Gail Trimble begins a stimulating review of two accounts of ancient reading practices by observing that ‘the physical form of what we read affects the ways in which we engage with a written text’, and that recent shifts from page to screen are but the latest in a long series of changes in how we read (Trimble, 2011, 24). One can add that the relatively quick shift from large cathode-ray screens to small portable touch screens highlights how the act of reading involves learning an unfamiliar technique for understanding what is written. This certainly converges with the readerly expertise demanded by the spatial organisation and physical form of many experimental texts. Trimble goes on to argue that ancient books in the form of rolls of papyrus paper – which had to be unrolled, read sequentially and then rewound – in fact offered greater possibilities for ‘checking back and skipping ahead’ than has previously been thought (Trimble, 2011, 24). Trimble also reminds us that the unpunctuated streams of letters typical of ancient writing meant that books were often read out loud by individual readers as the easiest way of making sense and that books were also read out loud by groups of friends or scholars (Trimble, 2011, 24). Reading something out loud, whether to oneself or others, is a species of performance. The relationship between performance, reading, writing and sounding is crucial to an understanding of the work of Caroline Bergvall (b.1962) – a body of writing where visual presentation and sound performance keep her texts in a condition of fluctuating existence.

At first sight, Bergvall's work offers the critic a number of clear approaches. It can be discussed in terms of performance writing, a sub-genre that she was instrumental in establishing and theorising. It is co-extensive with Bergvall's own significant body of writing on the practice of writing and a number of lengthy interviews. It is informed, on her own admission, by theoretical writing by Roland Barthes, Judith Butler, Michel de Certeau, Hélène Cixous, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Jacques Derrida, Gerard Genette, Julia Kristeva, Jacques Rancière and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, amongst others. Her work delivers a number of things for which there continues to be high demand in early twenty-first century academic criticism: it is located across and between languages and genres…