‘The melody of letters’: reading literature as a musical exercise 

How much of our enjoyment of literature comes from our innate human musicality, from the sounds of the words as we read? Using a mix of prose, poetry and literary criticsm from 1800 onwards, we celebrate literature’s oral roots, revelling in the sounds of words and witnessing ‘melodies’ of imagery and structure snaking in and out of texts. Modern audio books allow ‘songful’ elements to come to the fore, but the history of musico-literary studies stretches back longer -- historically books were habitually read aloud, and think back to oral tradition itself, including such giants as Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. This course will encourage you to become a skilled reader in what Robert Louis Stevenson described as ‘the melody of letters’.