Location:
Henry Charles Lea Library, 6th floor, Van
Pelt-Dietrich Library
Offices:
6th floor, Van
Pelt-Dietrich Library (both)
Telephones:
215 898 7552 (MR)
and 215 898 7089 (DT)
fax: 215 573 9079 (both)
E-mail:
ryan@pobox and traister@pobox
Online:
Traister's
website
Resources in the
History of Books and Printing from Traister's
website
This course is designed as an introduction to
selected topics in the history of texts in the early modern period for
advanced undergraduate and graduate students in the humanities. It is NOT
a soup-to-nuts course on the "history of the book" as conventionally
understood and presented in universities today. Rather, it is an attempt
to get at discrete issues in the history of texts -- their creation,
production, dissemination, and reception -- by way of the texts themselves
as material artifacts. Many history-of-the-book courses suffer from a
simple lack of content. The issues are abstract, the readings amorphous
and baggy. To paraphrase Dr. Phish: is there a course in this class?
What we try to do, on the other hand, is literally to give the course
content: content to read, content to handle and to study. Thus, one
of the essential components of the course will be the need to consult
original or early manifestations of selected texts. The texts we have
selected are all in English. While this approach may be parochial, it is
also practical. It guarantees the ready availability of certain texts and
allows us to avoid dealing with issues of translation for the
linguistically-challenged. The repertoire includes a variety of literary,
historical, scientific, and religious texts -- something for everyone. If
you have a "favorite text" or textual problem that is not on the
syllabus, we can probably find a way to accommodate you. We are neither
rigid nor committed to our own canon of privileged artifacts. For us,
these texts are lab specimens, the stuff of analysis and experiment.
Thousands of others could have been -- and can be -- used. The history of
books is a large and spacious tent; it is by definition inclusive and
democratic.
The course requirements are simple:
Your grade will reflect a balance of these elements.
The following should be available at the Pennsylvania Book Center (34th & Sansom Streets):
Depending on course enrollment, other titles on the syllabus below will be ordered as appropriate.
Introductory
Weeks 2-6: These five classes will consider varieties of background issues. Consider them as preparatory for the classes that you will direct during the second half of the class. A paper assignment due at the Week 6 class (February 24) concludes this part of the class.
Background 1
Background 2
Background 3
Read Adrian Johns, The nature of the book: print
and knowledge in the making (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1998), chapter 1 (bulkpack)
Background 4
Background 5
Read selections from Robert Darnton,
(bulkpack)
Paper 1 (approximately 5-6 papges): The instructors will provide a selection of books to be found on a truck in the Reading Room of the Annenberg Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Choose one of them (ask for assistance from staff in marking your choice so that two of you do not wind up discussing the same book!). Discuss it at some length. What do you see? What kind of book is it? What do its subject, its size, its provenance, its binding, and any other characteristics you may observe, tell you about it?
Students are responsible for preparing and running each of the following classes. How you approach the books assigned for each week, what points you would like to make about them, how -- if more thn one of you is involved -- you want to work together or separately: these are all your decisions. The instructors will be happy to work with you as you consider possibilities and, if necessary, to advise you about your choices. They will not do the work for you nor will they happily suggest the possibilities for discussion that you should be proposing and then working out: this is your class.A consumer advisory: being absent for the class you are responsible for would be an extremely injudicious decision.
A more intellectual word of advice: the opportunity to work closely with a defined text and a defined problem might very well suggest a term paper topic that develops naturally from your work for the class you prepare.
Exemplars 1
Read selections from The invention of pornography:
obscenity and the origins of modernity, 1500-1800, ed. Lynn Hunt (New
York: Zone Books, 1993) (bulkpack)
Exemplars 2
Re-read Eisenstein on printing and the scientific
revolution
SPRING BREAK -- NO CLASS
Exemplars 3
Exemplars 4
Exemplars 5
Exemplars 6
Exemplars 7
Final papers (approximately fifteen
pages in length) are due today.