January 7
D.F. Mackenzie Quote from “The Dialectics of Bibliography Now”:
“Whatever its metamorphoses, the different physical forms of any text, and the intentions they serve, are relative to a specific time, place and person. This creates a problem only if we want meaning to be absolute and immutable”
-Pretty sure I have an understanding of the assignment we’re supposed to be doing. No idea what I’m going to be doing it on.
January 21
- Thomas Tanselle Quote from “The Editorial Problem of Final Authorial Intention”:
“What controls the editor’s freedom of interpretation is his self-imposed limitation: he is concerned only with that intention which his knowledge of the author and the period allows him to attribute to the author” (144)
January 26 RBSC Group A
February 4
Paul C. Gutjahr and Megan L. Benton Quotes from “Reading the Invisible”:
“A book is created when a text is transformed by print, when it is literally shaped into a material object whose visual and tactile features render it perceptible and accessible to others” (65)
“Just as we can hear music only by listening to a particular performance of it, we can read a text only by reading a typographic presentation of it. Typography, then, is what Bringhurst calls “an essential act of interpretation, full of endless opportunities for insight or obtuseness” (65)
March 8
Adrian Johns Quote from “Introduction: The Book of Nature and the Nature of the Book”:
“The unifying concept of Einstein’s argument is that of ‘print culture’. This ‘culture’ is characterized primarily in terms of certain traits that print is taken to endow on texts. Specifically, those produced in such an environment are subject to conditions of standardization, dissemination and fixity…According to Einstein, printing meant the mass reproduction of precisely the same text, repeatable on subsequent occasions and in different locations” (272)
March 29
Franco Moretti Quote from “Style, Inc. Reflections on Seven Thousand Titles”:
That’s why long titles disappeared: because between the size of the market, and the length of titles, a strong negative correlation emerged: as one expanded, the other contracted” (529)