BOOK STUDIES CONCENTRATION PROPOSAL
Motion: That Oberlin College establish a new interdisciplinary concentration in Book Studies.
II. Rationale
Book Studies comprises “Book History” -- how books shape and are shaped by cognitive, cultural, economic, technological, and political forces -- as well as “Book Arts” -- the aesthetic, compositional, and creative dimensions of books, whether in the form of manuscripts, letterpress, hypertext, or artists’ books. Book Studies encompasses the social and cultural history of books/texts and their transmission, as well as artisanal and artistic approaches to the book as represented by book artists, illustrators, graphic designers, binders, fine press printers, and others engaged in studying the relationships between text and image. Book history and book arts are mutually reinforcing and inherently interdisciplinary. Artists’ books, for example, draw on the form of the book for creative engagement with issues and ideas that may involve history, politics, personal narrative, and poetry as well as aesthetics.
The “book” in Book Studies extends beyond the printed codex to embrace all formats, from cuneiform tablets to electronic media. The study of the book--as a material, cultural, sociological, religious, and artistic artifact--reaches all corners of the globe and extends into all eras. Book Studies attends to both hegemonic and divergent voices.
Because it encompasses a diversity of cultures and time periods, Book Studies also covers a diverse range of academic fields and methods. It brings together areas of inquiry and knowledge that have normally been institutionalized as discrete disciplines, including but not limited to: media studies, history, literary history, creative writing, anthropology, musicology and ethnomusicology, Africana Studies, religion, art, art history, East Asian Studies, psychology, library science, language study, chemistry (book conservation), environmental studies, cartography and education. As a field, book studies is thus at the center of the new synergies emerging in liberal arts education.
Book Studies at Oberlin will foster three of the college’s broad educational goals, as reaffirmed and sharpened in the current strategic plan: 1. Help students draw connections across the curriculum. 2. Better integrate Oberlin’s exceptional resources for experiential learning (AMAM, the Conservatory, the library system). 3. Prepare students for fulfilling, creative and socially engaged professional lives post-graduation.
We propose to offer Book Studies as a concentration, not a stealth major or minor; our goal is to provide pathways for students, faculty and staff interested in books as communication, material culture, and artistic media on a global scale. Bridging theory and practice, history and contemporary culture, the intellectual and the artistic, Western and non-Western, Book Studies will encourage connections across the curriculum and allow students to tailor a wide variety of courses to their particular interests. The concentration thus counters the perception of Oberlin departments as silos while serving as a model for a holistic approach to liberal arts education.
Oberlin’s long-standing goal, newly affirmed in the strategic plan, has been to integrate the resources of the College of Arts and Sciences, the Conservatory of Music, and the Allen Memorial Art Museum in order to offer students more opportunities for integrated and experiential learning. A Book Studies Concentration will greatly contribute to this effort while also highlighting other superior institutional resources: the Clarence Ward Art Library’s Special Collections (especially its extensive artists’ books holdings), the Main Library’s Special Collections (rich in both the history of the book and the book arts), the new letterpress studio (housed in Mudd 212), and music Special Collections in the Conservatory Library (notably the Eric Selch Collection). In drawing on the library’s rich collections of historically significant books and scores, artists’ books, manuscripts, print artifacts, and printing equipment, this concentration will make exemplary use of Oberlin’s extraordinary resources.
The Book Studies Concentration will also help forward the goal pursued by college and university libraries around the country of transforming library special collections from underutilized repositories of precious items into teaching spaces and living collections. Similar to the way faculty have mobilized the collections of the Allen Memorial Art Museum in their teaching, Book Studies classes taught with special collections make abstract concepts come alive for students through meaningful encounters with objects and artifacts. More generally, the inclusions of “lab” sessions in most Book Studies courses offers a model of learning that helps bridge the humanities and the sciences. In Book Studies, lab sessions can take place in the Goodrich Room shared by the the library’s Special Collections Department and Oberlin College Archives, the Allen Memorial Art Museum, the Art Library, the letterpress studio, an art studio, a concert space, or a computer lab.
By fulfilling the college’s goals of integrating the existing--and truly exceptional--resources for experiential learning, Book Studies offers a potential model for future concentrations.
Why Book Studies Now?
Book Studies has emerged in the 21st century as an exciting field of study. While we are still in an age of books, books are changing. Digital technology is altering the ways they are published, read, stored, and circulated. More broadly, today’s “digital revolution” is often considered a change as dramatic as Gutenberg’s invention of movable type and the shift from manuscripts to printed books. The competition and collaboration among media have far-reaching political, social, cognitive, and economic implications. The ability to draw historical parallels empowers students to make intellectual sense of current changes. In an information age, in which it is vital that students learn to think critically and creatively about how information and knowledge are packaged and disseminated, Book Studies is an important component of liberal arts education.
As the current strategic plan emphasizes, there is increased pressure on costly liberal arts colleges to offer a return on their students’ and parents’ investments with promising professional opportunities after graduation. Book Studies, an interdisciplinary field that encompasses the social sciences and the humanities, is rich in future career possibilities. It alerts students to and prepares them for careers in new media, art and design, academia, education, conservation, publishing in various media, archives, and librarianship. This concentration encourages students to pursue internships as an important part of their intellectual and practical training. These internships can in turn guide students towards future career paths.
What is most exciting about Book Studies is the ways in which it prompts students to think both creatively and critically about new information technologies. Tracing technologies of reading and writing throughout history and across the globe provides students with rich context in which to better understand the cultural significance of current forms of communication and information storage, from social media to data mining. Book Studies thus encourages students to develop skills of critical thinking, a core value of liberal arts education, while placing equal emphasis on helping students think practically about future employment opportunities.
The future of the liberal arts depends upon training a generation of students to think in innovative ways about how best to guarantee that knowledge will be preserved and freely accessible to all. The concentration will allow students to consider the following urgent questions:
1. How does the “digital revolution” enable us to reconceptualize the book and the activities for which it is central: reading, authorship and writing, storing information, disseminating ideas, spurring dialogue and conversation, and creating new forms?
2. How does the very opportunity to reimagine the book open up new disciplinary and interdisciplinary horizons; reveal new models for collecting, editing and disseminating information; inspire new artistic and intellectual practices?
3. How can we also profit from this particular moment in the history of books to contribute to the future of liberal arts education and its role in shaping the world?
Jonathan Rose, an outspoken advocate of Book Studies and a prominent book historian, stresses the ability of Book Studies to accomplish the intellectual and professional goals of a liberal arts education: “Without neglecting the aesthetic and humanistic aspects of the book, [Book Studies] has a strong vocational component, preparing students for careers in new media, publishing, journalism, information science, and the book arts.” Book Studies also promotes global understanding: “teach[ing] students how different societies create, distribute, use, and exchange information.”
By instituting a Book Studies Concentration, Oberlin would join the vanguard of undergraduate institutions taking steps to establish this new area of study. Smith College recently instituted a Book Studies Concentration and Goucher College offers a minor in Book Studies. A number of other peer institutions (Wellesley, Amherst, Grinnell, Vassar, and Carleton College) are at various stages in their creation of Book Studies as a curricular area. The goal of institutions involved in this mission is to enrich liberal arts education and to prepare students for post-Oberlin professions as well as to be thoughtful and creative participants in the future production and dissemination of knowledge. Students who are interested in an excellent liberal arts education along with opportunities to learn about book history and book arts could look to Oberlin as a place to pursue those interests.
Learning Goals
Book Studies pursues a number of interrelated learning goals. To most clearly identify these goals we have divided book studies into two core approaches: 1) history and theory, and 2) practice.
History and Theory
Book history trains students to identify all the contributors involved in the making of a book (printers, publishers, artists, typographers, booksellers, editors, readers, owners, and the many other participants in the production, transmission, and reception of books). In productive and significant ways, book history challenges and complicates the very notion of authorship. Students also learn to think in more complex ways about the relationships between artistic and economic interests, individual talent and collective creativity, intellectual and physical labor, producers, distributors, and consumers of culture. Hands-on experience with different writing technologies, from ancient clay tablets to e-books, gives students a sense of the role of technology in the creation and dissemination of ideas.
The history of reading and reception offers students a grasp of the global history of reading cultures, habits, and oral traditions. Important topics include:
the shifts from reading aloud to silent reading, and from reading in groups to solitary reading;
the persistence of scribal cultures in the age of print;
the relationships between sound and symbol;
the use of scores in relation to performance;
the relationship of working classes to the “classics”;
the novel and the post-colonial world;
class and/or race and the formation of reading groups and book clubs;
gender and literary instruction.
These topics in book studies also make students aware of their own reading practices and invite them to consider the cultural, social, and political stakes of how and what we read.
Practice
Descriptive Bibliography is the study of the book and related communicative media as material and cultural objects. This discipline teaches students how to examine physical books and print media for evidence about their production, history of ownership, reception, and circulation. This field is also involved in the establishment of new scholarly editions of texts and several forms of digital scholarship.
Book Arts enables students to bring together ideas and activities they tend to view as separate or even at odds; making and creating go hand in hand with thinking and analyzing. Through artists’ books and through calligraphy, illustration, letterpress printing, papermaking, typeface design, and electronic creations, students’ physical engagement in the making of books enriches their intellectual understanding of the nature and history of the book, illuminating ways in which medium and message are inseparable. By studying and creating artists’ books, for example, students develop a visual language to express narrative, history, and aesthetic, understanding the book as both a historic artifact and an object of art.
Advising. Each student concentrating in Book Studies will have an advisor; the advisor will be a member of the Book Studies Committee. Book Studies will pioneer the advising portfolios which OCTET and the Dean of Studies Office are putting into place.
The Book Studies concentration requires
*The Gateway course and four others. At least one course must be from the history and theory category and one from the practice category; students must take courses in at least two departments in addition to the Gateway to Book Studies. An approved winter term project or summer internship can count in the Practice Category, although it does not count for college course credit; in such cases the concentration will comprise four full academic courses and the Practice component.
*An Intellectual Coherence Statement. Upon declaring a Book Studies Concentration, students will identify an advisor from the Book Studies Concentration Committee. In consultation with the advisor, they will write an intellectual coherence statement, outlining their intended course of study and their understanding of how the courses undertaken will relate to one another. This statement will be submitted to the Book Studies Concentration Committee and periodically revisited by the student in consultation with the advisor.
* A Culminating Experience. Book Studies concentrators will meet with Book Studies advisor and one other committee member to reflect on the concentration.
Optional. Book studies faculty will be happy to confer on honors theses or capstone projects.
Courses
(A) Gateway Course: “Introduction to Book Studies.” To be developed by Professor Sandy Zagarell in collaboration with the Book Studies Concentration Committee; initially to be taught by Professor Zagarell. See Appendix IV for a description of this course.
(B) Courses that Count as History and Theory (regularly offered with clear Book Studies component):
(As of 28 February 2016)
ANTH 204: Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology
ANTH 438: Literacies in Social Context
ARTS 306: Arts from 1960 to the Present
ARTS 373: History of Photography
ARTS310: Medieval Art
ARTS 315: Illuminated Manuscripts
ARTS 316: Monastic Art of the Middle Ages and Renaissance
ARTS 326: Synagogues, Churches and Mosques
ARTS 355: The Art of Japanese Prints
ARTS 406: Word and Image in Medieval Art
ARTS 416: Illustrated Books in Fifteenth Century
ARTS 461: Contemporary Photography: Book Archive, Picture
*CRWR 375: Workshop in Cartoons, Comics, and Graphic Narratives[1]
EAS 116: Premodern Japanese Literature
EAS 272: East Asian Book and Literary Cultures
ENGL 227: Romantics and Their World
ENG 315: The Eighteenth-Century British Novel and Print Culture