MDA 599: Image / Word / Object: Rethinking the History of Books and Reading
MDA 599
Image / Word / Object: Rethinking the History of Books and Reading
Spring 2008
Thursdays 2-5pm
Seaver Classroom #3, Munger Building, Huntington Library
Professor Daniela Bleichmar, Depts. of Art History and Spanish and Portuguese bleichma@ usc.edu
Professor Deborah Harkness, Dept. of History
This graduate seminar seeks to rethink the history of the book and reading in the West from the Renaissance to the present by focusing on the visual and material aspects of books and book culture, in addition to the textual ones that have traditionally dominated the field. Our goal is to take a fresh approach to a field that is currently dominated by two questions: How fixed is print culture? How revolutionary was the print revolution? We propose in this course to move the study of the book in a new direction by approaching books as objects that contain both words and images. It is our contention that the history of the book should include a careful exploration of the material object of the book (delving into matters of design, manufacturing, codicology, and typography), as well as the complicated relationship between images and texts. Similarly, the history of reading can be fruitfully reconsidered by approaching it in terms of the history of seeing (albeit a specialized kind of seeing). In this way, we seek to rethink the history of the book from the vantage points of visual and material culture.
Course Mechanics
The course will meet directly at the Huntington Library, in Seaver Room # 3.
Course Requirements
The success of the seminar format depends on your attendance, dutiful completion of the reading assignments (which are challenging in both length and content), and active participation during our meetings.
Participation in discussion and oral presentations (50% of final grade): Each student will act as co-discussion leader twice over the course of the semester, preparing a short (ca. 10-min.) introduction to the week’s readings and setting up questions for discussion. All students will give brief presentations of their final research projects on our last class meeting.
Written assignments (50% of final grade): The major requirement for the seminar is a final research project on a topic of relevance to the course. The research project can be in the form of a paper (about 25- to 30-pages in length), or take another format (online resource, exhibition, exhibition plan, interactive media, etc.), upon agreement with the instructors.
Schedule of Meetings
01/17: Introduction to the history of the book & reading
- Finkelstein, David, and Alistair McCleery (eds.), The Book History Reader (New York: Routledge, 2001, 2nd. ed. 2006), pp. 1-120 and 277-291
- Eisenstein, Elizabeth, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983; 2nd.ed. 2005)
- “Forum: How Revolutionary was the Print Revolution,” in American Historical Review, vol. 107, no. 1 (February 2002), pp. 84-128, with contributions by Anthony Grafton, Elizabeth Eisenstein, and Adrian Johns [ Available on Blackboard under “Course Documents”]
- Price, Leah, “Reading: The State of the Discipline,” Book History 7 (2004): 303-320 [Available on Blackboard under “Course Documents” or online: click here to access article in PDF]
- BROWSE the journal Book History (1998-2007, 10 vols.) [Available online at: http://muse.jhu.edu.libproxy.usc.edu/journals/book_history/]
Can we identify the main topics, themes, approaches, methodologies, etc. of book history?
Recommended Reading:
- Chartier, Roger, “Crossing Borders in Early Modern Europe. Sociology of Texts and Literature,” trans. Maurice Elton, Book History 8 (2005): 37-50 [available online]
- Febvre, Lucien and Henri-Jean Martin, The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing 1450-1800 (London: Verso Books, [1984], reprinted 1997)
01/24: Making Books
***Presentation by Stephen Tabor, Curator of Early Printed Books, Huntington Library***
- McKitterick, David, Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order, 1450-1830 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003)
- Twyman, Michael, The British Library guide to printing history and techniques (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998)
- The Book History Reader, pp. 134-189 and 255-274
- Consult “Making the Book:” http://www.brynmawr.edu/Library/exhibits/BooksPrinters/making.html
Recommended Reading:
- Gaskell, Philip, A New Introduction to Bibliography (Oak Knoll Books, 2000)
- http://www.ndl.go.jp/incunabula/e/index.html
“Dawn of Western Printing: Incunabula”: Detailed online exhibit with detailed information about printing techniques, from the National Diet Library, Japan.
- Making medieval books: http://web.ku.edu/~bookhist/medbook1.html
- Making printed books: http://web.ku.edu/~bookhist/medbook2.html
- Diringer, David, The book before printing: ancient, medieval, and oriental (New York: Dover Publications, 1982)
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***01/30, Special Lecture, Seth Lerer (Stanford University), “Aesop’s Fables: Literature and the Imagination, from Medieval to Early Modern” 7:30 p.m., Friends Hall, The Huntington Library
Description: this lecture will follow the transformations of Aesop’s Fables in the worlds of education, literature, politics, and intellectual life from their revival in the Middle Ages to their first appearances in print. Illustrations from the Huntington’s collections will illuminate their impact on the visual imagination, in addition to the ways that manuscript compilers and early printers used the Fables to create books of intellectual authority and social impact.
01/31: Books and Readers
*** 1-2:30 pm. Invited speakers: William Sherman (University of York) & Matthew Eddy (Durham University), Overseers Room, Huntington Library. Description: A public presentation on the history of the book co-sponsored by Visual Studies, the Long 18th Century Seminar, EMSI, and IBIS. Join as William Sherman moves us “Towards a Pre-History of Collage and Matthew Eddy considers “Words in the Mind and on the Page: Dugald Stewart, Memory and Taking Notes.” There will be a question and answer period following the two talks. This presentation will be followed by a seminar discussion for students enrolled in MDA 599 at USC in Seaver Classroom #3.***
- Cavallo, Guglielmo and Roger Chartier (eds.), A History of Reading in the West , trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Amherst : University of Massachusetts Press, 2003)
- Sherman, William, “Towards a History of the Manicule,” 2005 [Available online at: http://www.livesandletters.ac.uk/papers/FOR_2005_04_002.html]
- Ann Blair, “Reading Strategies for Coping with Information Overload ca. 1550-1700,” Journal of the History of Ideas (2003), pp. 11-28 [Available online]
Recommended Reading:
- Ginzburg, Carlo, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-century Miller, translated by John and Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, reprint 1992)
- Moss, Ann, Printed Commonplace-books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996)
- Robert Darnton, “First Steps Towards a History of Reading,” in The Kiss of Lamourette, pp. 154-187
- Miall, David S., “Empirical Approaches to Studying Literary Readers: The State of the Discipline,” Book History 9 (2006): 291-311 [Available online: access article in PDF]
02/07: The Book as a Visual Object
***Presentation by Alan Jutzi, Avery Chief Curator, Huntington Library***
- Hessen, Anke te, The World in a Box: The Story of an Eighteenth-Century Picture Encyclopedia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002)
- Barchas, Janine, “Prefiguring genre: Frontispiece portraits from Gulliver’s Travels to Millenium Hall,” Studies in the Novel, vol. 30, no. 2 (Summer 1998): 260-286 [Available on Blackboard under “Course Documents” or online at: http://proquest.umi.com.libproxy.usc.edu/pqdweb?index=8&did=32280437&SrchMode=3&sid=1&Fmt=6&VInst=PROD&VType=PQD&RQT=309&VName=PQD&TS=1194126462&clientId=5239&aid=2]
- Garvey, Ellen Gruber, “Scrapbook, Wishbook, Prayerbook: Trade Card Scrapbooks and the Missionary Work of Advertising,” The Scrapbook in American Life (Temple University Press, 2006), pp. 97-115. [Available on Blackboard under “Course Documents”]
- Peltz, Lucy, “The Pleasure of the Book: Extra-illustration, an 18th-century Fashion,” Things (Summer 1998), v. 8, pp. 7-32 [Available on Blackboard under “Course Documents”]
- Pointon, Marcia, Hanging the head: portraiture and social formation in eighteenth-century England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), ch. 2: “Illustrious Heads,” pp. 53-78 [Available on Blackboard under “Course Documents”]
Recommended Reading:
- Barchas, Janine, Graphic Design, Print Culture, and the Eighteenth-Century Novel (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003)
- Castleman, Riva and Richard E. Oldenburg, A Century of Artists’ Books (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2002)
- Drucker, Johanna, The Century of Artists’ Books (New York: Granary Books, 1996)
02/14: The Illustrated Book
***Presentation by Mary Robertson, William A. Moffett Chief Curator of Manuscripts, Huntington Library***
- Jonathan Alexander, Medieval Illuminators and Their Method of Work (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992)
- Camille, Michael, “The Tres Riches Heures: An Illustrated Manuscript in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Critical Inquiry (1990): 72 – 107 [Available online]
- Berg, Keri A., “Contesting the Page: The Author and the Illustrator in France, 1830–1848,” Book History 10 (2007): 69-101 [Available online]
Recommended Reading:
- Haskell, Francis, The painful birth of the art book (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1987)
- Harthan, John, The History of the Illustrated Book. The Western Tradition (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1981)
- Katz, Bill (ed.), A History of Book Illustration. 29 Points of View (Metuchen, NJ and London: Scarecrow Press, 1994)
02/21: Illustration? Image as information: anatomy, botany, geography
***Presentation by Dan Lewis, Dibner Senior Curator, Huntington Library***
- Daston, Lorraine and Peter Galison, “The image of objectivity,” Representations, 40 (1992): 81-128 [Available online]
- Macgregor, William B., “The authority of prints: an early modern perspective,” Art history (1999), v. 22, no. 3, pp. 389-420 [Available online]
- Parshall, Peter, “Imago contrafacta: images and facts in the northern Renaissance,” Art History (1993) 16: 554-79 [Available online]
- Kusukawa, Sachiko, “Leonhart Fuchs on the importance of pictures,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 58: 403-427 [Available online]
- Jordanova, Ludmilla, “Gender, generation and science: William Hunter’s obstetrical atlas,” in Nature displayed. Gender, science and medicine 1760-1820 (New York: Addison Wesley Longman, 1999), pp. 183-202 [Available on Blackboard under “Course Documents”]
Recommended Reading:
- LOOK THROUGH: Cazort, Mimi; Monique Kornell; and K.B. Roberts; The ingenious machine of nature: four centuries of art and anatomy (Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 1996)
- Griffiths, Antony, Prints and Printmaking. An Introduction to the History and Techniques (London: British Museum, 1980)
- Alpers, Svetlana, “The Mapping Impulse in Dutch Art,” in The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983)
02/28: Words & Images
*** Invited speakers: Anne Jones (Smith College) & Tita Rosenthal (USC)***
IMPORTANT: This week our class will meet at USC, room SOS 250.
- Rosenthal, Margaret F. and Ann Rosalind Jones, Cesare Vecellio’s Habiti antichi et moderni: The Clothing of the Renaissance World (Europe, Asia, Africa, The Americas) (Thames and Hudson, 2008), introduction [Available on Blackbaord]
- Defert, Daniel, “A Secular Ethnographic Genre of the Sixeenth Century: The Costume Book (An Essay in Ethno-iconography,” (trans. Ann Rosalind Jones); published originally as “Un genre ethnographique profane au XVIe: Les livres d’habits (Essai d’ethno-iconographie),” in Britta Rupp-Eisenreich (ed.), Histoires de l’Anthropologie (XVIe-XIXe siècles) (Paris: Klincksieck, 1984), pp. 25-41 [Available on Blackboard under “Course Documents”]
- Wilson, Bronwen, The World in Venice: Print, the City and Early Modern Culture (University of Toronto Press, 2005), chap. 2, “Costume and the Boundaries of Bodies” [Available on Blackboard under “Course Documents”]
*** 03/01: Special event: Roundtable on the History of the Book, Huntington Library ***
Invited speakers: Peter Stallybrass (University of Pennsylvania), Janine Barchas (University of Texas, Austin) and Ellen Gruber Garvey (New Jersey City University)
03/06: The Social and Economic Lives of Books
- Darnton, Robert, The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (New York: Norton, 1996)
- The Book History Reader, pp. 308-376
- Kirsop, Wallace, “The State of the Discipline: Booksellers and Their Customers: Some Reflections on Recent Research,” Book History 1 (1998): 283-303 [Available online]
- Davis, Natalie Zemon, “Beyond the Market: Books as Gifts in Sixteenth-Century France,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (1983), pp. 69-88 [Available online]
Recommended Reading:
- Wilson, Adrian, The making of the Nuremberg chronicle (Amsterdam: Nico Israel, 1977)
03/13: The Places of Books: Libraries, Cabinets, Workshops
- Naudé, Gabriel, Advis pour dresser une bibliothèque and/or English translation by John Evelyn, Instructions concerning erecting of a library (London, 1661) [Available online through EEBO]
- Chartier, Roger, The order of books: readers, authors and libraries in Europe between the fourteenth and eighteenth centuries, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994)
- McKitterick, David, “Introduction” and “Books and Other Collections,” in David McKitterick (ed.), The making of the Wren Library, Trinity College, Cambridge (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 1-27 and 50-109 [Available on Blackboard under “Course Documents”]
Recommended Reading:
- Chartier, Roger, “Libraries without Walls,” Representations (Spring, 1993), no. 42, Special Issue: Future Libraries, pp. 38-52 [Available online]
- Richard Yeo, “A Solution ot the Multitude of Books: Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopaedia (1728) as ‘The Best Book in the Universe’,” Journal of the History of Ideas (2003), pp. 61-72 [Available online]
- Ophir, Adi, “A Place of Knowledge Recreated: The Library of Montaigne,” Science in Context 4 (1990) [Available online]
03/20: No meeting, Spring Break
*** 03/24: Special lecture, Robert Darnton (Harvard University) at the Huntington Library , details TBA***
03/27: E-Culture
*** Invited speaker: Elizabeth Osder , visiting professor, Annenberg School***
- The Book History Reader, pp. 485-525
- Darnton, Robert, “The New Age of the Book,” The New York Review of Books, vol. 46, no. 5 (March 18, 1999) [Available online at: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/546]
- Jan Broadway, “W(h)ither the Copy Text?” [Available online at: http://www.livesandletters.ac.uk/papers/FOR_2003_04_001.pdf]
- Reed, Christopher A., “Gutenberg and Modern Print Culture: The State of the Discipline II,” Book History 10 (2007): 291-315 [Available online: access article in PDF]
- Toobin, Jeffrey, “Google’s Moon Shot. The quest for the universal library,” The New Yorker (February 5, 2007) [Available online: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/02/05/070205fa_fact_toobin]
- Grafton, Anthony, “Future Reading. Digitization and its discontents,” The New Yorker (November 5, 2007) [Available online at: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/11/05/071105fa_fact_grafton]
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*** 03/28: Special Lecture: Pacific Coast Conference of British Studies Plenary Talk by Linne Moody, Director of the Center for Medieval Studies, University of York. 1:45-3:15 pm, Huntington Library. Title: “The Scribe of the Ellesmere and Hengwrt MSS. of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales”
04/03: No meeting: research
04/10: No meeting: research
04/17: No meeting: research
04/24: No meeting: research
05/01: Student presentations and class wrap-up.
Books to purchase for the course
Available at the campus bookstore.