Current Courses
A graduate seminar on the nature of censorship and the way it actually operated in Stuart England, Bourbon France, the British Raj, Communist East Germany, and regimes vulnerable to the Internet.
Today we are all conscious of a technological revolution in how we read books. But this is not the first time such a major change has occurred. In late antiquity scrolls were replaced by the parchment codex (the book form as we think of it now) and in the mid-fifteenth century printed books started to replace manuscript books. In an age of digital publishing, it is more than ever pertinent to study the impact of material textuality, the definition of authorship, the production and reception of knowledge, and the established literary networks. For the last few decades, the history of print culture has developed into a broad and vibrant field of scholarship. The purpose of this course is to give a survey of bookmaking, publishing, and authorship from Gutenberg to the digital age, with an emphasis on the Early Modern period (1450-1800). The themes of the course include the questions of manuscript and print cultures, the materiality of texts (how does the form of a book impact the way we read it?), censorship, the rise of the author, the formation of copyright, and the literary market. In order for the students to acquire basic knowledge in book history and to develop their skills in textual analysis, this course proposes an overview of the historical context of bookmaking in conjunction with a wider analysis of the current trends and theories of recent scholarship.