 |
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
2002-2003 |
Mellon Fellows |
Project
Sarah
L. Leonard
Courses During the first half of the 19th century, novels, memoirs, and popular accounts of life abroad became widely available and affordable to literate members of German society. A growing conviction that people were reading differently— for pleasure rather than edification, entertainment rather than worship—emerged on the literary landscape. However, popular reading habits produced anxiety in part because they reflected political and cultural uncertainties. Dr. Leonard investigates the creation, distribution, and cultural meaning of so-called "obscene print" in 19th-century Germany. She considers the official campaigns waged by police and courts in German cities to confiscate "immoral writings,” and to invent a legal language for prosecuting such texts. Dr. Leonard also examines the ongoing debates concerned with morality and proper gendered behavior which arose around these texts. This backlash was initiated by religious leaders, pedagogues, and physicians. Efforts to make sense of the popular book trade took different forms, yet all who commented on the subject shared the conviction that reading—particularly secular, pleasurable reading—could transform individuals and society for better or worse. |
Sarah L. Leonard
|
|
Project
Jennifer
Milligan Who gets to make claims about the “truth” of a nation’s past? Dr. Milligan examines the (re)writing and accessing of documentation related to French national history in the latter part of the 19th century. The French National Library and the Archives Nationales sit at the center of the relation between the citizen, nation, and state—an institutional constellation of politics mediated by reading and writing. Deeper fears about the power of the book and/or document to empower the citizen as reader and potential author, and thus agent, of national history engendered friction between these institutions. While documentation about the nation was contained in both, these two institutions filled different educative roles—the Library concerned with arts, science, and history and the archives being explicitly more political in nature. Given its political role, the Archives were all but inaccessible to the public in practice if not in law until the opening of a reading room in 1847. In the 1850s, historians pressured the Archives for access as the voice of history contained within its wall was considered to be the voice of the state. This modernization of the Archives allowed the institution to negotiate between state and scholar, authenticate political documents, and establish a hegemonic grasp over history’s writing. |
|
|
|
Project
Robert
L. Romanchuk Courses Out of the unlikely milieu of a 15th-century Russian monastery founded by a mystic and Hesychast came the first fruits of rational, Aristotelian thought. The Kirillov monastery at White Lake was established by Kirill and his disciples in the far north of the Muscovite state. A conflict over textual interpretations played itself out in this arena. Through their reading, most monks at Kirillov anticipated the recovery of books’ authoritative voices. These individuals considered interpretation a communicative act that directed and corrected their progress in monastic life. A smaller contingency of monks conceived of texts as sources of information, seeking knowledge through the reading, editing, and correcting of their books. Deploying the monastery’s well-preserved collection, currently housed in at the Russian National Library, Dr. Romanchuk systematically examines how habits of reading and interpreting can illuminate distinct social, spiritual, pedagogical and intellectual agendas. He is interested in drawing out the shift from communicative readings motivated by a religious figure to instrumental monastic readers who flourished in periods of fairly strict communal rule. |
|
|
|
Project
Jennifer
Snead Courses Amazon.com in the 18th Century Issues integral to 18th-century book production—
audience, distribution, piracy, chapbook reductions, compilations—challenge
21st-century models of “Enlightenment” authorship, authority,
and agency. Dr. Snead examines the role of John Wesley within this context
of mid- to late-eighteenth century English and American literary and print
culture. Wesley’s literary role as writer, editor, publisher, and
bookseller has often been neglected at the expense of his impact on the
religious practices of the day, namely his fostering of an overtly Christian
epistemology that focused on affective emotion. Dr. Snead’s project highlights Wesley’s
editorial methods not in an attempt to construct a coherent doctrine of
Methodism, but rather in terms of the general readership he sought and
mainly succeeded in reaching on both sides of the Atlantic. He strove
to educate an unlettered audience, an effort disavowed by his literary
contemporaries. As a “man of print,” Wesley is a central player
in fashioning a model of authority adequate for the demands of an increasingly
commercialized print marketplace. |
|
|
|
Project
Geoffrey
Turnovsky Courses How does the notion of authorship change as a result of commercialization? In the latter half of the 18th century, the “literary market” was increasingly becoming an integral part of French authors’ mental landscape. This “market” did not represent an external sphere equivalent to the Book Trade, but rather an intellectual construct or imagined space. Such a shift worked to modernize authorial practices. However, Enlightenment-era writers did not perceive the “market” in a homogeneous manner, and contradictory attitudes ranged from financial liberation to publication anxiety. Dr. Turnovsky traces this conceptual transformation of the Book Trade into a notion of the “literary market.” He focuses on how this process was affected by the changing hopes and fears of writers as these were altered by upheavals in the Enlightenment literary universe, notably by the decline of the traditional literary institutions and rise of commercial publishing. Ultimately, approaching the “literary market” as primarily a product of authorial expectations provides an opportunity to move beyond the posited opposition between Art and Commerce. |
|
|
