Browsing by Author "Martin, Daniel"

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    A warm and sympathetic thing: voice and dysfluency in Robert Browning's 'Mr Sludge, "the Medium"'
    (2020) Martin, Daniel
    This article takes a dysfluency studies approach to representations and expressions of voice and dysfluent speech in Robert Browning’s minor dramatic monologue ‘Mr Sludge, “The Medium”’ (1864). Browning’s speaker, an American spiritualist medium named Sludge, is vile and repugnant in his casuistry and sophistry as he defends his deceptions after being caught as a cheat during one of his séances. While Browning’s contemporaries recognized ‘Mr Sludge’ as a mockery of the real-life American medium Daniel Dunglass Home, the monologue relies on one central metaphor of the medium’s stuttering and stammering body that challenges broader Victorian assumptions about the relationship between speech, voice and elocutionary practices. Throughout this article, G.K. Chesterton’s claim that Browning’s critique of spiritualist practices is paradoxically a ‘warm and sympathetic thing’ becomes the keystone for understanding the monologue’s contributions to modern thought about the pleasures and vitality of dysfluent speech. Fundamentally, Browning’s exploration of the spiritualist’s deceptions and conjuring of the voices of the dead reflects broader medical analogies beginning in the 1840s that linked the causes of dysfluent speech to invasive and contagious voicings.
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    ‘Affirmative Signalling’: Dickens’s railway journalism and Victorian risk society
    (2017) Martin, Daniel
    This essay explores Charles Dickens’s railway journalism of the 1850s and 1860s and its differences from his more well-known fictional accounts of the British railway network. While fictional works such as Dombey and Son and ‘The Signalman’ emphasize the catastrophic aspects of railway accidents, Dickens’s journalism in Household Words and All the Year Round examines the modern systematicity of the railway network, which by its nature as system, necessitated accidents on the lines. The essay incorporates theoretical readings of risk by Ulrich Beck and Paul Virilio into its critical assessment of Dickens’s railway journalism. Fundamentally, it aims to demonstrate that Dickens’s railway journalism illuminates the complexity of Victorian narratives of technological and bureaucratic industrial and transport systems by prioritizing the global dimensions of systematic accidents over the period’s tendencies to focus merely on local accidental events.
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    Speaking machines and ghostly phantoms: the claustrum poetics of voice and dysfluency
    (2020) Martin, Daniel
    THROUGHOUT THE nineteenth century, experts in the study of voice and speech relied on a wide range of ghostly or haunted analogies to describe the enigmatic nature of vocal production and the causes and cures of stuttered speech. Phantoms, spectres, ghosts, incubi, and devils populate elocutionary, technological, scientific, and medical representations of voice and vocal dysfluencies, but the most provocative of such analogies is the voice as crypt, tomb, or what psychoanalysts influenced by the work of Donald Meltzer refer to as the "claustrum" (Meltzer, Plänkers). In our own times, the interdisciplinary field of voice studies prioritizes the "object voice" (Dolar 4) or "acousmatic voice" (Chion 18–27) as vocal effects characterized by an uncanny decoupling of voice and body. Regarding speech dysfluencies in particular, Brandon LaBelle argues that the mouth is a "vessel not filled with language, but more so, haunted or stammered by it" (130). Such analogies of uncanny or haunted vocal effects and speech symptoms echo nineteenth-century attempts to describe the speaking body as porous and prone to invasion and inhabitation, attempts that reached their zenith in medical expert James Hunt's claim in the posthumous edition of Stammering and Stuttering; Their Nature and Treatment (1870) that poor speech habits could be contracted by either unconscious or conscious imitation of people who stutter. Relying on a haunted analogy for argumentative effect, Hunt warns young speakers "against stuttering in mimicry, lest they should raise a ghost which they cannot get rid of" (254). My contribution to this forum on Victorian voices examines two case studies from the 1840s and 1850s that represent broader anxieties about the speaking body as a crypt that can be penetrated from the outside by unwanted vocal effects: Joseph Faber's 1846 exhibition of the Euphonia, or "Speaking Machine," and Henry Monro's medical treatise On Stammering (1850). Both are especially intriguing accounts of the claustrum poetics of Victorian technical and medical thought about the origins of voice and vocal production. Analogies of the claustrum were not merely figurative descriptions of the voice as a physiological object of scientific scrutiny but also sophisticated explanations of the phenomenology of the body as a receptacle and receiver of voice.
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    Treating and tracking infection: doctors, disease, and the type-writer girl in Bram Stoker’s Dracula
    (2020) Rhem, Kit; Martin, Daniel
    While the eponymous vampire of Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula has intrigued scholars through myriad interpretations of fin de siècle fears and anxieties, those who treat and manage the living infection that is vampirism are often ignored in favor of an exciting, terrifying monstrosity. Though the defeat of the vampire is only possible through the combination of a handful of middle-class professionals, none are as crucial to the process of gathering and disseminating information than Mina Harker. Mina, the only woman in the Crew of Light, mitigates the anxiety of the men surrounding her through the presence of her period-typical femininity, acting as the "heart" of the crew while disparaging the rise of the New Woman that threatened gender roles and expectations. However, her role is larger than that of a mere wife or woman; Mina works to mitigate anxieties through her growing collection of letters, articles, diary entries and more, information that proves vital to tracking and destroying the vampire. Through an examination of the rise of professionalism and the role of the Type-Writer Girl at the end of the nineteenth century, Mina Harker is exposed as the primary weapon against an undefined creature designed to provoke fear through familiar means of infection.