Course Schedule
Week One (Aug 25): What is Writing?
In the first class meeting we will discuss the syllabus and the goals of the class, divide up the workload, and quickly consider the larger themes that will occupy us for the semester.
Week Two (Aug 30/Sep 1): Before Books: the case for “Oral Culture”
On Tuesday we will discuss the characters and narrative of Achebe’s famous novel; on Thursday we will look specifically at Achebe’s depiction of an oral culture, using Ong and Goody/Watt as our guides.
Readings
- Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
- Walter W. Ong, Orality and Literacy, ch. 1-3, 6
- Jack Goody and Ian Watt, “The Consequences of Literacy” (R)
Week Three (Sep 6/8): Imagining Orality: Bede’s story of Cædmon
On Tuesday we will read Bede’s story, a far more positive view of the impact of missionaries and conversion on indigenous culture, and consider Cædmon’s role as a symbolic mediator between ‘oral’ and ‘textual’ cultures; on Thursday we will read three essays which view Cædmon’s text from three very different perspectives.
Readings
- Bede, selections from the Ecclesiastical History - available
online here (in pdf format)
- F. P. Magoun, “Bede’s story of Cædmon: the case history of an Anglo-Saxon oral singer” (R)
- Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, “Orality and the Developing Text of Cædmon’s Hymn” (R)
- Kevin Kiernan, “Reading Cædmon’s Hymn with someone else’s glosses” (R)
Week Four (Sep 13/15): Inside Writing: the Monastic Life
On Tuesday we will read Benedict’s Rule, which formed the framework of the monastic culture in which Bede lived and wrote; on Thursday we will look at Leclercq’s classic description of monastic life, with special attention to the role of reading and writing in a monk’s spiritual journey.
Readings
Week Five (Sep 20/22): Written Culture: the Secular World
On Tuesday and Thursday we will work through some of Clanchy’s larger themes and discuss a few of his examples in detail, alongside two essays that place the idea of ‘literacy’ in specific cultural and historical frameworks.
Readings
- M. T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record
- Nicholas Howe, “The Cultural Construction of Reading in Anglo-Saxon England” (R)
- M. B. Parkes, “The Literacy of the Laity” (R)
Week Six (Sep 27/29) Ideas of Order: Lists, Pages, Books
This week will be spent thinking in specific terms about written language. Starting from Goody’s discussion we will consider various developments in the visual organization of information, connecting them (via Parkes, Saenger, and Stock) to larger cultural changes in the medieval period.
Readings
- Jack Goody, The Domestication of the Savage Mind, 52-111 (R)
- Brian Stock, The Implications of Literacy, 12-87 (R)
- M. B. Parkes, “The Influence of the Concepts of Ordinatio and Compilatio on the Development of the Book” (R)
- Paul Saenger, “Silent Reading: Its Impact on Late Medieval Script and Society” (R)
Links
More than just a random sequence of items, a list does powerful work; a good list can be a way of remembering, defining, organizing or constructing the world. Here is a list of a dozen different kinds of lists:
- Memorably Alliterative Order: notable places and people of the world, according to a fictional Anglo-Saxon singer/poet named Widsith
- Historical Order: the generations of the descendants of Adam, according to the Book of Genesis
- Physical Order (head to toe, more or less): the appearance of Shakespeare’s mistress, according to “Sonnet 130”
- Logical Order: a taxonomy of the Intellect and Communication, according to Roget’s Thesaurus
- Bibliographical Order: the things people write books about, according to Melvil Dewey
- Alphabetical Order: a Glossary of Botanical Terms, according to Gardenweb.com
- Order of Occurrence in a book (Table of Contents): human diseases and disorders, according to the Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy
- Descending Order: the 100 greatest American movies, according to the American Film Institute
- Rising and Falling Order: what prayer is, according to George Herbert
- Associative Order: times and places in which they’ll stone ya, according to Bob Dylan
- Disorderly Order: “Oblique Strategies” designed to jump-start your creativity, according to Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt
- Inscrutable Order: the first ten of the 280,000,000 web sites found when you type the word “lists” into the Google Search engine, according to Google
What principles of order do these different lists follow? What kind of order does my own list create?
NOTE: No list of lists would be complete without a tip of the hat to the opening section of Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things (originally published as Les mots et les choses in 1966), which
can be read here. Foucault begins his vast work with a passage from a 1942 short story by Jorge Luis Borges, “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins,” which
is online here. After enjoying these excerpts, however, please read the trenchant critique of Foucault’s example by historian Keith Windschuttle, which appeared in the National Review in 1997.
Week Seven (Oct 4/6): Making Books: Medieval Scripts and Book Production
This week will be a short history of the development of books, pages, and the scripts that fill them. Looking at numerous examples, we will see how forms of writing, and ways of organizing information, changed from the late Roman to the early Modern age.
Readings
Week Eight (Oct 11): The Parts of a Book
NOTE: there will be no class on Thursday, October 13
Readings
- Greetham, Textual Scholarship, 153-68
Week Nine (Oct 18/20): Exercise: Manuscript Textuality
This week the class will practice transcribing a dozen different manuscripts, try to decide whether they are versions of the ‘same’ text or not, and address the problem of how to represent this medieval work to a modern audience.
Readings
- The Sphere of Life and Death, in various manuscript versions (class handout)
Week Ten (Oct 25/27): The Print (R)evolution
On Tuesday we will examine Eisenstein’s important work; on Thursday we will discuss some challenges and alternatives to it.
Readings
- Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, ch. 1-4
- Greetham, Textual Scholarship, 77-151, 225-270
- Anthony Grafton, Elizabeth Eisenstein and Adrian Johns, “AHR Forum: How Revolutionary was the Print Revolution?” (R)
- Joseph A. Dane, The Myth of Print Culture, 10-31 (R)
Week Eleven (Nov 1/3): Books v. Texts: the Case of Hamlet
What is the thing we call Hamlet? We will look at the three very different early printed versions of the play, speculate on how they came to be, and consider how (or whether) we can decide which version is the ‘real’ or ‘best’ one.
Readings
- William Shakespeare, Hamlet, either in any printed edition or via the
Enfolded Hamlet online (read the introduction carefully, then click on the picture of Shakespeare to go to the text)
- Michel Foucault, “What is an Author?” (R)
- Margreta DeGrazia and Peter Stallybrass, “The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text” (R)
Week Twelve (Nov 8/10): Righting Texts: Textual Criticism
Staying with the notoriously difficult question of the text of Hamlet, we will look at some of the techniques scholars have used to present old texts to modern readers.
Readings
- William Shakespeare, Hamlet
- Greetham, Textual Scholarship, 295-372
- Fredson Bowers, “Authorial Intention and Editorial Problems” (R)
- G. Thomas Tanselle, “Textual Instability and Editorial Idealism,” online here
Week Thirteen (Nov 15/17): Textual Fictions
This week we will read one of the best novels of the past century, a fantastic example of the ways editors can rule over and overrule their text.
Readings
- Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire
Week Fourteen (Nov 22/24): NO CLASS - Thanksgiving Break
Week Fifteen (Nov 29/Dec 1): Beyond Books: New Media
Our last weeks will look ahead to the ‘end’ of textual culture and the birth of ‘hypertext’ and electronic media. How are digital texts different from printed ones? How are digital archives different from libraries? Do these differences allow us (or force us) to read or think differently?
Readings
- Jerome McGann, “The Rationale of Hypertext,” online here
Week Sixteen (Dec 6): Final Meeting: What is writing?
Will your answer at the end of the semester be different from your answer at the beginning?
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