The Book
2002-2003
Topic Director: Peter
Stallybrass, Walter H. and Leonore C.
Annenberg Professor in the Humanities, and Professor
of English
The
Book has
been the subject of innovative interdisciplinary work
in the last two decades, becoming more visible the more
its demise has been predicted. Will the book, which
emerged as we know it in the first century of the Common
Era, survive as an important cultural form in the third
millennium? Does our present information overload make
it less likely that we will store information in the
bulky form of books, as opposed to in computers and
on microfilms? Will new computer technologies make books
as much the objects of nostalgia as gramophone records
have become?
Anxieties about
the disappearance of the book have made us increasingly
aware of the central role that books of every kind play
in our daily lives: picture books, telephone books,
medical advice, restaurant guides, detective novels,
self-help books, cookbooks, dictionaries, scholarly
monographs, fashion magazines, bibles, computer manuals,
date-books, city guides, and so on.
Perhaps books
have tended to become invisible because they are so
omnipresent that we take them for granted. But many
of the features that we expect to find in books (title
pages, word separation, page numbers, alphabetical indexes)
were late developments as the book was adapted for different
purposes and audiences. What are the most important
changes that have taken place in the history of the
book? The displacement of the scroll by the manuscript
book? Word separation? Silent reading? The emergence
of the printed book? Desktop publishing? Can some or
all of these changes be described as revolutions?
The Penn Humanities
Forum for 2002–2003 examined books as physical artifacts,
cultural technologies, and sources of knowledge, devotion,
and passion. We looked at the material surfaces of books
(surfaces made from papyrus, rice, animal skins, rags,
grasses, wood pulp) and at different forms of written
and printed inscription (writing or painting with quills,
brushes, or ballpoints; printing with wood blocks, hand
presses, or laser technologies).
Do these different
surfaces and methods of writing and printing shape or
effect what has been written or printed? And who are
the "authors" of the books we read? Scribes, patrons,
publishers, the "authorities" upon whom a writer draws?
When Roger Stoddard writes that "authors do not write
books," he is not trying to make a theoretical point.
He is reminding us that a printed book is not the product
of an author's hand but of compositors, pressmen, proofreaders,
and publishers, of papermakers and binders.
How is the material
production of books related to a writer's inspiration?
Do we need to rethink inspiration (meaning being breathed
into) in relation to imitation, the dominant model of
writing from Classical Antiquity to the Enlightenment?
How are books marketed and distributed? (Penn owns a
large collection of traveling salesmen's mock-ups, showing
the different bindings, engravings, and even paper quality
that a customer could order for the "same" book.) What
differences have the .com companies made to the selling
of books? How are books catalogued and stored in bookshops,
warehouses, libraries, and in people's homes?
Renewed interest
in the ways that books are made and marketed has also
brought increasing attention to the reader, both in
fiction (e.g., Borges, Calvino, Lessing) and in literary
and cultural studies (e.g., Chartier, Darnton, Radway,
Stock). How do the physical size, genre classifications,
pricing, and marketing of a book affect the ways in
which it is read? How do readers customize books for
their own purposes? What can marginalia, bookmarks,
and even wear and tear tell us about reading practices?
One can, for example, find an extraordinary variety
of markings in bibles: children's doodles, readers'
signatures (sometimes repeated again and again, as if
the reader was learning how to write his or her name);
family trees; cross-references; notes by binders, booksellers,
and librarians; paste-ins, including pictures, seals,
clothing, even hair; corrections; criticisms; manuscript
additions of other texts. How do book reviews (in magazines,
newspapers, or professional journals) shape readers'
desires and expectations?
Excellent new
work is considering the intersections between literacy,
reading, and power. Who receives access to books in
the first place? Who is trained to read? Who is excluded
from such training? Is writing an accomplishment, or
is it, as was often conceptualized in Classical Antiquity
and the Middle Ages, a mechanical art, subordinate to
the oratorical skills of the elite? If books are a crucial
form of cultural memory, who, then, decides what is
to be remembered and how? How does censorship determine
what is publishable? How, on the other hand, have prisons
often been the place where the incarcerated acquire
access to, and legitimation of, their writing?
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Programs & Fellows
2002–2003
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