Joanna Maciulewicz
WA scholarly lecture
18.01.2013
Midwives of the Muses and Merchants in the Temple:
The debate on the commodification of literature in eighteenth-century writings
Recent discussions about the inefficiency of copyright laws to regulate intellectual property in the age of digital technology arouse an interest in the times when literature was first introduced on the market and when the laws were introduced to regulate its circulation in the capitalist conditions. The marketization of literary creation is customarily described as its liberation from the tutelage of the powerful and wealthy, “from its aesthetic and ethical demands”, as Bourdieu puts it. Earlier literature was composed in the sheltered conditions of aristocratic patronage and manuscript culture but, idyllic as it may seem, the relationship of financial dependence between authors and their patrons is frequently viewed as disadvantageous. The unraveling of patronage system, the popularization of print, which reified literary texts and made them commodifiable, and a growing group of readers in the increasingly literate society created conditions for writers to live by the pen, without depending on the favours of their powerful patrons. The marketization of literature’s creation and circulation is thus seen as its autonomization. A.S. Collins (1927: 211) argues, and contemporary critics echo, that “[i]t was better that writers should serve the public than depend on patrons. Literature was in a healthy condition, and the free connexion between author and public was the best one”. However, judging by literature of the eighteenth century, not all the writers of the period experienced the new situation as an emancipation and liberation. Texts like The Dunciad, Tale of the Tub, or Joseph Andrews describe the marketization of literature in apocalyptic terms, as a world upside down where authors are ruthlessly exploited to churn out texts satisfying the unrefined tastes of the new reading public and where the pursuit of disinterested goals of literature becomes a quixotic occupation. On the other hand, biographical writings describing lives of professional writers, most notably that of Samuel Johnson, and of booksellers, were striving to bring the conflicting logical systems into reconciliation. The aim of the presentation is to analyse the representation of the debate which the transformation of the field of literary creation provoked and to show how the frictions between two conflicting ideologies, one governed by the logic of disinterestedness and the other driven by profit, were gradually smoothed over so that we can now view the commodification of literature as a favorable development.
Anna Jelec,
Dorota Jaworska
The cognitive role of gesture in blind and seeing impaired children and young adults.
Gestures are primarily understood as communicative hand movements, so it is reasonable to assume that they are learned and used on a visual basis. But their function is not limited to communication. We gesture in situations where the interlocutor cannot see our movements: in telephone conversations (Cohen and Harrison 1973; Cohen 1977), when obscured from our interlocutor's view (Alibali et al. 2001) or during simultaneous interpreting (Mol et al. 2009). We use gesture in conversations with an interlocutor whom we know to be blind. It seems that gestures not only help us communicate, they also help us think. A phenomenon called the speech-gesture mismatch can tell a teacher if the student understands a problem even if they cannot explain it in words (Alibali et al. 1993). Clearly, there is more to gesture than meets the eye. But is it possible to distinguish between gestures performed as a social cue, learned through observation and imitation, and gestures that are genuinely spontaneous and used solely for the benefit of the speaker? The present study sought to address the issue by comparing spontaneous conversational gestures of seeing and congenitally blind participants on the premise that in the latter case a vast majority of gestures is naturally produced rather than socially conditioned.
We asked 12 congenitally blind and severely visually-impaired children (7-11 years old) and young adults (19-16 years old), as well as a control group of 7 seeing young adults (16-18 years old) to participate in the study. The participants were instructed to act as teachers to a specially designed computer programme, explaining a set of abstract and concrete concepts in speech and gesture in two types of tasks: dialogue and monologue. Two cameras were used to record the performance, which was then analysed in terms of number and type of gesture used.
We predicted that if blind speakers did not gesture as much as their visually impaired peers it would suggest that gesture is to some extent acquired through visual instruction. However, we also hypothesized that despite the absence of visual gestural stimuli during the language-learning process gesture will be present in the language of the blind participants, with marked differences in gesture form, types and functions. Preliminary analysis shows different gesture patterns in all three groups, in both number of gestures per concept, and types of gesture used. We have also identified a number of examples of unusual use of gesture space by blind and seeing-impaired children.
References:
Alibali, Martha Wagner, Susan Goldin-Meadow and others. 1993. ‘Gesture-speech mismatch and mechanisms of learning: What the hands reveal about a child’s state of mind’ , Cognitive psychology 25: 468–468.
Alibali, Martha Wagner, Dana C. Heath and Heather J. Myers. 2001. ‘Effects of Visibility between Speaker and Listener on Gesture Production: Some Gestures Are Meant to Be Seen’ , Journal of Memory and Language 44, 2: 169–188. (date of access: 13 Jan. 2013).
Cohen, Akiba A. 1977. ‘The Communicative Functions of Hand I1lustrators’ , Journal of Communication 27, 4: 54–63. (date of access: 13 Jan. 2013).
Cohen, Akiba A. and Randall P. Harrison. 1973. ‘Intentionality in the use of hand illustrators in face-to-face communication situations’ , Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 28, 2: 276–279.
Iverson, Jana M. and Susan Goldin-Meadow. 1997. ‘What’s communication got to do with it? Gesture in children blind from birth.’ , Developmental Psychology 33, 3: 453. (date of access: 9 Jan. 2013).
Mol, L., E. Krahmer, A. Maes and M. Swerts. 2009. ‘The communicative import of gestures: Evidence from a comparative analysis of humanhuman and humanmachine interactions’ , Gesture 9, 1: 97–126. (date of access: 13 Jan. 2013).
