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.
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