Book History (Fall 2010)

The purpose of this reading course is to study the history of the book across histories, media, and institutions. This course attempts to trace the beginnings of the book from papyri and manuscripts to the rise of digital publishing, to investigate the formation of reading culture(s), to understand the politics/ontology of publication and authorship, and to analyze the institutions involved. The course begins with classical western antiquity (through the analysis of Greek and Roman reading traditions) and concludes (but not conclusively) with an interrogation into the futurity of the book in whatever form it may take. This reading course also intends to look at various critical theories and philosophies that may inform our analysis of reading. I see this course as helping to inform my understanding of the meaning of the book (in its broadest intellectual historical sense) and its making/unmaking across a period of time.

Introduction: the making of the book and how are texts/books studied?

Mackenzie, Donald F. Bibliography and the Sociology of the Text. London: The British Library, 1986.

The Book History Reader. Ed. by David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery. New York & London: Routledge, 2002.

Piper, Andrew. Dreaming in Books: The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.

Libraries: from ancient libraries to digital bibliography

Johnson, William A. Bookrolls and Scribes in Oxyrhynchus. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004.

Chartier, Roger. The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe Between the 14th and 18th Centuries. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992.

A History of Reading in the West. Eds. Guglielmo Calvallo and Roger Chartier. Trans. Lydia G. Cochrane. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999.

Casson, Lionel. Libraries in the ancient world. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001.

Literacy, bibliophilia and the rise of a reading culture

Ferguson, Margaret W. Dido’s Daughters: Literacy, Gender, and Empire in Early Modern England and France. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2003.

Stallybrass, Peter. "Material Culture: An Introduction." Shakespeare Studies. 28 (2000): 123-129.

Ancient Literacies: the Culture of Reading in Greece and Rome. Eds. William A. Johnson and Holt N. Parker. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Evolving book technologies: from manuscripts to e-books

Stallybrass, Peter, Chartier, Roger, Mowery, J. Franklin and Heather Wolfe. "Hamlet's Tables and the Technologies of Writing in Renaissance England." Shakespeare Quarterly 55.4 (2004): 379-419.

Chartier, Roger. Forms and Meanings: Texts, Performances, and Audiences from Codex to Computer. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995.

Grafton, Anthony and Megan Williams. The Transformation of the Book: Origen, Eusebius and the Library at Caesarea. (2006)