Toward Interpretive Pluralism: Literary History and the History of Reading

Introduction

As a discipline, literary history is about four centuries old. There is not much literary history in antiquity or the Middle Ages. Literary history begins to be written seriously in the early modern period. The writing of this kind of history coincides with the appearance of national identity, that is, the sense of identity associated with the nation-state. Literary history is one form of expression of national identity. Efforts have been made from time to time to introduce an international perspective into literary history, but most projects in the field are still conceived within a nationalist framework.

The study of reading is considerably older than the writing of literary history and is not grounded in any single period, doctrine, or ideological position. The chronology of the subject can be divided conveniently into five phases, dealing respectively with oral traditions, alphabetic literacy, rolls and manuscripts, printing, and computers (including advanced telephones). Its history can be written from a variety of perspectives, for example, those that deal with reading materials, reading practices, and theories of interpretation.

The most significant change in reading materials before the age of printing took place in late antiquity, when the ancient roll was replaced by the codex, the forerunner of the modern book.¹ The chief innovation in practices was the adoption of silent reading, which was known in antiquity and became the norm at the end of the Middle Ages.² By contrast, theories of interpretation are numerous and emerged in stages over a lengthy period of time. The first examples deal with reading as a mode of verbal communication; from the early modern period, they are concerned, as nowadays, with both oral and written texts.

In antiquity, reading was largely oral/aural. Reading was not conceived as an autonomous subject, but was interdependent with other verbal disciplines, that is, phonology, grammar, and rhetoric. It was Plato and Aristotle who first thought about reading as a problem between oral and written communication. The topic is taken up occasionally in the Platonic dialogues³ and addressed formally in the opening paragraph of Aristotle’s De Interpretatione, where it is noted that “spoken words are the symbols of mental experience and written words are the symbols of spoken words. Just as all men have not the same writing, so all men have not the same speech sounds, but the mental experience, which these directly symbolize, is the same for all, as also are those things of which our experiences are the images.”⁴ In the late Hellenistic period, Seneca, Quintilian, and Plutarch had interesting things to say about oral reading as an aid to education and moral development.⁵ A synthesis of pagan, Jewish, and Christian views on reading and interpretation was elaborated in books 2 and 3 of Augustine of Hippo’s De Doctrina Christiana, begun in 396 CE, to which was appended an influential theory of verbal and written signs.⁶

Down to Montaigne, who died in 1592, theories about reading were indebted to both ancient and medieval thinkers, among the latter Hugh of St. Victor, Bonaventure, Dante, and Petrarch.⁷ Significant changes in reading techniques took place during these centuries. Under the influence of St. Benedict and Gregory the Great, monastic communities evolved a style of meditative reading that emphasized silence, solitude, interiority, emotion, and the use of visual images. In the Carolingian period Latin education was revived, a distinctive script emerged, and word separation related to silent reading appeared in insular manuscripts.⁸ By the twelfth century, textual traditions were widespread in northwestern Europe, at least among the elites of society, resulting in an international framework for the types of interpretation that were utilized with legal, philosophical, and theological writings.⁹ During the final phase of expansion of Latin literacy, which took place amidst the rise of vernacular languages, there was an interest in documentary accuracy, in indices, dictionaries, and other reference tools, and in the rehabilitation of classical rhetorical discourse.

The Middle Ages can thus be said to have created the foundations of modern textual authority, whose range was extended during the Renaissance [End Page...