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thinking with [Samuel] Delany — can we (learn to) read a contemporary novel the way we would read a medieval verse romance?
it just occurred to me today that it’s relatively easy to think about earlier stuff as if it were (a kind of) novel — if I were going to get back into Greek I’d be thinking about whether/how it’s productive to read Lucian with my contemporary sci-fi protocols. but it’s a lot harder to go the other way — mostly what we can do (this is what this week’s two readings for the theories of the novel class I’m auditing both do) is to identify text-internal generic and formal characteristics, as you have done.
but what’s our actual process of reading say, the Roman de Brut? what Delany means by reading protocols is to a large extent quite literally the ways we process every word as we read it — the canonical example for sci-fi is Heinlein’s “the door dilated”, where we’re on familiar ground for the first two and when we hit the third have to either reject the text as nonrealist (which is what people who don’t like, or aren’t used to reading, specfic often do in lieu of real critique — dismissing it as frivolous, escapist, and/or ungrounded from “reality” and therefore useless if not actively bad) or rework our conception of the world we’re reading ourselves into to account for the new information the single word provides.
the other reading protocol he outlines tentatively at one point, by way of example, is (lyric) poetry, where he suggests that a key element of the way we read and process poetry is by attending especially to sound (and perhaps, I would add, thinking of concrete poetry, to the visual elements of the text, the way it’s laid out and organized on the page) in a way that we tend not to for non-poetic texts.
in both cases these reading protocols (one which attends closely to the ways new information about the nature of the world is presented, the other which attends closely to sound) can be applied with varying levels of rewardingness to different texts — we can read Jane Austen with our sci-fi protocols, or Marx with our poetry protocols.
so the questions are: how do we read medieval romance (now), how would we have read (or encountered, if in oral form) medieval romance (then), and can we transfer those reading protocols to texts from other periods?
imagine if contemporary science fiction and fantasy novels were published by default in annotated critical editions, or even just with a thirty page intro and another thirty pages of endnotes.
in other words: “medieval texts” as such is a category that in fact most people never have a “direct” experience of, because of language boundaries, lack of familiarity with manuscript reading practices, inaccessibility of manuscripts in the first place, etc. — so maybe in some ways my question about how we interact with medieval texts at the level of the word is sort of unanswerable, because almost no-one interacts with them that way.