• Cultures of the Book (ENGL 034, taught remotely Fall 2020)

    Author(s):
    Whitney Trettien (see profile)
    Date:
    2020
    Group(s):
    TM Book History, Print Cultures, Lexicography
    Subject(s):
    Books, History, Mass media, Bibliography
    Item Type:
    Syllabus
    Tag(s):
    Book history, History of the book, Media history
    Permanent URL:
    http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/hkwc-4206
    Abstract:
    The book: it’s a soothingly familiar technology, one we all know how to operate. Open the front covers to reveal the text; turn the page to continue reading. Yet even the most seemingly ordinary aspects of the book, like titles and page numbers, had to be invented. In this course, we will work to defamiliarize the book, investigating how the form we know to today came to be. We will conceptually pull apart the material codex into its constituent parts and examine them in a variety of social, historical, and literary contexts. While we will be focusing primarily on the Western book, we will also consider the history of the book in Mesoamerica and Asia, tracing the emergence of paper and moveable type back to Imperial China. We will also work comparatively to examine the codex in relation to other forms, like cuneiform tablets, scrolls, palm leaf manuscripts, and hard disk drives. Students will contribute directly to an ongoing public humanities project on the history of the book. Fall 2020 addendum: This course will be remote. Each Monday meeting will be synchronous; each Wednesday meeting will be an asynchronous assignment. Recordings will be provided for students in a time zone that prevents them from participating in synchronous classes.
    Metadata:
    xml
    Status:
    Published
    Last Updated:
    2 years ago
    License:
    Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
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