Howsam, Leslie. Old Books and New Histories: An Orientation to Studies in Book and Print Culture. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2006. [Relevance: a place to start]
It is somewhat comforting to note that Leslie Howsam begins her first chapter by pointing out that “This vast scope and these blurred boundaries mean that no one can ever be an expert on all its [book history’s] aspects” (3). The committee can’t expect me to know it all – Howsam says so! With the scope and disunity of the “field” – from printed books to electronic texts, medieval manuscripts, modern notebooks; studies of reading, printing, publishing; Ancient Rome to last year in New York – of course no one agrees on the most basic terminology. Howsam identifies three major disciplines in dialogue: history, bibliography, and literature, and then proceeds to triangulate from these more formalized fields the fuzzy interdisciplinary areas between them.
The interdisciplinarities Howsam maps in chapter 2 have been both my joy and my frustration since my undergraduate honors thesis. The region between History and Literature is the provenance of cultural history, literary history, print culture studies, and cultural studies; between history and bibliography the realm of the studies of print houses. Having been “raised” a historian, I find that I still identify with the axes which pivot on that point of Howsam’s triangle, even if I have jumped the departmental fence, as it were. The real value of these first two chapters is in the way Howsam fleshes out this amorphous region between disciplines: by giving examples of studies she feels are material to shaping the field, the second chapter can function as something of a control for my larger project. If the purpose of preliminary examinations in the field of History of Text Technologies is to prove that I have a sense of the field in which I hope to contribute, this snap shot of the field as of 2006 provides a number of nice starting places, and I will likely return to it at the end of this project to see what articles may fill in perceived gaps.
More directly valuable is the concise comparison of “Models of the Book’s Place in History,” in chapter 3, which compares a number of visual and rhetorical models for conceptualizing the function of books (defined loosely in some, and more stringently in others, but primarily physical objects) in human society at more or less specific points of location and time. Beginning with Robert Darnton’s “Communication Circuit Model” from 1982 and it’s critique by Thomas Tanselle, followed by Thomas Adams and Nicolas Barker’s 1993 “Book-Centered Model,” which emphasizes the material object’s influence on humans at various stages, rather than the human influence on the material object. This chapter reflects the three-fold nature of the previous two, in which Darnton’s (historical) model is contrasted by Adams and Barker’s (bibliographical) model and finally rounded out by Peter McDonald’s “Critique from Literary Studies” (1997). While I tend to favor the tangible nature of Adams and Barker’s argument, Howsam notes McDonald’s nod towards Pierre Bourdieu’s cultural theory, and while I wouldn’t attempt to distill it at this fourth level of critique, I find what she presents compelling and will seek out his theory directly in future reading. Ok, so this third chapter has a fourth model, and doesn’t fit completely neatly into the trifold formula of the others. James Secord’s “The Histories of the Book and of Science” (2000) connects the conceptualizations of scientific experiment and the event(s) that constitute authorship, print, and reading. This model, rather than being purely a model of the place of the book in society, is a conceptualization of the idea of the book as a methodology, or, as Howsam phrases it, “using the book as an intellectual approach and a way to open up interpretive possibilities” (45).
While these and the final two chapters in Howsam’s book are a review of the literature, they provide a cogent synopsis of the state of the field, up to fairly recently. She’s a bit more optimistic than I currently am about the problems inherent in “matters of communication” between disciplines -- a lack of shared vocabulary (indeed, the use of the same word to mean fundamentally, if fractionally, different things) is a fairly large stumbling block to easy interdisciplinarity. In the fifth chapter, she gives a nod towards resistance to interdisciplinary techniques in the three fields, particularly history, which challenges book history to justify a place for itself in the academic landscape where territory is well defended.
Friday, June 25, 2010
Thursday, June 24, 2010
A place to start
Lerer, Seth. “Epilogue: Falling Asleep over the History of the Book.” PMLA 121.1 (Jan 2006): 229–234.
I expected this to be a polemic against the New Boredom, but I was drastically mistaken. It’s a love-song to the printed book, placing the reader in a position of power “over” the physical object, rather than “in front of” a screen, discussing the impossibility of curling up with a computer or electronic reader. The only part of that disparity in inclination that Lerer does not discuss is the likelihood of damaging something by falling asleep on one’s electronic device (yourself or the device); instead he focuses on the aesthetic detractions of such a past time. For much of this article, he treats the importance of studies of the physical object itself lightly, instead focusing heavily on the importance of post-production human interaction with texts (readers, anthologizers, teachers), spending the largest percentage of the article on the makers and consumers of anthologies. While I realize the space of this epilogue is limited, and given its scope it is perforce breezy and not able to treat any specific element in depth, I wish he’d pushed a little harder on the question of why there is so close a connection between Book History studies and canonicity.
In contrast John Guillory’s argument that canons are not composed of individual works, but of assembled value sets that form a literary system, Lerer argues that the history of the book “itself may qualify the claim. Much speculation on the idea of the canon, and in fact much of literary history as a whole, still goes on as if literary works were somehow unbound to the physical objects that house them. Books are objects, though, and canonization is as much a process of se¬lecting space as of selecting value” (231-232). Setting aside the problem of prioritizing space as an issue and then, at the end of the article, dismissing electronic formats on purely aesthetic grounds, I’m not entirely sure that I fully buy the argument that canon-status follows purely from space issues. This seems most applicable to the study of anthologies from a specific period, say early to mid nineteenth century to the late twentieth.
Are questions of the study of Canonization and the study of Book History a chicken and an egg problem? Do scholars examine canonical works because we’re inherently interested in the material history of canonicity (and as a byproduct, reifying the canon), as Lerer explains the study of Anthologies (using, for his example, the 1950 Oxford Book of American Verse), or does the canon itself blind us to other positibilities? Does this focus on Canonical works amount to a teleological view of the history of the book? What about the Also Rans? What about failures? Are they too numerous to be interesting? Can a story be defined by the negative space around it – ie, a piece of canonical literature by its companions on the shelves, the medical books, the trashy ballads, the pious stories that no one reads anymore?
Or is it just that we focus on the current canon, or currently accepted deviations from it (non-canonical works by women, or subject peoples, or children, etc -- and those only at risk of being pidgeonholed), because that is what the Academy currently demands, and we would all like jobs at some point?
I expected this to be a polemic against the New Boredom, but I was drastically mistaken. It’s a love-song to the printed book, placing the reader in a position of power “over” the physical object, rather than “in front of” a screen, discussing the impossibility of curling up with a computer or electronic reader. The only part of that disparity in inclination that Lerer does not discuss is the likelihood of damaging something by falling asleep on one’s electronic device (yourself or the device); instead he focuses on the aesthetic detractions of such a past time. For much of this article, he treats the importance of studies of the physical object itself lightly, instead focusing heavily on the importance of post-production human interaction with texts (readers, anthologizers, teachers), spending the largest percentage of the article on the makers and consumers of anthologies. While I realize the space of this epilogue is limited, and given its scope it is perforce breezy and not able to treat any specific element in depth, I wish he’d pushed a little harder on the question of why there is so close a connection between Book History studies and canonicity.
In contrast John Guillory’s argument that canons are not composed of individual works, but of assembled value sets that form a literary system, Lerer argues that the history of the book “itself may qualify the claim. Much speculation on the idea of the canon, and in fact much of literary history as a whole, still goes on as if literary works were somehow unbound to the physical objects that house them. Books are objects, though, and canonization is as much a process of se¬lecting space as of selecting value” (231-232). Setting aside the problem of prioritizing space as an issue and then, at the end of the article, dismissing electronic formats on purely aesthetic grounds, I’m not entirely sure that I fully buy the argument that canon-status follows purely from space issues. This seems most applicable to the study of anthologies from a specific period, say early to mid nineteenth century to the late twentieth.
Are questions of the study of Canonization and the study of Book History a chicken and an egg problem? Do scholars examine canonical works because we’re inherently interested in the material history of canonicity (and as a byproduct, reifying the canon), as Lerer explains the study of Anthologies (using, for his example, the 1950 Oxford Book of American Verse), or does the canon itself blind us to other positibilities? Does this focus on Canonical works amount to a teleological view of the history of the book? What about the Also Rans? What about failures? Are they too numerous to be interesting? Can a story be defined by the negative space around it – ie, a piece of canonical literature by its companions on the shelves, the medical books, the trashy ballads, the pious stories that no one reads anymore?
Or is it just that we focus on the current canon, or currently accepted deviations from it (non-canonical works by women, or subject peoples, or children, etc -- and those only at risk of being pidgeonholed), because that is what the Academy currently demands, and we would all like jobs at some point?
Redirecting
I originally started this blog as an assignment for a class on digital humanities. Now, however, I'm going to borrow a page out of the playbook of several scholars smarter than myself, and use it as a place to discuss the readings I must do over the next four and a half months before I take my Prelims exam.
The content will be mostly book history, bibliography, and a few strands of Early Modern history and literature. I don't really expect anyone will want to read it, but hopefully doing it this way will both keep me accountable, and help with my own retention of the material.
So here it goes.
The content will be mostly book history, bibliography, and a few strands of Early Modern history and literature. I don't really expect anyone will want to read it, but hopefully doing it this way will both keep me accountable, and help with my own retention of the material.
So here it goes.
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