"Today, public readings have become a vital part of any form of literary life. Orality is the keyword of contemporary writing. Yet do we know what actually happen when a poetic text is read out loud? How are signs on a page transformed into a stage performance? What does it mean to move from a text for the eye to sounds and images presented in front of a living and actively participating audience? This book does answer these questions, but not in abstract or general terms .It looks instead at how authorsthemselves live this experience of reading out loud and how they write about it in their fiction (for the scene of a poet taking to floor in order to read her or his work to various kinds of audiences is a scene that frequently occurs in modern fiction).Taking its departure from Balzac, whose Lost Illusions contain the Ur-version of the public poetry reading, this books revisits a wide range of masterpieces of 19th and 20th Century literature, including works by Marcel Proust (Remembrance of Things Past) and James Joyce (The Dead), and then reaches out to contemporary practices, in literature as well as in cinema and the graphic novel. This book also contains a series of close readings of contemporary artists (poets, performers, directors, comics authors) who try to invent new forms of public reading that do not reject the written and visual aspects of their texts in order to strike the right balance between classic print culture and new orality"--
