The Practice of the Text: Arts of Conversation, Arts of Writing

Abstract

Barton and Hamilton assert that literacy is a social practice; it links the activities of reading and writing with the social contexts in which they are embedded and which they assist in shaping.1 An awareness of this pervades current endeavours within textual geography, where attention to the practices of production and reception are seen as revealing the spatialities and authorities of knowing.2 It is an attention which tends to coalesce around the reading encounters and formal productions of geographical texts, yet within these analyses limited consideration has, so far, been directed to the practice of writing, and more specifically, to its historicised, cultural practice. This is partly because of the assumption that writing is solipsistic in nature and that, unlike other practices, few writers are likely to reflect on writing in writing.3 The textual traces through which past practices are registered reveal their fragility when writing is itself problematised. Indeed, the historicised practice of writing will always come to us through the guise of finished creations, making it difficult to realise the human agency at the core of all documents. Furthermore, as Hamilton points out in the context of photography, visual, and by implication textual, artefacts of literacy practices are always partial.4 Thus, to gain access to the intimate milieu of the writer, to the way in which they put thoughts and ideas to paper, is to engage both with the vagaries of subjectivity and the absences which pervade the written text. One way of approaching this is to take the practice of writing as an event which is interwoven within a wider linguistic system. As Barton and Hamilton suggest, analysing literacy events allow the complexity of practices to be appreciated. The practices of reading, writing and speaking are not independent of one another but are complicit within one another.5 Consequently, this paper begins to explore this idea through an event which occurred over the weekend of 27 October 1899, at the house of the dramatist-author Eden Phillpotts. Phillpotts was a well-known writer in literary circles, having written several successful novels and plays throughout the 1890s. In October 1899 he

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 2 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.