This dissertation, "Reading Aloud and Charles Dickens's Style" by Lai-ming, Tammy, Ho, 何麗明, was obtained from The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong) and is being sold pursuant to Creative Commons: Attribution 3.0 Hong Kong License. The content of this dissertation has not been altered in any way. We have altered the formatting in order to facilitate the ease of printing and reading of the dissertation. All rights not granted by the above license are retained by the author.
Abstract:
Abstract of thesis entitled
Reading Aloud and Charles Dickens's Style
Submitted by Tammy HO Lai Ming
for the degree of Master of Philosophy at the University of Hong Kong in August 2005
This thesis explores how Dickens's writing style was influenced by the Victorian practice of reading aloud, a significant activity of the period which Dickens himself indulged in both privately and publicly. Dickens knew his writings would be read aloud, and my claim is that as a result he gave his characters' speech and his prose narrative a notably oral-, aural- and performance-oriented style. In some places across the novels, his writings both presuppose and encourage an oral recitation.
To assist readers to reproduce the unique voices of many of his characters, Dickens employed explicit markers such as phonetic spelling, narrative comments and punctuation. These markers encourage the one reading aloud to create a vivid oral performance for an audience, and are obvious signs that the speech should be dramatically 'performed'.
Some of Dickens's own prose narrative passages are also specially designed for oral performance. I describe this as an aural prose style, a style meant to be heard: especially relevant in the analysis of this style are iconic features, 'devices which depend on some Abstract perceptible resemblance between the physical properties of language and external reality' (Attridge, 1982:287). Formal linguistic features such as sound patterning, onomatopoeia, repetition (lexical and syntactic) and sentence length help create iconicity in Dickens's prose. I argue that the aural elements in the prose are designed to boost narrative power by building up rhetorical impact, heightening an audience's emotional responses, and highlighting key narrative incidents.
This kind of performance-oriented style is especially prominent in certain thematic contexts. For example, sounds are an important part of Dickens's narratives, and he highlighted them using auditory signals such as contrastive phonetic textures, words which imitate sounds (in particular onomatopoeias), rhythmic patterns and lexical repetition. Another thematic topic lending itself to performative representation was the experience of repetition. Dickens was particularly interested in using iconicity to transmit the physical and psychological turmoil of characters to a listening audience. The iconicity of passages can also help us to plausibly reconstruct the way a reader might perform the texts aloud. Finally, by examining Dickens's representation of clock sounds and monotonous urban landscapes, this thesis investigates Dickens's attempts to represent modes of time and space in forms of language, and specifically to represent them in a way that gives them significance through their emotional or expressive power.
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DOI: 10.5353/th_b3551238
Subjects:
Oral reading
