Dickens and the stenographic mind / Hugo Bowles.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Bowles, Hugo, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Dickens, Charles, 1812-1870.

Dickens, Charles.

Shorthand.

Physical Description:

xvi, 193 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2019.

Summary:

"Initially described by Dickens as a 'savage stenographic mystery', shorthand was to become an essential and influential part of his toolkit as a writer. In this ground-breaking interdisciplinary study, Hugo Bowles tells the story of Dickens's stenographic journey from his early encounters with the 'despotic' shorthand symbols of Gurney's Brachygraphy in 1828 to his lifelong commitment to shorthand for reporting, letter writing, copying, and note-taking. Drawing on empirical evidence from Dickens's shorthand notebooks, Dickens and the Stenographic Mind forensically explores Dickens's unique ability to write in two graphic codes, offering an original critique of the impact of shorthand on Dickens's mental processing of language. The author uses insights from morphology, phonetics, and the psychology of reading to show how Dickens's biscriptal habits created a unique stenographic mindset that was then translated into novel forms of creative writing. The volume argues that these new scriptal arrangements, which include phonetic speech, stenographic patterns of letters in individual words, phonaesthemes, and literary representations of shorthand-related acts of reading and writing, created reading puzzles that bound Dickens and his readers together in a new form of stenographic literacy. Clearly written and cogently argued, Dickens and the Stenographic Mind not only opens up new evidence from a little known area of Dickens's professional life to expert scrutiny, but is highly relevant to a number of important debates in Victorian studies including orality and literacy in the nineteenth century, the role of voice and voicing in Dickens's writing process, his relationship with his readers, and his various writing personae as law reporter, sketch-writer, journalist, and novelist."-- Dust jacket.

Contents:

1 Gurney and Sons p. 6

1.1 Shorthand system design p. 7

1.2 Economy in speech and writing p. 11

1.3 Dickens's shorthand manuscripts p. 15

1.4 Summary-the decline of Gurney p. 19

2 The devil's handwriting p. 21

2.1 Symbols for letters and words p. 22

2.2 Recognizing and memorizing the symbols p. 28

2.3 Learning abbreviation and vowel reduction p. 30

2.4 Decoding speech-mental representation p. 37

2.5 Writing the shapes p. 38

2.6 Dickens's stenographic creativity p. 40

2.7 Summary-the devil's last trick p. 46

3 Despotic reading p. 48

3.1 Reprogramming p. 49

3.2 Visualizing character shapes p. 51

3.3 Sounding out vowels p. 53

3.4 Inferencing meaning p. 54

3.5 Dickens's childhood reading p. 56

3.6 Summary-the new literacy p. 63

4 The stenographic mind p. 65

4.1 Gurneyesque word games p. 65

4.2 Stenographic thinking and phonotactics p. 71

4.3 Visualization and the stenographic prism p. 77

4.4 Vocalization and the writing process p. 80

4.5 Summary-gaming the system p. 82

5 Reporting p. 83

5.1 Reporting communities-Doctors Commons and the Gallery of Parliament p. 83

5.2 Reporting speech-a full and faithful report p. 89

5.3 Dickens's accuracy as a reporter p. 90

5.4 Reporting voices p. 95

5.5 Summary-the importance of voicing p. 101

6 PKWK p. 103

6.1 Writing dialect p. 104

6.2 Non-standard spelling as speech representation in Pickwick p. 108

6.3 Allegro speech and eye dialect p. 110

6.4 Semi-phonetic spelling p. 114

6.5 Changing vowels, diphthongs, and triphthongs p. 120

6.6 Summary-the influence of Gurney reading and writing rules p. 122

7 Plays of the pen p. 125

7.1 Letter combinations p. 126

7.2 Reported speech in Doctors Commons p. 130

7.3 Stenographic speech p. 131

7.4 Reading and writing puzzles p. 135

7.5 Pedagogy of reading and writing p. 141

7.6 Stenographic commentary, narrative, and plot p. 146

7.7 The stenographic self p. 150

7.8 Summary-the poetics of conversation p. 151

8 Stenographic literacy p. 152

8.1 Foreignization and domestication p. 154

8.2 Puzzle, play, and pleasure p. 155

8.3 Pedagogy, learnability, and control p. 158

8.4 Literacy lessons p. 162.

ISBN:

0198829078

9780198829072

OCLC:

1040615678