Browsing by Author "Martin, Daniel"
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Item ‘Affirmative Signalling’: Dickens’s railway journalism and Victorian risk society(2017) Martin, DanielThis 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.Item The child's stuttering mouth and the ruination of language in Jordan Scott's blert and Shelley Jackson's Riddance(2020) Martin, DanielIn recent years, the interdisciplinary field that Chris Eagle has called “Dysfluency Studies” (“Introduction” 4) has questioned cultural expressions of speech disorders that rely on stuttering or stammering as a metaphor for other mental, aesthetic, political, and affective problems. Literary, cultural, and critical expressions of stutters and stammers (some literal, others metaphorical) are notoriously difficult to contextualize because they pop up everywhere in our writing. We desperately want to make the world and its language systems stutter for various aesthetic and political reasons. Echoing the foundational work of disability scholars David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder on the concepts of narrative prosthesis, Eagle writes that “without exception in modern literature, speech pathologies are ‘diagnosed’ metaphorically as the symptom of some character flaw such as excessive nervousness or weakness, or treated as a symbol for the general tendency of language toward communicative breakdown, ambiguity, polysemy, misunderstanding, etc.” (Dysfluencies 11–12). Eagle’s extensive study of the “neurolinguistic turn” in modern fiction by authors such as Herman Melville, Emile Zola, James Joyce, Robert Graves, James Joyce, Philip Roth, Gail Jones, Jonathan Lethem, and David Mitchell, among others, fills a gap in literary analysis of speech dysfluencies left by Marc Shell’s Stutter, which explores the aesthetic qualities of speech dysfluencies in literature and popular culture. Shell and Eagle’s studies respectively advocate for better cultural representations of people who stutter and challenge powerful biomedical beliefs that dysfluent voices are by default in need of correction or cure. At the same time, the interdisciplinary field of Dysfluency Studies that Shell and Eagle have inaugurated recognizes the stutter or stammer as an embodied expression of linguistic and communicative diversity and challenges the normative time frames that govern our collective desires for vocal fluency.Item George Catlin’s Shut your mouth, the biopolitics of voice, and the problem of the “Stuttering Indian”(2023) Martin, DanielThe stutter persists as an unwanted excrescence in most cultural or critical/theoretical accounts of the voice, and sometimes even the most rigorous scholarly approaches still rely on powerful assumptions that link voices to personal or collective agency. What does it mean to find a voice for people who stutter? Sonically, stutters and stammers rupture time frames; conceptually, they do similar work halting the fluency and fluidity of histories premised on personal and collective identities, and institutional developments. Following Michel Foucault’s earliest outlines of biopower and the biopolitical production of manageable populations, I argue that the modern science and therapeutics of dysfluent speech emerged in the nineteenth century through “the controlled insertion of bodies in the machinery of production and the adjustment of the phenomena of population to economic processes”. Put simply, fluency in voice became foundational to modern regimentation and training in speech and communication. In recent years, scholars such as Josephine Hoegaerts and Riley McGuire have begun to examine the material histories of stuttered or stammered speech, each positing that the “science” of speech disorders emerging in the nineteenth century was implicated in powerful cultural narratives of fluency’s privilege and prestige. At the core of the explosion of curative and therapeutic techniques in early elocutionary and medical approaches to stuttered speech persisted a productive fantasy of a lost “natural” voice that could paradoxically be rediscovered through biopolitical instrumentation. The fantasy of this lost voice – a voice that experts believed existed elsewhere in space and time than the “civilized” nation states of the modern West – functioned biopolitically as an impossible “normal” that nevertheless became the goal of speech training, management, and production.Item Speaking machines and ghostly phantoms: the claustrum poetics of voice and dysfluency(2020) Martin, DanielTHROUGHOUT 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.Item Treating and tracking infection: doctors, disease, and the type-writer girl in Bram Stoker’s Dracula(2020) Rhem, Kit; Martin, DanielWhile 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.Item A warm and sympathetic thing: voice and dysfluency in Robert Browning's 'Mr Sludge, "the Medium"'(2020) Martin, DanielThis 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.