Directions Students create and present a monologue (an extended speech spoken by one person usually addressed to someone, either the reader, spectators, or an imagined second character) as if from the point of view of an object they have read about in a newspaper article, work of literature or historical account.
It was the reader or spectator's job to cut through the subject's illusion of integrity and get to the forces that were manipulating her.
Thus, it transformed the academic study of literature from a marginal scholarly apparatus of footnotes to the only game in town, thereby turning traditional readers into spectators.
Unless you are a regular Spectator reader, you may have missed a little ongoing drama.
Her style is rich, ironic and pugnacious; she jousts willingly with him and the reader becomes a spectator of this subtle and fascinating contest.
To use a linguistic metaphor, the tired, instituted language of everyday communication ('spoken' or sedimented language) is rejuvenated by a 'speaking' language, a true expression that imposes itself on the audience (be it the reader or the spectator).
More importantly, this self-indulgent premeditated slander makes mugs out of Spectator readers who expect to find truth and fairness in an article they paid for.
Twenty years ago, I sat next to Margaret Thatcher at a Savoy Hotel dinner for readers of The Spectator who had paid to hear her talk about her memoir, The Downing Street Years.
The spectator or reader is called upon to effectuate the same original mode of being-in-the-world: "If he is a writer, that is, if he knows how to find the ellipses, elisions and caesuras of conduct, the reader will respond to his appeal and meet him at the centre of the imaginary world he animates and rules" (Merleau-Ponty 1964b, 89).
Readers of the New Statesman – where, I discovered, this piece first ran – may well have known the identity of an unnamed "editor of the Spectator", but readers of this book will not, especially since they aren't told the year.
Because as readers, we are spectators just like the traveller.
