Punctuating Presences: How Punctuation "Marks" Voice

• Applicant: Dr. Elizabeth Bonapfel
• Subject Area: European and American Literary and Cultural Studies
• Term: from 2016 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 313598279

What would literature look like without punctuation? As a mode of organizing grammar and syntax, punctuation is one of the most basic elements of written language. Despite this fact, punctuation is largely overlooked in literary studies because it is so normative as to be invisible. My research project, Punctuating Presences: How Punctuation Marks Voice, addresses this pervasive invisibility by asking what punctuation can tell us about our understanding of literary history. The primary research question that I explore in Punctuating Presences is how punctuation signals different forms of voice, speech, or thought in print. With a focus on historical conventions as they have solidified and changed from the late 17th century to the present, my research explores how punctuation organizes the basic structures underpinning our expectations about literary style, conventions, and genres in English language and literature.Punctuation only exists in print. At each stage of my project, therefore, I explore the effect of changes in print history in relation to developments in literary style through an examination of how punctuation signals speech, thought, and voice on the page. Much of literature relies on the representation of speech and thought as indicated by punctuation marks, but these very forms are changing constantly. By tracking changes in punctuation over time, my research explores what punctuation usage tells us about the interrelationship among genres and how punctuation signals transitions among various voices (character, narrator, speaker, actor) in a textual medium. By focusing on the evolution of punctuation, my project first examines the use of punctuation marks, such as the dash and the ellipsis, in late 17th-century printed dramatic texts to give the impression of realistic speech. It then explores how 18th-century novels borrow from these marking strategies of printed drama to give the impression of thought and speech in prose. The project then examines how the 19th-century realist novel eliminates such graphic diversity by using mainly quotation marks to indicate thought and speech, while also demonstrating how modernist authors react against these very conventions through experimental punctuation. Finally, the project draws our attention to the ways in which contemporary authors draw upon modernist punctuation and modes of marking in their own experimental practices of indicating dialogue, thought, and speech. Punctuating Presences offers a genealogy that traces how many current punctuation practices (dashes, ellipses, parentheses, among others) derive from and depend upon the novel's tendency to borrow from the graphic forms of 18th-century printed dramatic texts. At stake is nothing less than an attempt to translate the impression of spoken speech from the stage to the page.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants