Ways of Reading Third Edition - Martin Montgomery, Alan Durant, Nigel Fabb, Tom Furniss, Sara Mills 2007

26.4 Reading between the myths
Unit 26 Literature in performance
Section 6 Media: from text to performance

Literature in performance is made a sensitive issue in the modern period by the scale of shifts in our textual environment. Over the last hundred years public communication has moved from an environment dominated by the authority of print media to one in which relayed and reproduced forms of speech, as well as images, so-called ’live’ documents and interactive web materials all play an increasingly important part.

Interestingly, despite the divergence between the myths of print and performance illustrated above, the act of reading a page itself shows in microcosm the properties of both: the printed words are a sort of notation, to be realized in a performed interpretation; the act of reading has a specific duration, like a performance, in that reading is a time-based activity; and reading a page varies between different performers and occasions, as different readings are produced.

Understanding present relations between literature and performance involves building towards general arguments about our textual environment on the basis of specific analyses (such as analysis of the act of reading a page, or making sense of a radio programme or multimedia text), rather than leaping to general claims about orality, literacy, print or performance.

26.4.1 Does literature have a future?

If people nowadays, especially young people, consume narrative and drama more in films and on television than in books or on the stage, and lyricism more in pop lyrics than in collections of poetry, does it then follow that literature is dying?

Many of the examples introduced in this unit suggest that literature has always involved a performance dimension. In this respect, the recent technological extension of modes of performance into new media represents a stage of growth and change in the general process of interaction between written and spoken, rather than a fundamental transformation of mode of representation. If this is so, then warnings of the death of literature because of its co-existence with other media discourse types are unnecessary.

Predicting what mix of texts will be read in fifty or a hundred years’ time is risky: how much print; how much on-screen text; how much audio and audio-visual material; how much hypertext, interactive and streamed material - and how much text in forms and formats not yet envisaged? It is not particularly future text types or delivery systems that will determine whether the insights and pleasures associated with literary reading have a future, however. What will be more important is to relate changing media properties and capabilities to the working of creativity at other levels, including choice of topic, reproduction of and experimentation with form, and engagement with new issues and audiences.