimaces, changed voice, the text had spaces and capital letters, and he was holding me on his legs and the book in his arms so it would have been pretty complicated.