Graduate Course Description

Methods in the History of Books and Reading

Price, Leah

Competing models of authorship, printing, and reading; changing practices in the production, circulation and use of the printed word; material vs. verbal evidence; book history as/vs literary criticism, cultural history, history of ideas. Designed to broaden participants’ repertoire of methods and tools for analyzing material culture, this case-based course presupposes no prior knowledge. Instead, each participant will identify a book (or other printed object) from their own field of interest to examine through a different rubric every week, presenting their findings to the rest of the group; in order to ensure that the seminar provides practice in “teaching” your material to classmates in other time/place or disciplinary fields, students from across the humanities (history of science, art history, classics…) are especially welcome.

Learning goals:

• Broaden your repertoire of methods for interpreting texts and analyzing material culture
• Identify areas of interest for dissertation research, and situate those interests within theoretical and historiographical debates
• Develop the ability to break a research project into stages, to identify tools needed to pursue each, and to plan the most efficient way to acquire them.
• Familiarize yourself with library resources on campus and beyond
• Practice constructing arguments and marshaling primary & secondary texts to support your claims
• Gain practice in presenting your research to scholars in other time/place field

Requirements:

1. One 5-10-minute oral presentation, with handout that should summarize the week’s secondary readings, compare or contrast them with readings earlier in the semester, and identify a series of questions for the seminar to discuss.
2. One 5-minute max + 1 slide max presentation at the second class meeting of a “keyword” of your choice, for which you’ll take responsibility during class discussion for the remainder of the semester.
3. A bibliographic exercise comparing 2 objects held by a library at Rutgers-New Brunswick or elsewhere in the tristate area (due in Week 5). To help you identify the object(s), we’ll take two in-class field trips to collections off campus; funding will be provided for the field trips as well as for individual research trips.
4.  A posting to the seminar’s discussion board at least 24 hours before class, every week except those labeled “no posting.”
5. A proposal for the final paper (around 500 words); a 7-10-minute oral presentation of your final paper (which will normally still be in draft at this point) at the final seminar meeting; and a conference-length (=3-4,000 words) short paper on a topic of your choosing, which will ordinarily center on a book or other object chosen from your own research interests and will ideally have formed the focus of the leadup exercises as well.
6. In class discussion, willingness to teach your subfield to seminar members focused on other genres/times/places, to think together about methods and models from case studies outside your field that can be applied to your future dissertation work, to argue for your ideas, and to back them up with evidence marshaled both in advance and on the spot.

Books on order and on reserve:

• David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery (eds.), The Book History Reader (London: Routledge, 2006).
• Guglielmo Chartier and Roger Cavallo, A History of Reading in the West (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003). 978-1558494114. $27.50.
• Michelle Levy and Tom Mole (eds), The Broadview Reader in Book History (Ontario: The Broadview Press, 2014). 978-1554810888. $49.95. (Buy if possible).