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Literature, Book History,
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Ben-Gurion University, July 1-3, 2008
Senate Building, Room -136
Workshop Description
Over the last twenty years the field of book history has drawn increasing attention from scholars in a variety of disciplines. Historians, literary critics, anthropologists, media specialists, philosophers, geographers - all (and more) have found in book history an institutional home for work that often falls outside traditional disciplinary goals and practices. A recent special issue of PMLA (Publications of the Modern Language Association) on "The History of the Book and the Idea of Literature" (January 2006) is only one indication of the growing significance attached to this rapidly expanding area of research.
The workshop will address the theoretical and methodological complexities inherent in a field not only known by a "raft of aliases: book history, print culture, media studies, textual scholarship" (Leah Price 2006) but also invested in the assumption that it is fruitful and possible to speak across disciplines. Recent work on the history of reading has indeed shown that literature professors can borrow techniques, questions and rhetorical strategies from historians - and vice versa. Yet researchers in disparate fields bring diverse assumptions and expectations to the analysis of similar texts and phenomena. The workshop will address the interdisciplinary nature of book history, the inaccessibility of reading as an object of historical attention, and the longstanding divide between textual and contextual approaches to evidence and cultural value. We will refine a viable interdisciplinary methodology for the history of books and reading.