Chartier 1994

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Roger Chartier. The Order of Books. Trans. Lydia G. Cochrane. Stanford UP, 1994. Print.

Preface

  • vii [question/intervention] ...how did people in Western Europe between the end of the Middle Ages and the c18 attempt to master the enormously increased number of texts that firs the manuscript book and then print out into circulation?
    • Inventorying titles, categorizing works, and attributing texts were all operations that made it possible to set the world of the written word in order.
    • Our own age is the direct heir of this immense effort motivated by anxiety. It was in those decisive centuries, when the hand-copied Books was gradually replaced [not really replaced] by world composed in moveable type and printed on presses, that the acts and thoughts that are still our own were forged.
  • viii The dialectic between ways of imposing control and order on the world of books and reading, which is "by definition, rebellious and vagabond"— "recognizing its diverse modalities and multiple variations is the first aim of a history of reading that strives to grasp— in all their differences— communities of readers and their ‘arts of reading’."
  • ix Words and discourses exist only when they become physical realities and are inscribed in the pages of a book, transmitted by a voice or narrating, or spoken on the stage of a theatre. Understanding the principles that govern the ‘order of discourse’ supposed that the principles underlying the processes of production, communication, and reception of books (and other objects that bear writing) will also be deciphered in a rigorous manner.
    • linguistic materiality— see Hack 2005, and De Grazia & Stallybrass 1993 for "materiality of the text” (this supersedes McGann 1991’s bibliographic codes)
    • 9 ...there is no text apart from the physical support that offers it for reading (or hearing), hence there is no comprehension of any written piece that does not at least in part depending upon the forms in which it reaches the reader.
  • x Works are produced within a specific order that has its own rules, conventions, and hierarchies, but they escape all these and take on a certain density in their peregrinations— which can be in a very long time span— about the social world.
  • To consider in this way that all works are anchored in the practices and the institutions of the social world is not to postulate any general equivalence among all the products of the mind. Some, better than others, never exhaust [xi] their significative force. If we try to understand this by invoking the universality of beauty or the unity of human nature we will fall short of the truth. The essential game is being played elsewhere, in the complex, subtle, shifting relationships between the forms (symbolic or material) proper to works, which are unequally open to appropriation, and the habits or the concerns of the various publics for those works.

1 Communities of Readers

  • 1 quote from de Certeau about writing as accumulative vs. reading which "takes no measures against the erosion of time"
  • fundamental problem for the history of reading, a "history that hopes to inventory and make sense out of a practice (reading) that only rarely leaves traces, that is scattered in an infinity of singular acts, and that easily [2] shakes off all constraints"
  • The historian’s task is this to reconstruct the variations that differentiate the espaces lisibles— that is, the texts in their discursive and material forms— and those that govern the circumstances of their effectuation— that is, the readings, understood as concrete practices and as procedures of interpretation
    • McGann 1991 pushes on the idea that the text only exists when the reader reads it, as he does on 3
  • 3 against the structuralist and reception history idea of a "purely semantic definition of the text"
  • 3 ...Reading is always a practice embodied in acts, spaces, habits.
    • Jardine & Grafton 1990 for a famous case study
    • not just phenomenological: looking for “specific mechanisms that distinguish the various communities of readers and traditions of reading." (4)
  • 5 "New readers make new texts and their new meanings are a function of their new forms.” DF McKenzie [6] perspicaciously notes here the dual set of variations— variations in the readers’ resources and in textual and formal mechanisms— that any history that takes on the task of restoring the fluid and plural signification of texts must take into account.
    • again here a call for studying the old canon in new circumstances
  • 8 Reading is not uniquely an abstract operation of the intellect: it brings the body into play, it is inscribed in a space and a relationship with oneself or with others. This is why special attention should be paid to ways of reading that have disappeared from our contemporary world.
    • eg, Reading aloud
  • 9 important: these reading practices are often implicit in texts themselves: "The challenge matters because it reveals not only the distant foreignness of practices that were common long ago but also the specific structure of texts composed for uses that are not the uses of today’s readers of those same texts. In the 16th and 17th centuries the reading style implicit in a text, literary or not, was still often an oralizatjon of the text, and the ‘reader’ was an implicit auditor of a read discourse."
    • he gives the example of motifs in Quixote but in the C19 you could also example Bleak House (1853) as an example of serial reading inscribed in the text
  • 10 doubling down on critique of literary history based on abstracted "text" and also reception theory that doesn’t really account for mediation
  • 11 l/u McKenzie essay on Congreve, which he uses to make the point "Variations in the most purely formal aspects of a text’s presentation can thus modify both its register of reference and its mode of interpretation."
  • "triumph of white over black"... fragmenting the text into separate units [that echo] the intellectual or discursive articulation of the argument in the visual articulation of the page. Chopping up the text in this manner could have far-reaching implications where Scripture was concerned.
    • see Stallybrass 2002 and he quotes Locke about anxiety about the aphoristic (both do)
  • 12 ...when a text is transferred from one form of publishing to another, dictating both a new transformation of the text and the constitution of a new public.
    • multiform editions of serial novelists’ works, Turner 2005
  • 13-15 good on the way that publishers’ understanding of how they thought readers read feeds back into format: "...the intent was to inscribe the text into a cultural matrix that was not the one that its original creators had in mind, and by that means to permit ‘readings’, comprehensions, and uses that might have been disqualified by other intellectual habits."
    • McGill 2013 maps this with Dickens in America copyright-free publication
  • 17 conventionally accepted oppositions in how reading practices can change the work: silent/aloud, intensive/extensive, private/sociable
    • too simple and too teleological in development from Middle Ages to enlightenment
    • Blair 2010 falls into the second
  • 18 another set of transformations: technological revolution (Eisenstein 1979), change from roll to codex, change in literacy/reading modes— more interesting to think about how these mutations "related to each other"
  • 22 historical practices reverse the elite/silent, popular/aloud dichotomy (reading aloud a basis for elite sociability)—might not practices do the same for novel/silent/intensive?

2 Figures of the Author

  • ’’’the history of the book is useful for thinking about the development of conceptions of authorship’’’
  • 25 McKenzie 1986 parallels descriptive/analytical Anglo-American bibliography and structuralist criticism— the self-sufficient work of art/text
    • shift in 80s with McKenzie et al. to historically oriented, "poststructuralist" bibliography
  • 26 Anglo-American bibliography was "thus a history with neither readers nor authors," contributing to "the death of the author"(paradoxically given its root in scholarly editing)
  • Febvre & Martin 1958 lose the author in the French post-Annales school, too
  • 27 argument Whether the history of the book neglects the author or leaves him or her to others, it has been practiced as if its techniques and discoveries were irrelevant to the history of those who produced texts, or as if that history has no importance for the comprehension of works.
  • nice potted history of reception theory, new historicism, and sociology of cultural production
    • Bourdieu: "analysis shifts to the laws of operation and the hierarchies proper to a given field (literary, artistic, [28] academic, religious, political, and so forth), to the structural relationships situating the various positions defined within a field, to the individual or collective strategies that those positions command, and to the transfer into the works themselves (in terms of genre, form, theme, and style) of the social conditions of their production.”
  • 28 the author in these approaches is not the Romantic hero: "As he returns to literary criticism or literary sociology the author is both dependent and constrained." By not being master of text or intention, by the social determination of literary production
  • 29 good rehash of Foucault author-function

(Which he traces to the period and dynamics covered inSt Clair 2004)

    • 32 By moving the figure of the author back in time and by articulating it with mechanisms for controlling the circulation of texts or for lending then authority, Foucault’s essay invites us to a retrospective investigation that gives the history of the conditions of the production, dissemination and appropriation of texts particular pertinence.
  • 36 [covering arguments about authors’ exclusive and perpetual rights in C18] The legitimation of literary property was thus based on a new aesthetic perception designating the work as an original creation recognizable by the specificity of its expression. This concept combining a unique form, the author’s genius, and the inalienabilty of the author’s ownership was argued during the conflicts [after 1709 statute and Tonson v Collins in 1760]
  • 37 Thus in the latter half of the c18 a somewhat paradoxical connection was made between a desired professionalization of literary activity...and the authors’ representation of themselves in an ideology of literature founded on the radical autonomy of the work of art and the disinterested ness of the creative act. On the one hand the...work became a negotiable commodity endowed with a valeur commerçante, as Diderot put it...On the other hand, the work was held to result from a free and inspired activity motivated by its internal necessities alone.
  • 38 This is different from the change Foucault maps: "After the mid-century the situation was reversed when a possible and necessary monetary appreciation of literary compositions, remunerated as labor and subject to the laws of the market, was founded on an ideology of creative and disinterested genius that guaranteed the originality of the work."
  • 39 When recourse to printing became unavoidable the effacement of the author that was typical of the "courtly tradition of anonymity" took several forms
    • ie, Swift’s anonymity, Gray’s device of a manuscript found by chance, Macpherson’s Ossian (Gidal 2015)
  • 46-7 but this goes back further to Don Quixote and to Jonson’s Workes, which he maintained he could control publication as an author, and his aristocratic-dedicated printed plays: these c16-17 authors adapting "the modern technology of dissemination to an archaic patronage economy" (qting Loewenstein)
    • again the persistence of patronage during print, going even further past Gissing et al to Yeats and Lady Gregory: "Freedom (of ideas or of commerce) seemed in no way contradictory to the protection of authority, beginning with the protection of a king" (48) (so troubling the clean definition of authorship [author-function] as subject to "penal authority" Foucault argues for)
  • 55 and even further back to Petrarch and manuscript culture
  • 57 The modern notion of ‘book’, which spontaneously associates an object and a work, although not unknown in the Middle Ages, separates off only slowly from the collection of several texts by a given author.

3 Libraries without Walls

  • 62 The dream of a library (in a variety of configurations) that would bring together all accumulated knowledge and all the books ever written can be found throughout the history of Western civilization.
  • 63 Even for those who held that a library must be encyclopedic, selection was an absolute necessity.
  • 65 double meaning of French "bibliothèque" in late c17: a space for books and also a "collection [or] compilation of works of the same nature”
    • can connect this to Piper 2009 on collected editions of Goethe and Price 2000 on anthologies (this provides the theoretical bridge to libraries)
    • 66 What is the genre thesaurus, catalogus, flores (florilegia) in Latin was usually bibliothèque in EM French (see Blair 2010)
  • l/u were there books summarizing c18 or c19 novels in Victorian Britain as there was in France?
  • 68 also anthologies: "Even if both genres offered extracts, their intention was not the same. The smaller works aimed at eliminating, selecting, and reducing rather than accumulating a multitude of separate and dispersed works in one collection[.]”
  • talking about utopia/uchronia: What happens to books in Erewhon? After London? News from Nowhere?
  • 69 libraries also as catalogues
  • 79-80 La Croix du Maine’s c16 desire to erect a physical library on "the basis of the practice of the commonplace book"
  • 88 The various meanings given to the term for a library thus clearly show one of the major tensions that inhabited the literate of the EM age and caused them anxiety. A universal library (or at least universal in one order of knowledge) could not be other than fictive, reduced to the dimensions of a catalogue, a nomenclature, or a survey. Conversely, any library that is actually installed in a specific place and that is made up of real works available for consultation and reading, no matter how rich it might be, gives only a truncated image of all accumulable knowledge. The irreducible gap between ideally exhaustive inventories and necessarily incomplete collections was experienced with intense frustration. It led to extravagant ventures assembling— in spirit, if not in reality— all possible books, all discoverable titles, all works ever written.

Epilogue

  • 90 "Forms effect meanings," DF McKenzie reminds us, and his lesson, which should be taken to heart, warns us to be on guard against the illusion that wrongly reduces texts to their semantic content. When it passes from the codex to the monitor screen the ‘same’ text is no longer truly the same because the new formal devices that offer it to its reader modify the conditions of its reception and its comprehension.
  • 91 the book as a powerful metaphor for understanding "the cosmos, nature, history, and the human body": "If the object that has furnished the matrix of this repertory of images (poetic, philosophic, scientific) should disappear, the references and the procedures that organize the ‘readability’ of the physical world, equates with a book in codex form, would be profoundly upset as well."
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