Understanding the ways people spoke about and in the city, Janet Stewart asserts, is crucial to understanding the city itself. Speech, she argues in Public Speaking in the City, constructed the modern city as surely as its physical geography did – at the same time that the shape of the city constructed the way speakers talked about it. Despite contrary contemporary pressures, face-to-face personal communication continued to thrive in the modern city, she finds in this study of Berlin and Vienna in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Stewart develops this conceptual framework through a series of loosely related chapters exploring speaking, architects as public intellectuals, architecture, ideas of the city and modernity. She introduces the lecture circuit of the era, highlighting some of the speakers of the day. Advertised speeches in designated halls abounded, frequently bringing together various contemporary views of the lecture, often to provide lectures that united educational or informational purposes with entertainment. Those public lectures, Stewart explains, periodically defined a vision of the city. Architects in particular contributed to a discourse on the nature of the city. Stewart traces the ideas of significant German-speaking architects as they enhanced their own professional status by speaking and writing about the city. Shifting gears, Stewart discusses the rise of a new style of speaking, to meet new needs. Speakers merged the styles of the lectern and the fireside to inform informally. Such speaking, Stewart explains, included a broader public in the audience and addressed that public's desire for intimacy in the modern world. To close, Stewart turns her attention to the built environment in which this speaking took place, from formal halls to coffee shops to adult education buildings. She considers how the architecture of these spaces connected to their uses as speech sites, facilitating a vision of modern communication as both dissemination of information and seeming dialogue.
What holds these varied themes together – even more than the argument of the book – are the spaces where these themes played out and the actors involved. Themes such as speaking, architecture and the city come into focus and fade into the background in different chapters. But throughout, snapshots of ideas, activities and spaces in Berlin and Vienna develop. And the thinkers who comment on speaking styles in one section might be the architects who designed the hall in another. On one level, this wide-ranging discussion makes Stewart's central claims compelling. It is abundantly clear that speaking flourished in these modern cities. Stewart's research enables her to provide very detailed descriptions of the ideas, practices and settings she explores. Her discussion of a new speaking style that performs intimacy is particularly significant, as that style resonates both in the spaces she finds speech and, though she does not explore it, in communication practices throughout the twentieth century. In another sense, though, her discussion does not fully make the case that public speaking shaped the modern city. To start with, the book does not examine the resonance of this speaking among its possible audiences or how extensive those audiences were. Is the fact that speeches considering the city took place enough to demonstrate that those speeches constructed how the public understood the city? More broadly, the terms here sometimes become so open that they lose some of their analytical power. Public speaking comes to mean all kinds of talk: does it matter how broadly inclusive that public is? Does it matter that much of that public speaking took place in indoor spaces that limited access to some degree? Such questions are not addressed. When the terms are too inclusive, our abilities to make distinctions diminish, a point that becomes particularly evident when Stewart posits the idea of Internet communication as suggesting the endurance of public speaking for the city of the twenty-first century.
This is a work for a specialized audience. Stewart frames her discussion theoretically, overtly building on terms from and conversations within a variety of fields, from sociology to philosophy. She spends little time introducing some of the central figures in her account. But Stewart's basic project of considering how the circulation of information and ideas through public speaking constructed the German-speaking city around 1900 is one that is suggestive for readers concerned with the city as a space shaped by the interactions between people, their ideas and practices and the built environment. As such, the conclusions she draws from her work may speak to an array of scholars.
