Oral reading, print culture, and the German Enlightenment.

Publication: The Modern Language Review

Publication Date: 01-JUL-05

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The eighteenth century is often identified as the period when silent reading became the norm. In the German Enlightenment, however, reading aloud did not die out. Everyday domestic practices, including oral reading, reflected the Enlightenment intellectual programme. This view is supported by personal correspondence, reading manuals, textual features, and narrative themes.

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Das Vorlesen gibt dem Gedanken Personlichkeit. (C. G. Korner, 'Ideen uber die Deklamation') (1)

The period of the Enlightenment in the German-speaking world is commonly reckoned as running from approximately 1720 to some time shortly after 1800. The term 'Aufklarung' is not simply a retrospective nomenclature, but was used at the time as a way of designating principles formulated relative to education and human emancipation. Authors such as Kant, Lessing, Mendelssohn, and Wieland speak of 'Aufklarung' in a variety of contexts. This indicates that the notion of Enlightenment is not simply externally imposed by historians, but reflects the self-consciousness of the age. That individuals of that period, without a clear theoretical programme, should reflect and further promote this Zeitgeist is hardly remarkable. The evidence provided below suggests the extent to which the higher theoretical purposes are in evidence in people's daily lives, in salons, reading circles, and in common domestic practice. Furthermore, it is clear that this spirit of Enlightenment moves easily, fluidly, almost seamlessly, into the remoter aspects of cultivated social interaction: in gesture, drama, rhetoric, and manners. This article does not argue that those remoter expressions of enlightened consciousness are programmatic or based on some theoretical contemporary project, but that they confirm the extent to which the enlightened Zeitgeist found its way into the common round of sociability and domesticity.

For Immanuel Kant, the project of Enlightenment famously and necessarily involves both initiative on the part of the individual and support for such efforts in the public realm. Freedom to exercise individual reason and judgement can be granted and nurtured only in a state where such a condition does not constitute a threat. The mind of the individual must join forces with society to achieve Enlightenment's goal. (2) The Enlightenment makes a clear demand for universally valid principles to be generated from human reason and lays emphasis on guiding individual consciousness to subscribe to the general liberation from tradition. The principles laid down by Kant aim at establishing a social milieu in which these ideals will flourish. Thus the term Enlightenment defines a literary school and the type of philosophical reasoning which lent that school its impulses just as much as it designates, speaking more generally, a social-historical period. And yet, in spite of the rise of a more or less community-minded, democratic, and universal perspective during the Enlightenment period, there appears equally, in some quarters, to be a tendency towards private cultivation of the individual intellect, not in symbiotic relation to the needs of the many, but independent of any focus on the greater good. An example of these dual, perhaps complementary, inclinations, one focusing on the community, one on the individual, may be found in the reading habits of the period. The Enlightenment is often characterized as the period in which reading, the principal tool of enlightenment, first became an exclusively private matter, but there are many indications of reading as a persistent, regular social activity continuing throughout the period.

A revolution in reading habits certainly occurred during the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, largely as a result of improvements in printing techniques and methods of dissemination. Technical advances in text reproduction meant that works were more readily available, and, among both men and women, the habit of regular reading spread through all levels of society. A further factor that helped spread the love of reading was cultural: the improved communication granted by this social change led to a new level of self-consciousness; people became conscious of themselves as a body, the 'public'. (3) This altered relation to the printed word, in turn, created a private sphere into which the silent reader could retreat. But just as communal consciousness and private, individual consciousness support each other, so silent, private reading can easily coexist with communal, oral reading. (4)

H. C. G. Demme's lecture 'Uber die Kunst, gut zu lesen' (1792) opens by describing the universal zest for the printed word in rather disparaging terms, 'in einem Zeitalter, wo die Lesesucht sich uber alle Stande verbreitet hat', and refers on the next page to 'diese[s] leses uchtige[] Zeitalter'. (5) Writers were now no longer dependent on the support of a patron and could direct their work to accord with popular tastes, further stimulating the general enthusiasm for reading. Responding to market demand, publishers made larger numbers of copies available, especially of the more popular genres. In the wake of the introduction of compulsory schooling in the second half of the seventeenth century, the middle classes in particular took up reading with a vengeance, and in an organized way: in reading circles, clubs, and societies, their enthusiasm was fuelled by a proliferation of journals and weeklies which increased in number throughout the eighteenth century. (6) Reading propagates the Enlightenment ideal without necessarily following any developed, theoretical Enlightenment project.

Literacy now extended well beyond the scholar's study. Reading, supported and further promoted by the mutual interest of the book trade, was becoming an increasingly public pastime. Nevertheless, a commonly held view is that during the Enlightenment precisely these two factors--rapidly rising literacy rates and increasingly easy access to reading materials--together ushered in the age of the silent reader. (7) Consequently the assumption is widespread that the printed word largely put an end to traditional practices of oral reading during the age of Enlightenment. However, a substantial body of evidence does exist to call this view into question.

Curiously enough, the reading revolution, during which more people, from more varied social classes, were leaving behind the devotional works that had virtually constituted their sole reading matter and developing the habit of reading all sorts of material, does not in fact seem to have posed any sort of serious threat to the hallowed tradition of reading aloud. (8) And even though orality by its very nature leaves no discernible trace, there do exist sufficient printed sources to support the opposing view, namely, that reading aloud did not come to an end with the onset of the Enlightenment, but continued, both as a natural and as a consciously cultivated communicative form, throughout the eighteenth century and well into the nineteenth. The oral and the written do not suddenly take up opposing stances; instead, they achieve a relationship of interdependence, strengthened both by the Enlightenment's promotion of rational discourse and public opinion, and by the improved availability of texts.

The textual sources that substantiate this view belong to four categories: personal, including...

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