Stenographic literacy
Stenographic literacy
The overall argument of the book is that the influence of Gurney shorthand on Dickens created a form of stenographic literacy (the stenographic mind) which he passed on to his readers. Section 8.1 of this concluding chapter introduces the ideas of foreignization and domestication and argues that Dickens’s stenographic mind enabled him to recalibrate the balance between the two and connect with a wider readership. Section 8.2 stresses how stenography helped Dickens exploit the pleasure of word play to motivate and enthuse his readers, while section 8.3 explains how this exploitation became a way to control his readers’ voices. Section 8.4 argues that the Gurney system, with its emphasis on the creative manipulations of vowels, constituted a pedagogy for reading spoken words and hearing written ones, which Dickens acquired at Doctors Commons and passed on to his readers in a learnable literary form.
Keywords: literacy, foreignization, domestication, play, pleasure, pedagogy, learnability, control, reader, readership
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