Reading in the Wilderness

Virtual Listening in Lyric Space: First-Person Voice Effects in Late Medieval English Lyric

“…Jessica Brantley has shown that traces of performativity and public dramatic performance can permeate private meditative experiences of lyric texts through the presentation of inscriptions and images on the page. 45 The I effects of recognizing and conflating textual voices suggest that, in addition to the forces and energies of performance infusing the text from beyond the page, lyrics with juxtaposed Is can also generate their own kind of textual performativity from within. The effects of textual sensing hinge on speaker shifts on an utterance-to-utterance basis and arise from the webs of interrelationship between and among the poem's distinct instances of first-person voice.…”