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2002-2003 |
Faculty Fellows |
Project
Shane Butler
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Project
Karen Detlefsen Dr. Detlefsen is intrigued by the ambivalent and complex relationship between philosophers and books. In the early 17th century Descartes wrote, "As soon as I was old enough to emerge from the control of my teachers, I entirely abandoned my literary studies. Resolving to seek no knowledge other than that which could be found in myself or else in the great book of the world, I spent the rest of my youth traveling." Such a statement indicates the emergence of attitudes that eschewed the authoritarian knowledge, especially knowledge contained within the books of Scholastic philosophers. Women from the 17th and 18th centuries experienced a similar reaction. Freedom from books' authority - often housed in monasteries and universities from which women were barred - and the belief that one could rely upon knowledge found within one's own soul, allowed women to enter philosophical discourse in large numbers for the first time in history. Their original philosphies of nature did much to advance the discipline. These musings can be found in their private correspondence with their more famous male counterparts. Elisabeth of Bohemia’s letters with Descartes and Damaris Masham’s correspondence with Leibniz are most notable. However, these letters, as well as their philosophical treatises, were often not published in the course of their lifetimes. Or, they were published anonymously because of women’s desire to avoid public censure. Hence, the majority of women philosophers’ works from this period reside in a handful of rare book rooms. This inaccessiblity partly accounts for the history of philosophy - the point in history at which we have arrived. With this in mind, Dr. Detlefsen will explore why it is that some books profoundly shape our intellectual history while other books, other sources of knowledge are lost. |
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Emma Dillon Thirteenth-century France was the site of unprecedented innovations in the realms of polyphonic composition, innovations that were at once facilitated and determined by the development of new, prescriptive forms of musical notation. Dr. Dillon will investigate how this new materiality in music-making fundamentally changed the ways medieval singers and listeners engaged with sound. Notated polyphony permitted greater forms of textural and textual complexity; as a result, new semantic problems – ethical and musical in nature – arose. Perhaps the most extreme tension between sound and sense was embodied by the motet. Its juxtaposition of different voices singing different texts, often in different languages, rendered texts meaningless even as they were animated in sound - the verbal sense lost in the complex web of polyphony. How did audiences engage with music that seeks to present more than the ear can hear? How did they negotiate the gap between sensual sound and textual meaning? What did this gap signify, particularly when the meaning at stake was sacred in naure? To wrestle with these issues, Dr. Dillon deploys some fifty manuscripts from northern France that date to ca. 1220-1300. They play witness to the extraordinary diversity of forms through which music was transmitted, ranging from simple rolls designed for easy use in performance; to the compilation of music among vernacular and Latin texts; to much more complex and elaborate compendia devoted solely to music, lavishly illuminated and scrupulously designed. By exploring the order, layout, and pictorial decoration of music and cross-referencing other forms of textual organization, we may see how book design could aid the unraveling of sonic complexities. Readers did not use books like modern scores. Rather, cues to other readerly modes established new styles of reading the motet, styles which mimicked and supplemented the complex acts of listening to polyphony, in the quiet, contemplative space of the book. |
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Michael Gamer
Dr. Gamer’s investigation brings two bodies of critical writing – recent theoretical work on collecting and museum culture, and historicist work on 19th century poetic collections – to bear on the 19th century canonization of Romantic poetry. In doing so, he poses several questions: How do certain writers become national institutions, specifically Britain’s Robert Burns?; Why do the acts of literary canonization coincide with the founding of Britain’s first explicitly national museums?; What does this process have to do with the history of authorship?
Figuring prominently in his project is the changing conception of authorship at the turn of the 19th century. By comparing the idealized notion of the author, identified in the works of Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, and other Romantic writers, with alternative types of authorship – newspaper poets, Gothic dramatists, and the poet laureate, Gamer challenges late 18th century notions of literary authority. Romantic writers actively worked to re-configure themselves as independent, autonomous authors whose books had lasting value (i.e. were worthy of being collected) for themselves, independent collectors, and national institutions.
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Cristle Collins Judd
Dr. Judd's proposes a new approach to the history of western musical theory. Dialogue in music sits most directly in the realm of the history of the book. The decision to write musical texts in dialogue had an extraordinary impact on resulting works. Usually the fact that a musical treatise is in dialogue form is dispensed with in a single sentence or two along the lines that it "is in accordance with classical taste of the day." but this begs a host of related questions: What classical taste? What does it mean when an author chooses this rather than some other format? What can dialogue tell us about one's theorizing? And perhaps more to the point, what can music and writing about music tell us about the nature of the Renaissance dialogue? Writing about music is almost invisible in the larger studies of the genre of dialogue. Rather than merely filling an iconic role, notation in musical treatises, in fact, reopens, the question of orality and reader participation in fundamentally new ways. Non-discursive examples display an inborn resistance to the frame of the text, to textuality, to utterance, perhaps more so than music. There are times when such notation does serve a purely iconic function - when we are meant to see notation, but not hear it. At other times, the notation serves as a generalized reminder of music as sounding phenomenon, and at still other times, the notation is meant to be "read" and hard, although the reading and hearing may take many forms. Thus, music examples function simultaneously as visual image and aural trace. What is implicit in a dialogue and particularly complicated in a dialogue about music is the attempt to disguise the rupture of words and notation beneath a mask of verisimilitude, accomplished both through the mode of exposition, but also through the physical placement of words and music. |
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Robert St. George
Legal books were a source of oral performance as well as repositories of accumulated knowledge. Central in Dr. St. George's work is 18th century lawyers' "spoken books." In what ways did early American lawyers, as a nascent professional group, rely upon reading aloud in public as a means of consolidating occupational authority and making their claims to discovery of "legal truth" convincing as oral performance?
The first step towards occupational professionalism occurred with Boston attorney Jeremiah Gridley's establishment of Sodalitas in 1765. This polite discussion club for younger local lawyers included the likes of Oxenbridge Thatcher, Benjamin Pratt, William Cushing, James Otis, Josiah Quincy, and John Adams. Detailed documentary and empirical evidence of Sodalitas members' books, marginalia, and court jottings reveal the performative use of books in court. Determining the general reading patterns of these early American attorneys, aside from legal texts, also informs a reconstruction of court performances. Dr. St. George recognizes that the extemporaneous languages of the pulpit, stage, and classical orator contained within non-legal texts were instrumental in shaping new styles of speech and gestures in courtroom settings. As it anchored the new paradigm of legal discourse in the private library and the archive of legal precedents it constitute, and as it articulated rather than masked the disappearing voice of the lawyer, the spoken book added a new semiotic force to the "trade in talk" of Sodalitas members in Boston's early legal community.
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