Listening to Literature Aloud
Listening to Literature Aloud
From an early age, many readers have experienced the pleasures of being read aloud to while sitting on a parent’s lap at home or sitting on the floor in an attentive circle at school. Unlike listening to music, however, opportunities for hearing literature read aloud seem to diminish as we grow older unless we’re one of those commuters or joggers who avidly listens to audiobooks. What those listeners remind us of is that to rely solely on the sounds of words—without the images that accompany them in film or video—can, paradoxically, enhance rather than lessen the intensity and power of the spoken word. Moreover, focused listening can be an imaginatively absorbing experience that induces a homebound commuter to park in the driveway to hear the final section of a reading.
The recorded selections of short stories, poems, and plays in this section represent a wide variety of voices, styles, and subject matter that are offered to enrich your encounters with the works to be found in the anthology. Lend an ear and your rate of return is likely to be high interest.
Suggestions for Responsive Reading
- To read along or not to read along: Either way is fine but for different reasons. If you read the text for the first time as you listen, you’ll likely find it more accessible and fluid, particularly if the syntax and style is unfamiliar to you or is set in a remote historical period. On the other hand, a first reading together with a recording might also short-circuit your own initial response to the work and interpretation of it. If this is a second or third reading as you listen, you’ll hear more clearly the interpretive possibilities the reader has chosen to emphasize, thereby making you more aware of the work’s (and the reader’s) subtleties. Try experimenting with both approaches to different works in order to determine which one works better for you.
- Consider how well the reader’s voice and overall style of delivery is matched to the literary work. Describe the appropriateness of any regional accents, inflection, pronunciation, volume, rhythm, and pacing of the reading in order to explain how the lines are spoken serve to reinforce what is said. The degree of appropriateness becomes readily apparent if you imagine, for example, how you would describe the difference between a rendition of Emily Dickinson’s “I heard a Fly Buzz—when I died” by Meryl Streep compared with, say, Sylvester Stallone (or Streep performing an audiobook version of First Blood).
- Determining the tone of a text is often the most challenging and important interpretive skill we develop as readers. Listening to a work read aloud, however, can be enormously helpful in establishing tone when we hear the nuances made apparent by an effective reader orally interpreting the text. Tone can convey any of the full range of human emotions. Notice the range of differences among the following descriptive clusters describing tone: loving, ardent, admiring, affectionate / bored, subdued, languorous, dreamy / argumentative, disdainful, detached, self-justifying, or any number of other attitudes and moods.
- If the oral reading isn’t what you expected, if it disappoints or surprises you, try to explain as specifically as possible why the performance differs from your expectations. Use the text to validate your own response, and indicate particular elements of the recording to support your assessment of the recording.
Suggested Topics for Writing
- Listen to any two poems read by different readers and then contemplate in an essay how switching the readers with the poems would affect your response to the two poems.
- Choose one of the recorded short stories and write an essay offering an alternative voice from popular film or television to read the story aloud. Explain in detail why you think this person’s voice and style of reading would enhance (or undercut) your pleasurable understanding of the story.
- Choose one of the short plays in the anthology not recorded here and write specific director’s suggestions for how the lines should be delivered, taking into account such matters as tone, inflection, pronunciation, pacing, and volume.
- With two other students, choose a poem from the list and record your own versions of it. Be prepared to explain what informed the choices of your respective oral interpretations as well as their similarities and differences compared to the original recording.