Adding Voices: The Lady’s Museum, LibriVox, and the Classroom
By Jennifer Factor (Brandeis University) and Ashley Bender (Texas Woman’s University)
This essay invites readers to imagine the many ways literature moved in the long eighteenth century, passing through places and people’s hands, through silent reading in one’s closet or communal reading in a coffee house, parlor, or salon. These mixed engagements of reading aloud and listening to others read would have been especially true for a women’s periodical such as Charlotte Lennox’s the Lady’s Museum, a serialized work designed to reach out to what Karenza Sutton-Bennett has called “a cohort of activist, intellectual women who were ready to challenge preconceived [gender] notions.”[1] How appropriate, then, that the Lady’s Museum Project (LMP), an online interactive teaching edition of Lennox’s periodical, provides opportunities for twenty-first-century learners to approximate these community-making practices.[2] Drawing on “classroom” experiences mixing the Lady’s Museum Project with LibriVox, a free crowd-sourced audio resource, this essay contemplates the practical and theoretical possibilities of such pedagogy for our students and for our disciplinary practice.
Founded by Hugh McGuire in 2005, LibriVox serves as a digital literary commons, much as LMP is. Our classroom work crossing LibriVox with LMP took different, complementary approaches. Jenny created an audio version of the magazine with LibriVox early in the development of the LMP’s first teaching edition. As part of a Brandeis University-sponsored internship that centered multi-modal learning and Digital Humanities pedagogies, Jenny researched, sound-scripted, and recorded over forty minutes of material, rendering the volume-one “Trifler” series into aural life. Ashley incorporated LMP as the capstone for a British Lit to 1760 survey loosely organized around the querelle des femmes, the traditional conversation around the role of women in society. As planned, students would have worked in groups to record sections of Lennox’s “The History of Harriet and Sophia” and Fénelon’s “Treatise on the Education of Daughters.” After Ashley had laid much logistical, theoretical, and historical groundwork in the classroom, the LibriVox project manager informed her and Kelly Plante, co-editor of the LMP, that multiple students could not contribute to a recording of the same “chapter” unless they were doing a dramatic reading. The project was, pun intended, put on pause.
Although the outcomes were not what we had anticipated, we came away energized by the pedagogical possibilities for audio performance, especially in evoking the original social nature of periodicals. As our classrooms contemplated the heterogeneity of Lennox’s readership, panning across class, race, immigration status, and even birth order, among other factors affecting a woman’s contact with “literacy” skills and learning, we reminded ourselves that Lennox’s women “readers” were not all serving in the text-parsing role. Aural and oral literacies were powerful tools that equalized women’s access to ideas and the information landscapes they encountered. As Abigail Williams, Elizabeth McHenry, Betty Schellenberg, and Mary Kelly, among so many others, have pointed out, women read aloud to one another, and these reading groups activated a porous and participatory relationship between readers as writers, writers as readers.[3] Much as the boom in eighteenth-century print culture did not erase manuscript culture, as Schellenberg notes, neither did it eradicate a vibrant oral culture, a concept that Paula McDowell argues arose during the eighteenth century, as “orality” became a concept for theorization and historicization.[4] The preservation powers of print, which so often mediates our experiences with historical oralities, occlude the thick entanglement of information transmission and media forms. As Michelle Levy and Tom Mole note, “historians of orality find it difficult to separate orality from other forms of mediation.”[5] Contemplating these complex histories of mediation and transmission through discussion and the actual practice of embodied oration introduces students to a broader concept of “literacy” within and across specific historic contexts. Embodied practice invites students to challenge limited notions of literacy.
Laying bare this multi-dimensional conception of literacy as one that legitimates both aural (listened to) and oral (spoken) engagements with texts has the added potential to activate unique and timely collaborative experiences for our classrooms. Project-centered, shared explorations like ours adapt the traditional skill-building associated with the study of literature for the twenty-first century, addressing the professional development needs of students and responding meaningfully to institutional demands for marketable skills, something our discipline has always provided but has, perhaps, not always made transparent to students. Similarly, the development and practice of a wide range of research skills related to primary and secondary materials, especially digital and physical archives, further situates the objects of students’ study within the larger processes of those artifacts’ cultural production, revivifying these artifacts and the multiple ways, including orality, that they moved through the world. Such efforts remind students that cultural production is an intricately networked process that links discourses across space and time. They remind them that even in our own time, texts are material like films or songs that are shaped and shared within groups.
We began with such a strong commitment to LibriVox because the work pushed students beyond enclosed classroom groups and into contact with the wider LibriVox community. Projects like LMP’s audio component allow students to engage in public and digital humanities work and to experience their own values as participants in a wider scholarly conversation around the past. Such public humanities projects—public-facing scholarship of any kind—moves students beyond thinking about classroom-specific audiences to thinking about the whys and hows of the humanities in the world. These projects consequently enact “knowledge mobilization” and address calls for a more publicly engaged discipline.[6] For example, the past two decades have seen numerous calls for reenvisioning the humanities PhD and “a reorient[ing] of graduate research and the forms of its production and publication to address multiple audiences inside and outside the academy and to enable students to participate actively in life of the public.”[7] Public humanities practices also help students develop the vocabulary and syntax for explaining the value of humanistic study to a wide range of audiences and stakeholders, shaping the direction of a more expanded humanities narrative.[8]
To be sure, neither process was perfect. Such projects do not tend to fare well without sufficient preparation and planning, and as Ashley’s experience revealed, due diligence is not a panacea: obstacles do arise; technical difficulties will occur. Even in the absence of a LibriVox capstone project, however, Ashley’s students learned Audacity and other editing software. We see these opportunities as valuable for developing technical competencies that can give students an edge across professional, academic, and personal contexts while fostering exploration and experimentation. They demystify the technical processes behind much of the media students engage with (e.g., podcasts) and help students imagine themselves as creators within these roles. Even more, these skills help students envision broader possibilities for their own extracurricular engagements with the socio-cultural-political world.
It is both the positive and cautionary takeaway, however, that these projects are harder to launch and require more of us as pedagogues, and more of our students as thinkers, doers, and creators. Yet we recognize the project’s remarkable potential as complementary to curricular revisions that emphasize decolonial practices. The Ladies Museum Project—in its online teaching and LibriVox editions—reminds us that bringing in new and different texts is not sufficient. We cannot reinvent the reading list merely through tokenized additions. We also need to reimagine the possibilities for engaging with cultural artifacts, to reinvent how we read with our students, and how we point toward the lived life of literature. When we read literature in the same old ways over and over, even when the texts we do this with are new to our reading lists, we continue to flatten the literary-historical experience for students. When we engage in a more animated, living multi-modal manner, we recreate and re-embody the meanings of reading, writing, thinking, building friendships, and being in a diverse cultural world. This is exactly the world that the eighteenth century was and one we hope humanities classrooms continue to reflect now and in future days.
[1] Karenza Sutton-Bennett, “Intellect versus Politeness: Charlotte Lennox and Women’s Minds,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 35, no. 3 (2023): 375–396.
[2] Kelly Plante and Karenza Sutton-Bennett, “‘A Numerous and Powerful Generation of Triflers’: The Social Edition as Counterpublic in Charlotte Lennox’s the Lady’s Museum (1760–61) and the Lady’s Museum Project (2021–), Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 35, no. 2 (2023): 287-301, DOI: 10.3138/ecf.35.2.287.
[3] Elizabeth McHenry, Forgotten Readers: Recalling the Lost History of African American Literary Societies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002); Abigail Williams, The Social Life of Books: Reading Together in the Eighteenth-Century Home (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017); Mary Kelley, Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America’s Republic (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2012); and Betty A. Schellenberg, Literary Coteries and the Making of Modern Print Culture, 1740–1790 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).
[4] Schellenberg, Literary Coteries; 402. Paula McDowell, “Toward a Genealogy of ‘Print Culture’ and ‘Oral Tradition” (2010), The Broadview Reader in Book History, ed. Michelle Levy and Tom Mole, (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2015): 395–415.
[5] Michelle Levy and Tom Mole, The Broadview Introduction to Book History (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2017).
[6] Research Impact Canada, Knowledge Mobilization Is for Everyone! (n.d.), https://researchimpact.ca/kmb_resource/knowledge-mobilization-is-for-everyone-2/.
[7] Institute for the Public Life of Arts and Ideas, White Paper on the Future of the PhD in the Humanities, McGill University, 11. See also Gretchen Busl, Kristina Reardon, and Courtney Ferriter, eds., Getting to the Finish Line: New Directions for the Dissertation Process (New York: Modern Language Association, forthcoming); Susan D. Porter, and Jennifer M. Phelps, “Beyond Skills: An Integrative Approach to Doctoral Student Preparation for Diverse Careers,” Canadian Journal of Higher Education, 44, no. 3 (2014): 54–67.
[8] Ashley Bender and Gretchen Busl, “Experiential Education as Public Humanities Practice,” The Palgrave Handbook of Digital and Public Humanities, ed. Anne Schwan and Tara Thomson (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022): 31–48.