Stenography had been used for centuries to capture the words of orators, lecturers, and royals, but there was a significant expansion of the use of stenography in the eighteenth century. During the period when Samuel Richardson held the contract to report on decisions reached in the House of Commons, Thomas Gurney began transcribing the testimony of many speakers at trials in the Old Bailey. In this article, I suggest that Richardson, increasingly aware of stenography as a technology for capturing many different speakers’ words verbatim, ratcheted up epistolarity to establish a high-water mark for the multivoiced novel. He depicted characters who weren’t merely using stenographic concisions to keep up with the pace of speech but were essentially taking dictation from themselves. In a final section I consider Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Gold-Bug” as a repudiation of the multivoiced novel as a literary form and an effort to humiliate its voice-centeredness.
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This kind of writing always gives me the creeps. Rather than seize the day (my favorite genre) it is haunted by the passage of time and the burden of the past. It marks an occasion of dubious significance, perhaps even an overdue date, or (worst of all) a deadline. Is it really fifty years? So what? And what does that mean? Is this the time for elegiac expressions, nostalgic, sentimentalizing, melancholy, tired, irrelevant? Has Critical Inquiry grown old? No, actually. That was me. I got old, but CI did not. Thanks to its longstanding policy of bringing young people into the editorial group, the journal is as young as ever. In fact the founding generation in 1973–74 (all full professors) was probably the oldest group that ever ran it. I got old and irrelevant, not to say irreverent, so they asked me to say something from beyond the grave. So what should I talk about? If I try reciting the history of the journal, I will be forced to name names, and that will take upmy entire word allotment. I was advised to limit the length of this to a thousand words, a tenth of what I would need to chronicle the wild ride of Critical Inquiry through the rise of new disciplines and methods, new topics and questions in the humanities and social sciences over the last fifty years. But I must not even start naming the numerous intellectual movements that have rustled through the leaves of this journal and fertilized its roots, or that would take up my entire word allotment as well. And besides, it’s all there, accessible online. Look it up. So what is there to say, then? Some lines of the late John Prine immediately came to mind when I received this invitation:
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{"title":":Phenomenal Blackness: Black Power, Philosophy, and Theory","authors":"Julius L. Jones","doi":"10.1086/726301","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/726301","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":48130,"journal":{"name":"Critical Inquiry","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48915940","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Truth of Value: A Conversation with Theaster Gates","authors":"Zachary Cahill","doi":"10.1086/726274","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/726274","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":48130,"journal":{"name":"Critical Inquiry","volume":"50 1","pages":"164 - 174"},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43039479","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":":Extraction Ecologies and the Literature of the Long Exhaustion","authors":"Benjamin Morgan","doi":"10.1086/726304","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/726304","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":48130,"journal":{"name":"Critical Inquiry","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"60729635","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
A sand table is an intentional structure that is an early, indeed ancient, interactive platform for visualization and simulation. An intellectual furnishing that is also a tangible instance of speculative infrastructure, the sand table offers a tactile space for the rehearsal of tactics, staccato words whose roots lie in haptics and arrangement. While common in military settings, sand tables have also been used to teach the blind, train wilderness firefighters, conduct therapy for trauma victims, illustrate stories to children, and play imaginative games. Today there is a direct line from this seemingly modest technology—an implementation of what has been called elemental media—to augmented reality and other tangible interfaces. Part media history, part media archaeology, this article argues that sand tables belong to the lineage of platforms for speculative thinking and world-building that culminated in the rise of the digital computer amid a Cold War complex of scenario-driven futurology (whose centerpiece was the so-called situation room). It also suggests that sand, in its literal granularity—the physical affordances of the minute particulars of its particulate matter—offers an alternative to the binary regimen of ones and zeros that is the extractive product of the refined silica out of which semiconductors are still made.
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{"title":":Free Indirect: The Novel in a Postfictional Age","authors":"Athanassia Williamson","doi":"10.1086/726305","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/726305","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":48130,"journal":{"name":"Critical Inquiry","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"60729862","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":":Inventing the Alphabet: The Origins of Letters from Antiquity to the Present","authors":"Patricia Crain","doi":"10.1086/726292","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/726292","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":48130,"journal":{"name":"Critical Inquiry","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43567991","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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