Beyond Words

Sobs, Hums, Stutters and Other Vocalizations

Steven Connor

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781780232584
• eBook ISBN: 9781780233031
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

In Beyond Words, Steven Connor seeks to understand spoken human language outside words, a realm that encompasses the sounds we make that bring depth, meaning, and confusion to communication. Plunging into the connotations and uses associated with particular groups of vocal utterances—the guttural, the dental, the fricative, and the sibilant—he reveals the beliefs, the myths, and the responses that surround the growls, stutters, ums, ers, and ahs of everyday language. Beyond Words goes outside of linguistics and phonetics to focus on the popular conceptions of what language is, rather than what it actually is or how it works. From the moans and sobs of human grief to playful linguistic nonsense, Connor probes the fringes and limits of human language—and our definition of "voice" and meaning—to challenge our basic assumptions about what it is to communicate and where we find meaning in language. By engaging with vocal sounds and tics usually trivialized or ignored, Beyond Words presents a startling and fascinating new way to engage with language itself.

References

ONE: Ahem

1 William James, The Principles of Psychology (New York, 1890), p. 488.

2 Steven Connor, Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism (Oxford, 2000).

3 Aristotle, De Anima Books II and III (With Passages From Book I), ed. and trans. D. W. Hamlyn (Oxford, 1993), p. 32.

4 Ibid.

5 Ibid., p. 33.

6 Remke Kruk, ‘Pseudo-Aristotle: An Arabic Version of Problemata Physica X’, Isis, LXVII (1976), p. 253.

7 Afnan H. Fatani, ‘The Iconic-Cognitive Role of Fricatives and Plosives’, in Outside-In – Inside-Out: Iconicity in Language and Literature, 4, ed. Costantino Maeder, Olga Fischer and William J. Herlofsky (Amsterdam and Philadelphia, 2005), p. 176.

8 Charles S. Peirce, Collected Papers, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, 8 vols (Cambridge, MA, 1931–58), vol. II, p. 277.

9 Connor, Dumbstruck (Oxford, 2000), pp. 35–43.

10 Gérard Genette, Mimologics, trans. Thaīs E. Morgan (Lincoln and London, 1995).

11 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Poetical Works, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge (Oxford and New York, 1983), p. 297.

12 Plutarch, Plutarch’s Moralia, With an English Translation By Frank Cole Babbitt, vol. III: Sayings of Kings and Commanders. Sayings of Romans. Sayings of Spartans. The Ancient Customs of the Spartans. Sayings of Spartan Women. Bravery of Women (London and Cambridge, MA, 1949), p. 398.

TWO: St . . . st . . . st

1 Steven Connor, Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism (Oxford, 2000).

2 Ibid., pp. 327–37.

3 Bartholomaeus Anglicus, Batman Uppon Bartholome his booke De proprietatibus Rerum (London, 1582), p. 46.

4 Bartolommeo della Rocca Cocles, A Brief and Most Pleasau[n]t Epitomye of the Whole Art of Phisiognomie, trans. Thomas Hill (London, 1556), sig. C3v.

5 Francis Bacon, Sylva Sylvarum: or A Naturall Historie (London, 1627), p. 103.

6 Alexander Ross, Arcana Microcosmi, or, The Hid Secrets of Man’s Body Discovered . . . (London, 1652), p. 250.

7 William Abbotts, Impediments of Speech: Stammering, Stuttering, Lisping, &c., Their Causes and Cure (London, 1879), p. 19.

8 ‘C. K.’ [Charles Kingsley], Hints to Stammerers, By a Minute Philosopher (London, 1864), p. 25.

9 Ibid.

10 Ibid., pp. 26, 27.

11 Otto Fenichel, ‘A Case of Stammering’, Psychoanalytic Quarterly, XV (1946), p. 540.

12 Otto Fenichel, ‘Outline of Clinical Psychoanalysis’, Psychoanalytic Quarterly, II (1933), pp. 96, 97.

13 Isador H. Coriat, Stammering: A Psychoanalytic Interpretation (New York, 1927).

14 Peter Glauber, ‘The Psychoanalysis of Stuttering: Some Fundamentals of Psychoanalysis Relevant to the Understanding of Stuttering’, in Stuttering: A Symposium, ed. John Eisenson (New York, 1958), p. 80.

15 Roger Ascham, Toxophilus the Schole of Shootinge (London, 1545), sigs xiv–xiir.

16 Marc Shell, Stutter (Cambridge, MA, and London, 2005), pp. 109–12.

17 Galfridus Grammaticus, The Promptorium Parvulorum: The First Anglo-Latin Dictionary, c. 1440 AD, ed. A. L. Mayhew (London, 1908), p. 472.

18 Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XVIII: Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Group Psychology and Other Works, 1920–22, trans. James Strachey (London, 1964), p. 64.

19 Christopher G. Goetz, Michel Bonduelle and Toby Gelfand, Charcot: Constructing Neurology (New York and Oxford, 1995), p. 144.

20 Edwin Lee, On Stammering and Squinting, and On the Methods for their Removal (London, 1841).

21 J. F. Dieffenbach, Memoir on the Radical Cure of Stuttering, By a Surgical Operation, trans. Joseph Travers (London, 1841), pp. 11–12.

22 Abbotts, Impediments of Speech, p. 27.

23 Dieffenbach, Radical Cure of Stuttering, p. 13.

24 Ibid., p. 14.

25 Ibid., pp. 26–7.

26 Dwight N. Hopkins and George C. L. Cummings, eds, Cut Loose Your Stammering Tongue: Black Theology in the Slave Narratives, 2nd edn (Louisville, KY, 2003), p. v.

27 ‘John Lennon Talks with Marshall McLuhan’, In the Life of . . . The Beatles blog, 2009, online at http://lifeofthebeatles.blogspot.co.uk.

28 Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, ed. Roger Lancelyn Green (Oxford, 1971), p. 61.

29 Augustine of Hippo, St Augustine’s Confessions: With an English Translation By William Watts, 2 vols (London and Cambridge, MA, 1950), vol...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• ONE Ahem
• TWO St . . . st . . . st
• THREE Hiss
• FOUR Hic
• FIVE Mmmm
• SIX Grrr
• SEVEN Pprrpffrrppffff
• EIGHT Tittle-tattle
• NINE Zzzz
• EPILOGUE Blottybus in Blottis
• REFERENCES
• FURTHER READING
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INDEX