Written Word Research Articles

Censoring sex: a historical journey through American media

1 Introduction Chapter 2 1. Books and Periodicals: Seduction by the Written Word and Maybe a Picture or Two Chapter 3 2. Paintings, Sculptures, and Other Pictorial Arts: You Call Dirty Pictures Art? Chapter 4 3. The Movies: Teaching the Wrong Lessons and in the Dark As Well Chapter 5 4. Music and Dance: Stirring the Senses and Unleashing the Beast Chapter 6 5. Radio, Television, and the Internet: Home Invaders 7 Epilogue

Squawkies and Talkies

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes The images accompanying this essay are provided by the author (collection of Will Straw). 1. Virginia Pope, ‘The Changing Cycle of Entertainment/After a Long Era of Shadows and Voices Comes a New Call for the Actor’, New York Times (16 October 1932). 2. Virginia Pope, ‘The Changing Cycle of Entertainment’. 3. Douglas Kahn, Noise Water Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), p.123. 4. David Henkin, City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), p.111. 5. Peter Fritzsche, Reading Berlin 1900 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), p.1. 6. Michael Warner, ‘Zones of Privacy’, in What's Left of Theory: New Work on the Politics of Literary Theory, ed. Judith Butler, John Guillory and Kendall Thomas (New York and London: Routledge, 2000), p.102. 7. Lenny Kaye, You Call It Madness: The Sensuous Song of the Croon (New York: Villard Books, 2004). 8. Walter Winchell, ‘Broadway’, syndicated column, Port Arthur News (24 March 1936), p.4. 9. Unsigned, ‘Foreword’, Squawk, no date, no pagination, pp.1–2. 10. For claims about Knight's ‘invention’ of the term, see the discussion on the American Dialect Society listserve, archived at ⟨http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi‐bin/wa?A2 = ind0001D&L = ads‐l&P = R1218⟩ [15/01/2008]. 11. Jim Bishop, The Mark Hellinger Story (New York: Appleton‐Century‐Crofts, 1952), p.55. 12. For a lengthier account of Clow's trial, and his life in general, see Will Straw, ‘Traffic in Scandal: The Case of Broadway Brevities’, University of Toronto Quarterly, 73:4 (2004), pp.947–971. 13. Unsigned, ‘Mirrors of Mayfair’, Broadway Brevities, 3:20 (June 1924), p.17. 14. ‘The Press’, Time (11 August 1930), p.23. 15. Nick Mount, When Canadian Literature Moved to New York (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), p.53. 16. Neal Gabler, Winchell: Gossip, Power and the Culture of Celebrity (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994). 17. John Guillory, ‘The Memo and Modernity’, Critical Inquiry 31 (2004), p.126. 18. For images of the covers of Broadway Brevities from all periods in its history, see my website, ‘Print Culture and Urban Visuality’, ⟨http://www.arts.mcgill.ca/ahcs/cultureofcities/Print%20Culture.html⟩ 19. Stephen G. Clow, ‘Parasites Who Have Fattened Off Brevities. Our Original and Unique Style of Banter Copied Everywhere B Columnist Winchell on the Most Brazen and Contemptuous imitator B Boasted “Winchellisms” But an Echo of Brevities (1916–1924)’, The New Broadway Brevities 1:4 (1930), pp.32–33. 20. Stephen G. Clow, ‘Parasites Who Have Fattened Off Brevities’, pp.32–33. I have shortened the text Clow reproduces for reasons of space. 21. Neal Gabler, Winchell: Gossip, Power and the Culture of Celebrity, p.80. 22. The three‐dot ellipsis is used in Walter Winchell's ‘Merciless Truth’, Vaudeville News (20 August 1920), p.2. 23. James Carey, ‘Technology and Ideology: The Case of the Telegraph’, in Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp.201–30. 24. Johanna Drucker, The Visible Word: Experimental Typography and Modern Art, 1909–1923 (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), p.94.

Epistolary America

Epistolary America David Quigley (bio) David M. Henkin. The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in Nineteenth-Century America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006. xvi + 221 pp. Figures, notes, and index. $38.00 (cloth); $20.00 paper). The nineteenth-century letter. Any historian of that century has spent countless hours fingering the aging stationery of that age of correspondence, imagining the past worlds suggested by idiosyncratic penmanship. The letters are everywhere, and always have been, at least as far as historians are concerned. And yet, there is something wonderfully eye-opening about David Henkin's new book, a study that sets out to get inside the letter-writing culture of that earlier era and is certainly one of the first scholarly works to make use of period letters purchased on eBay. The Postal Age doesn't simply use letters and their writers as sources; rather; they are the subject matter at hand. Or as Henkin puts it, "we have, in other words, barely begun to study the modern posted letter as its own distinctive historical practice" (p. 6). Nearly a decade ago, Henkin published his first book, City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York (1998). That previous work took as its subject the proliferation of printed materials—handbills, commercial signage, and myriad forms of currency—that ran through the American city in the decades before the Civil War. Henkin's reading of urbanizing Manhattan stands as one of the most compelling arguments for "the democratic inclusiveness of the new urban public."1 In this new study, Henkin builds out from the neighborhoods of New York to tell a national story of cultural transformation that returns to and advances his interest in democratization and public culture. The unprecedented world of the mid-nineteenth-century postal system, in Henkin's telling, marked "a powerful rupture and a fundamental divide," as "a critical mass of Americans began reorganizing their perceptions of time, space, and community around the existence of the post" (pp. 2, 3). Taken together, Henkin's first two books stand as a brilliant recreation of the common cultures of midcentury Americans. Across these two texts, Henkin has come closest among nineteenth-century American historians to producing a history of antebellum mentalities. Moving beyond the merely private, Henkin offers a sophisticated reading of the history of the intersections between public [End Page 54] and private life, an approach altogether appropriate to the terrain of the Civil War-era United States. Like his mentor Mary P. Ryan, Henkin brings Habermas to nineteenth-century America and manages to say something original about the nature of the modern public.2 Unlike too many younger scholars prone to a kind of fetishization of the theoretical, Henkin is something of a model for at once taking seriously and moving beyond his theoretical sources; by engaging the complex particulars of the past, he produces a more compelling account of the making and remaking of American public life. There is an elegant simplicity to Henkin's structure, with the book divided into two equally compelling and original parts. The three chapters that make up Part One—"Joining a Network"—tell the story of the creation and expansion of the national postal system in the middle of the nineteenth century. Henkin emphasizes the revolutionary impact of federal postal legislation in 1845 and 1851, arguing that these reforms, far more than earlier policies, brought about a nation of letter writers. Between 1840 and 1860, per-capita letters carried tripled, from 1.61 to 5.15 (p. 3). The critical shift, laid out in fine detail in the second chapter, occurred when the primary function of the postal system changed from the distribution of newspapers to the transmission of private letters. The first half of the book ends with Henkin's original reconstruction of the place of the post office in the antebellum American city. In this account, the federal government's primary presence in urban America is presented as the central grounds of public life. It is in the book's second part—"Postal Intimacy"—that Henkin advances his most provocative and ultimately convincing readings of the culture of the post. An opening discussion of...

Rulers, Peasants and the Use of the Written Word in Medieval Japan: Ategawa no shō 1004–1304 (review)

Rulers, Peasants and the Use of the Written Word in Medieval Japan: Ategawa no shō 1004–1304 (review)

In the Beginning was the (Written) Word

A pivotal text within Peter Ackroyd's oeuvre, Hawksmoor is most fruitfully read as a kind of mythography where a special version of deconstructive play dominates all levels of the fiction, from single words through characters and action to the level of meta‐reflection itself. In fact, the novel's design can be said to reflect the philosophy of space of the eighteenth‐century architect Nicholas Dyer: his seven churches are embodiments of différance, subtly infusing alterior knowledge into urban reality. Similarly, Hawksmoor’s ‘‘vision‐house of language,’’ its post‐structuralist myth, advocates the post‐1968 Derridean/Deleuzean enterprise of reterritorialization– of reconnecting the uprooted postmodern subject to estranged territory. At the base of this myth, mobilizing it as its non‐originary source, as the exemplary figure of the trace, is the child, the spatial thinker in the novel; by folding language into the city of London, the Derridean child imagines the permeable bounds between building/dwelling/thinking, encouraging individuals to transgress them and, in Ackroyd's words, to re‐situate themselves in ‘‘the riddle of London, which is perpetually new and always old.’’

The Spirit of Terrorism Ground Zero Welcome to the Desert of the Real America's Culture of Terrorism: Violence, Capitalism, and the Written Word Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War Portents of the Real: A Primer for Post-9/11 America

The Spirit of Terrorism Ground Zero Welcome to the Desert of the Real America's Culture of Terrorism: Violence, Capitalism, and the Written Word Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War Portents of the Real: A Primer for Post-9/11 America

Spoken word frequency counts based on 1.6 million words in American English

Written word frequency (e.g., Francis & Ku6era, 1982; Kucera & Francis, 1967) constitutes apopular measure of word familiarity, which is highly predictive of word recognition. Far less often, researchers employ spoken frequency counts in their studies. This discrepancy can be attributed most readily to the conspicuous absence of a sizeable spoken frequency count for American English. The present article reports the construction of a 1.6-million-word spoken frequency database derived from the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (Simpson, Swales, & Briggs, 2002). We generated spoken frequency counts for 34,922 words and extracted speaker attributes from the source material to generate relative frequencies of words spoken by each speaker category. We assessthe predictive validity of these counts, and discuss some possible applications outside of word recognition studies.

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Politics, Print Culture and the Habermas Thesis Cluster

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Politics, Print Culture and the Habermas Thesis Cluster

Interpreting Our World: Authority and the Written Word in Robert J. Conley's Real People Series

The Summer 2001 issue of the Phoenix profiles painter Talmadge Davis, a self-taught artist who takes as his subject matter the traditions and history of his people. journalist Will Chavez writes that Davis wants his paintings to teach people about history. The article describes Davis's depic- tion of the Revolutionary War era patriot Dragging Canoe. Interestingly, Davis titled his work Cherokee Dragon, a title taken with permission from the book of the same name by author Robert Conley. Davis's Dragging Canoe bears a striking resemblance to actor Wes Studi because he allowed Davis to use his image for the painting (Chavez). In the creation and naming of Davis's painting, three artists—a writer, a painter, and an actor—converge in the production of new art representing a cultural hero few people outside country celebrate. This artistic discourse characterizes an evolving aesthetic that seeks to explore history, invigorate culture, and support nationhood. A culturally informed process of critical interpretation modeled on oral traditional thought and performance is emerging from these artistic conversations, and at the center of

The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in Nineteenth-Century America (review)

The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in Nineteenth-Century America. By David M. Henkin. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Pp. 238. Cloth, $38.00.)Reviewed by Konstantin DierksDavid Henkin has, for the second time, written a marvelous book. His first monograph, City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York (Columbia University Press, 1998), was a strikingly original account of an important new kind of literacy in mid-nineteenth-century New York City, exemplified in the reading of commercial signs on city streets. That book pulled the histories of literacy and of cities in new directions. Henkin's equally original new monograph, The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in Nineteenth- Century America, broadens the concern to and nation. Whereas scholars tend to write the history of through the invention of technologies such as the telegraph or telephone, Henkin focuses instead on the everyday use of communications. This enables him to discern a communications revolution in the United States in the 1840s and 1850s premised not on technological innovation, but on popular culture-the sudden and concerted application of an old technology to new purposes, by new groups of people. Earlier in the nineteenth century the postal system operated by the federal government was primarily a carrier of newspapers, business correspondence, and letters on special occasions. By the 1870s that postal system had become a widespread medium enabling many ordinary Americans to experience a peculiar new and modern sensation of connectedness-for good, as well as for ill.In making this argument Henkin's second book shares a common theme with his first, namely an unsung element in the emergence of modernity in the United States. In both books, Henkin asks us to appreciate the modernity of the nineteenth century with fresh and subtle eyes, without the usual technological determinism. Richard John accomplished something comparable with his account of the development of the federal postal system in the early national era, enabling us to appreciate the formation of perhaps the first modern large-scale enterprise, ironically by a government otherwise committed to smallness even in its military apparatus {Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse, Harvard University Press, 1995). John examined the role of the post office in crucial political debates of the early national era, but Henkin shifts our gaze in the subsequent antebellum era from political controversy to everyday life, from newspapers to letters, from the elite to the masses. The most important context was not political or institutional, but geographical and social: the extraordinary mobility animating the United States in the middle of the nineteenth century.That mobility came from broad historical patterns like a rush of migration westward, and from concerted historical events such as the California Gold Rush (1848-1855) and the American Civil War (1861-1865). The United States Congress responded to the emergence of such geographical mobility-and mimicked the pioneering example of the British Parliament-by dramatically reducing the cost of postage, first in 1845 and again in 1851. The most significant result was not the speed of mail across space, but access to and use of the post by more and more Americans. The volume of mail carried by the postal system more than tripled in a decade, and Henkin highlights new practices and new expectations as ordinary Americans swiftly turned something novel into something normal-into habit, into culture. Americans of all sorts wrote more and more letters, and they used those letters to send money and daguerreotypes to one another, filling the mail with objects as well as words. …

The Healing Power of the Written Word: A Workshop Exploring Medical Literature

The Healing Power of the Written Word: A Workshop Exploring Medical Literature

The Role of Spoken and Sign Languages in the Retention of Written Words by Prelingually Deafened Native Signers

The purpose of this study was to determine the nature and efficiency of the strategies used by prelingually deafened native signers for the temporary retention of written words with reference to a primary language-coding hypothesis (M. A. Shand, 1982). For the gathering of the data, participants were shown lists of serially presented written target words that they were asked to recognize according to their presentation order from within word pools that contained different types of code-specific distracter words. Three performance dimensions were examined: (a) false recognition of target words, (b) correct recognition of target words, and (c) retention of target word presentation order. Participants were prelingually deafened native signers (n=11, average grade level=8.18 [1.17]) and a hearing control group (n=25, average grade level=9.00 [0.76]). Findings from the analysis of the nature of false recognition and the number of correctly recognized words show convincingly that formationally similar distracter words interfered with the memory performance of the native signers and phonologically similar distracter words with that of the hearing control group. It was concluded that the participants decoded written words into a code reflecting their primary language experience for their temporary retention in working memory.

On the agenda: The power of the written word

The quality of writing is not enough on its own, however. It is important to understand what the funder is looking for and appreciate that there has to be a match between your own project and the funder's remit.

“What” and “Where” in Word Reading: Ventral Coding of Written Words Revealed by Parietal Atrophy

The visual system of literate adults develops a remarkable perceptual expertise for printed words. To delineate the aspects of this competence intrinsic to the occipitotemporal "what" pathway, we studied a patient with bilateral lesions of the occipitoparietal "where" pathway. Depending on critical geometric features of the display (rotation angle, letter spacing, mirror reversal, etc.), she switched from a good performance, when her intact ventral pathway was sufficient to encode words, to severely impaired reading, when her parietal lesions prevented the use of alternative reading strategies as a result of spatial and attentional impairments. In particular, reading was disrupted (a) by rotating word by more than 50 degrees , providing an approximation of the invariance range for words encoding in the ventral pathway; (b) by separating letters with double spaces, revealing the limits of letter grouping into perceptual wholes; (c) by mirror-reversing words, showing that words escape the default mirror-invariant representation of visual objects in the ventral pathway. Moreover, because of her parietal lesions, she was unable to discriminate mirror images of common objects, although she was excellent with reversible pseudowords, confirming that the breaking of mirror symmetry was intrinsic to the occipitotemporal cortex. Thus, charting the display conditions associated with preserved or impaired performance allowed us to infer properties of word coding in the normal ventral pathway and to delineate the roles of the parietal lobes in single-word recognition.

The Music of Form: Rethinking Organization in Writing

Written words are laid out in space and exist on the page all at once, but a reader can only read a few words at a time. For readers, written words are trapped in the medium of time. So how can we best organize writing for readers? Traditional techniques of organization tend to stress the arrangement of parts in space and certain metadiscoursal techniques that compensate for the problem of time. In contrast, I’ll describe five ways to organize written language that harness or bind time. In effect, I’m exploring form as a source of energy. More broadly, I’m implying that our concept itself of “organization” is biased toward a picture of how objects are organized in space and neglects the story of how events are organized in time.

Native Speakers of Arabic and ESL Texts: Evidence for the Transfer of Written Word Identification Processes

English as a second language (ESL) teachers have long noted that native speakers of Arabic exhibit exceptional difficulty with English reading comprehension (e.g., Thompson-Panos & Thomas-Ruzic, 1983). Most existing work in this area has looked to higher level aspects of reading such as familiarity with discourse structure and cultural knowledge to explain native Arabic speakers' ESL reading difficulties (Abu Rabia, 1996). However, higher level processes often depend on lower level processes, such as letter and word identification, and deficient lower level processing can inhibit reading comprehension (Koda, 1990). Given important differences in the written representation of vowel information in English and Arabic writing, it was hypothesized that the English reading comprehension difficulties experienced by Arabic speakers might also reflect nontarget-like lower level processing of letters and words. Two experiments compare the reading processes of native Arabic speakers to the reading processes of native English speakers and non-Arabic ESL learners and provide some evidence that native Arabic speakers are less aware of vowel letters in English texts than either control group. This differential awareness of vowel letters may contribute to native Arabic speakers' ESL reading comprehension difficulties. The implications of this research for ESL pedagogy are discussed.

The Difference Between Knowledge and Ignorance is in the Written Word

The Difference Between Knowledge and Ignorance is in the Written Word

EDITORIAL: The Power of the Written Word

In the March 2006 issue of The Journal of Sexual Medicine (JSM), the editorial focused on the power of a simple change in words to alter the meaning and therefore attitude and support for sexual medicine healthcare and research by insurers and government agencies.

Q:] When Would You Prefer a SOSSAGE to a SAUSAGE? [A:] At about 100 msec. ERP Correlates of Orthographic Typicality and Lexicality in Written Word Recognition

Using a speeded lexical decision task, event-related potentials (ERPs), and minimum norm current source estimates, we investigated early spatiotemporal aspects of cortical activation elicited by words and pseudo-words that varied in their orthographic typicality, that is, in the frequency of their component letter pairs (bi-grams) and triplets (tri-grams). At around 100 msec after stimulus onset, the ERP pattern revealed a significant typicality effect, where words and pseudo-words with atypical orthography (e.g., yacht, cacht) elicited stronger brain activation than items characterized by typical spelling patterns (cart, yart). At approximately 200 msec, the ERP pattern revealed a significant lexicality effect, with pseudo-words eliciting stronger brain activity than words. The two main factors interacted significantly at around 160 msec, where words showed a typicality effect but pseudo-words did not. The principal cortical sources of the effects of both typicality and lexicality were localized in the inferior temporal cortex. Around 160 msec, atypical words elicited the stronger source currents in the left anterior inferior temporal cortex, whereas the left perisylvian cortex was the site of greater activation to typical words. Our data support distinct but interactive processing stages in word recognition, with surface features of the stimulus being processed before the word as a meaningful lexical entry. The interaction of typicality and lexicality can be explained by integration of information from the early form-based system and lexicosemantic processes.

Plagiarism Persists in News despite Changing Attitudes

Well into the 1990s, it was common for reporters and editors to copy one another. Today, plagiarism is almost universally condemned, yet eliminating all plagiarism may be impossible.