The Sound Must Seem an Echo to the Sense”: Experiencing Oral and Silent Reading of Poetry

van Peer, W. and Chesnokova, Anna (2024) The Sound Must Seem an Echo to the Sense”: Experiencing Oral and Silent Reading of Poetry Колективна (три і більше авторів). Style and Sense(s). Palgrave Macmillan, France, Cham.

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Abstract

Poetry originates in social orality: music and voice are fundamental for the way it functions. Important are both the emotional ingredients in poetry as an experience (van Peer and Chesnokova, Experiencing Poetry: A Guidebook to Psychopoetics, London, Bloomsbury, 2022) and the oral and social nature of its delivery. Reading a poem means first and foremost experiencing it through our auditory senses, and in the distant past all literature was public, meant to be performed aloud, memorized and recited. The ancient Greeks listened to the Iliad while the singer accompanied himself on the lyre. It was only in the eighteenth century that the silent reading of literature became more common. Since then, most poetry has been confronted privately, with less involvement of the auditory sense. Nowadays, however, we are witnessing a return to the original oral and public nature of poetry, as seen in its widespread distribution over the internet and the massive participation, both live and online, in slam festivals. As evidenced by YouTube views, and social media in general, poetry is being widely consumed and savored, but no longer in the private way. However, we remain largely unaware of whether reading a poem silently or hearing it read aloud makes any difference in how we understand the text or in how it affects us emotionally. To investigate this question, this chapter will present the results of two experiments, in which respondents read the same poems (both traditional and modernist) aloud or in silence. We then probed their cognitive, aesthetic, emotional, social, musical and sensual reactions, using a Likert scale. The statistically significant differences between the groups highlight some differences between auditory and visual senses in encountering poetry.

Item Type: Monograph (Колективна (три і більше авторів))
Uncontrolled Keywords: Poetry reading; effects of reading; psychopoetics; empirical studies of literature; silent / oral reading
Subjects: Статті у базах даних > Scopus
Монографії > Видані за кордоном (в країнах ОЕСР та мовами ЄС або українською)
Divisions: Факультет романо-германської філології > Кафедра лінгвістики та перекладу
Depositing User: Анна Вадимовна Чеснокова
Date Deposited: 13 May 2024 11:53
Last Modified: 08 Nov 2024 09:45
URI: https://elibrary.kubg.edu.ua/id/eprint/48927

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