Title: Unbinding Books in Romantic Period Britain
Lecturer: Deidre Lynch (Professor of English, Harvard University)
Chairperson: JIN Wen (Professor of Comparative Literature, East China Normal University)
Date: 1:30 pm, May 19th, 2017 (Friday)
Venue: Room 5303, Building of School of Humanities, Minhang Campus, ECNU
Sponsor: Si-mian Institute for Advanced Studies in Humanities, ECNU
Abstract of the Lecture:
Nearly two decades ago the American critic William Paulson declared that “electronically stored and retrieved text, in comparison with its printed predecessor, is almost infinitely malleable and labile”; his contrast between the digital text’s openness to “modification and recontextualization” and “the stasis of cold print” has subsequently become a commonplace. I want to complicate this familiar before/after contrast between a print and a digital age: I do so in part by restoring the blank book--the book with nothing in it (at least not initially), the book that exists not to be read through but instead to be filled up--to its rightful place of prominence within our histories of the book. This paper surveys the multitude of ways in which avid readers in early nineteenth century Britain--people whose bookishness was in one sense beyond question, we might say--nonetheless demonstrated their discontent with the way the bound, paginated, and printed book preserves content by locking it down within an enduring organizational framework.
Brief Introduction of the Lecturer:
Deidre Lynch, Harvard University, Professor of English, voted one of their favorite professors at Harvard by the Class of 2016. Loving Literature: A Cultural History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. The Economy of Character: Novels, Market Culture, and the Business of Inner Meaning. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998(Winner of the 1999 MLA Prize for a First Book; subject of a 2006 symposium at the Stanford Center for the Study of the Novel). Member, Editorial Board, PMLA (2012-14).