tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33595714.post6881588355755006974..comments2023-12-02T18:39:25.382+08:00Comments on 新春秋 PANDEMONIUM: No classics, memos will doUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger5125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33595714.post-52962394946122929202007-08-05T06:20:00.000+08:002007-08-05T06:20:00.000+08:00倉海君:I am certainly inclined to concede the validit...倉海君:<BR/><BR/>I am certainly inclined to concede the validity of your accounts for the practice of silent reading in the West and in China. But if I point to the past glory of rhetorica--not only in the Greek and Roman days, but also in the one-third of the scholastic curriculum devoted thereto, and much more so since the revival of letters which we tend to call the Renaissance--if I point to this, I mean to suggest that the word was once much more intimately connected with the sound than it is now; writers then were trained to write with one eye towards the rhetorical quality of the prose, and readers were used to regard much writing as ready for delivery.<BR/><BR/>As for the Chinese case, I am a little reserved as to the proposition that Chinese, given its graphic tradition, is optimally suited to silent reading. Absent proper punctuation, it is exceptionally hard to resist reading classical Chinese aloud, the flow of the sentence being in such a case the most, if not the only, practical guide for proper cadence.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33595714.post-46576446719277892372007-08-04T17:57:00.000+08:002007-08-04T17:57:00.000+08:00Y.T.,In the West, the manners of reading silently ...Y.T.,<BR/><BR/>In the West, the manners of reading silently probably date back to the seventh century, when the evolution of word separation took place. Until then, the readers had to plod their way through scriptura continua, with their eyes moving in series of fixations and saccades. Physical pronunciation, in effect, much facilitated the decoding of unseparated writing and the retention of phonemes. In this case, they did not read aloud simply for rhetorical training, or to relish an oral performance, but were also driven by necessity. It might be no small feat to read silently in the past, so it is not hard to account for Augustine's amazement when he saw Ambrose reading alone with his voice silent, and his tongue still.<BR/><BR/>Yet we have to note that the development of reading manner depends not only on the way the language is transcribed, but also on the structure of the language itself. Research indicates that the Chinese graphic tradition provides optimal conditions for developing the ability of silent reading, so I doubt, in light of such findings, if reading aloud was as predominant in the Chinese history of reading as in the Western one. I do not mean that the Chinese people were not used to reading aloud, which is obviously wrong: the Chinese students in the past are so well known for their chanting aloud the text to be memorized, and swaying the body to the cadence of the sentences. But I wonder if this practice was equally prevailing in China. Had it been the case, Zhu Xi (朱熹)'s advice of "心到,眼到,口到"(《童蒙須知》) would have been somewhat superfluous. The Chinese people, I think, would read aloud only when they intended to learn the text by heart, and ample evidence can be found in history books to demonstrate that a lot of readers could read, or even memorized verbatim, a text, silently, rapidly, and to nobody's bewilderment. <BR/><BR/>The reason why the two critics were quoted (well, I am the writer of the essay) is hardly related to the practice, be it modern or ancient, of reading aloud or not. I was stressing the importance for a reader to be withdrawn from the crowd, and remain intent on the book in a silent ambience, as opposed to the guide-lines drawn up by the Education Bureau.<BR/><BR/>To know more about silent reading, I would recommend Alberto Manguel's A History of Reading, one of my great favourites.倉海君https://www.blogger.com/profile/17212577823407511988noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33595714.post-53837118454902615542007-08-03T05:21:00.000+08:002007-08-03T05:21:00.000+08:00The writer said: "Let us hear what the gurus of re...The writer said: "Let us hear what the gurus of reading say: for Harold Bloom, reading is rather ‘a solitary praxis’ than ‘an educational enterprise’, and ‘it matters, if individuals are to retain any capacity to form their own judgments and opinions, that they continue to read for themselves’ ; in The Uncommon Reader, George Steiner, one of the greatest literary critics of our time, tells us that ‘genuine reading demands silence’." <BR/><BR/>I am inclined to believe that what these two great readers described is actually a rather modern phenomenon. For the better part of Western history, reading meant reading aloud; sight was not detached from sound: for the sound was an organic component of the experience of reading. Whether it was printing that separated the connection between sound and sight, and eventually subordinated one to the other, I do not know. But delivery--a crucial element in the classical conception of rhetoric--seemed, by its very emphasis in university training, to have made it a habit of scholars to read aloud.<BR/><BR/>To my way of thinking, reading aloud has the advantage of putting the reader in the virtual position of a speaker ready to communicate with his audience: to inform it, or even to move it. Reading silently seems rather to keep the reader all unto himself, isolating the thought from all the attendant emotions and interlocutory reactions. Instead of a "solitary praxis," reading can well be a communal and communicative experience.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33595714.post-53762436974546101592007-07-09T11:16:00.000+08:002007-07-09T11:16:00.000+08:00OH, you have read the books? really bullshit? I wa...OH, you have read the books? really bullshit? I wanna buy it but won't read it and then attack it, tell me where did you buy it, thx a lot!Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-33595714.post-34378652069131693282007-07-09T05:07:00.000+08:002007-07-09T05:07:00.000+08:00Well written essay with a boring topic, should wri...Well written essay with a boring topic, should write bullshit such as <A HREF="http://diumanpark.mysinablog.com/index.php?op=ViewArticle&articleId=666841" REL="nofollow">《港女聖經》及《Blog中百萬年薪》</A>, those're the crap that can get published nowadays. Charts and graphs will be at least more colourful in comparison.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com