“Continuous Performance”: Silent Film and Plebeian Spectatorship in Dorothy Richardson’s Film Writing, 1927-1933

( Boosung Kim ) 한국영어영문학회 2019 영어 영문학 Vol.65 No.1

The advent of cinema at the dawn of the twentieth century profoundly ruptured the nineteenth-century notion of spectatorship as a constituent of bourgeois male subjectivity by allowing marginalized social groups such as working-class women, child vagrants, and rural people to have access to a new public sphere. This paper focuses on the British modernist writer Dorothy Richardson’s film writing, which appeared in the avant-garde literary magazine Close Up (1927-1933), to show how the silent cinema spectatorship in the 1920s challenged gendered, class-bound notions of spectatorship. In particular, this paper explores the representation of spec-tatorial practices in her film writing and the ramifications of a particular mode of perception she valorizes: contemplation. Throughout the column she wrote for Close Up, Richardson, writing from the perspective of one of the spectators seated in a movie theatre, committed herself to theorizing spectator subjectivity in the early sound era. By taking up a position similar to that of the nineteenth-century male urban investigator, Richardson revises the dominant imaginative mappings of London through her discussion of the spaces of the movie theaters and the demographic makeup of the cinema audience. Challenging dominant views on cinematic perception, Richardson associates absorptive, contemplative modes of perception with plebeian spectatorship to highlight the cinema’s therapeutic, emancipatory function for the underprivileged. Richardson also contends that silent films, when accompanied by simple piano music and performed in a small, garage-like movie theater, should be the norm to secure and nurture contemplation.

“Continuous Performance”: Silent Film and Plebeian Spectatorship in Dorothy Richardson’s Film Writing, 1927-1933

김부성 한국영어영문학회 2019 영어 영문학 Vol.65 No.1

The advent of cinema at the dawn of the twentieth century profoundly ruptured the nineteenth-century notion of spectatorship as a constituent of bourgeois male subjectivity by allowing marginalized social groups such as working-class women, child vagrants, and rural people to have access to a new public sphere. This paper focuses on the British modernist writer Dorothy Richardson’s film writing which appeared in the avant-garde literary magazine Close Up (1927-1933) to show how the silent cinema spectatorship in the 1920s challenged gendered, class-bound notions of spectatorship. In particular, this paper explores the representation of spectatorial practices in her film writing and the ramifications of a particular mode of perception she valorizes: contemplation. Throughout the column she wrote for Close Up, Richardson, writing from the perspective of one of the spectators seated in a movie theatre, committed herself to theorizing spectator subjectivity in the early sound era. By taking up a position similar to that of the nineteenth-century male urban investigator, Richardson revises the dominant imaginative mappings of London through her discussion of the spaces of the movie theaters and the demographic makeup of the cinema audience. Challenging dominant views on cinematic perception, Richardson associates absorptive, contemplative modes of perception with plebeian spectatorship to highlight the cinema’s therapeutic, emancipatory function for the underprivileged. Richardson also contends that silent films, when accompanied by simple piano music and performed in a small, garage-like movie theater, should be the norm to secure and nurture contemplation.

플롯 없는 소설: 도로시 리차드슨의 『순례』에 나타난 지루함과 모더니스트 독자

김부성 ( Boosung Kim ) 한국영미문학페미니즘학회 2017 영미문학페미니즘 Vol.25 No.2

Dorothy Richardson`s thirteen-volume novel Pilgrimage presents a single woman`s life as a continuous process without offering any traditional sense of resolution or ending. With its emphasis on detail and with its use of unpunctuated prose, the novel gained the reputation of being unreadable and was criticized for generating boredom. Drawing attention to its serial form and style, this essay investigates how Richardson`s literary experiment constructs a new type of reading subject whose relation to textual space should be different from that of the nineteenth-century readers. In her pursuit of serial form in depicting the portrait of an artist as a young woman, Richardson thematizes boredom as integral to her feminist strategies to express critical dissent from dominant narratives of gender. Through her essay “About Punctuation,” her preface to Pilgrimage, and scenes of reading in the novel, Richardson argues that “feminine prose” distinguished from nineteenth-century masculine realism should be properly unpunctuated to the extent that one`s reading speed must be encumbered so that readers can question norms implicated in standard punctuation. Promoting “the slow, attentive reading” by using experimental punctuation and detail, Richardson`s prose style highlights readers` creative collaboration and allows readers to experience non-homogenous temporalities and spatialities. Richardson`s aesthetics of slowness serves to constitute modernist readers, who were required to adopt a new reading strategy to overcome boredom while encountering unreadable texts and to appreciate aesthetic values of new modes of writing though active participation in textual production.

From “Einfühlung” to Empathy: The Problem of Other Minds and Aesthetic Encounters in Pursuit of Self-Understanding in Dorothy Richardson’s Pointed Roofs

김부성 한국근대영미소설학회 2022 근대 영미소설 Vol.29 No.1

While literary modernism’s signature narrative style, stream of consciousness, has been widely studied from the perspective of Freudian psychoanalysis, other possible inter-influences between modernism and psychology have received little scholarly attention. This paper asks for the need to move beyond Freud by calling attention to the approximate coincidence of the emergence of literary modernism and the introduction of the word “empathy” into English. Empathy was coined by the English psychologist Edward B. Titchener in 1909 as a translation of the German word Einfühlung, an aesthetic phenomenon whose framework was theorized by the German philosopher Theodor Lipps. This paper reads Dorothy Richardson’s Pointed Roofs (1915) as an early modernist work to show the neglected connection between Einfühlung/empathy as a popular subject of study in both aesthetics and psychology in the early 1900s and the modernist exploration of interiority. Known as the first writer whose work was described as “stream of consciousness,” Richardson represents her protagonist Miriam Henderson’s consciousness by merely recording what she perceives, feels, thinks, and, often partially, understands. This paper argues that while depicting Miriam’s struggle to adjust to a new life as an English teacher in Germany, the novel captures the then-burgeoning concept of Einfühlung/empathy and its relevant anxieties by accentuating moments of aesthetic encounters and the limits of Miriam’s ability to understand other minds.

낭독하는 여자: 도로시 리차드슨의 『터널』에 나타난 청각적 자아와 정동적 경험

최현지 ( Hyunji Choi ) 한국근대영미소설학회 2024 근대 영미소설 Vol.31 No.1

Dorothy Richardson’s 1919 work The Tunnel, the fourth volume of her thirteen-volume novel sequence Pilgrimage, is best known for its experimental prose style to which the term “stream of consciousness” was first applied. Due to the novel’s distinctively detailed representation of the protagonist Miriam Henderson’s constantly changing consciousness, critics have focused on introspection, egotism, and self-isolation. This essay argues that scenes of reading in The Tunnel offer a new perspective on Richardson’s portrayal of fictional selfhood. In particular, this essay discusses performative aspects of Miriam’s act of reading a book aloud to her friend, in which factors such as the rhythm of her voice and the relevant bodily experience generate a kind of affective in-between-ness, momentarily allowing for them to have a shared experience between the reader and the listener. This essay also discusses how this act of reading aloud can be associated with qualities such as responsiveness and intersubjectivity and thus function as a counterpoint to Miriam’s seeming self-centeredness. By closely looking at scenes of reading in the novel, this essay considers how acts of reading aloud can be understood as a radical form of communication, not only between self and other but also between self and the world.