Latest revision as of 17:00, 16 March 2017

Idea A: Vic Print Culture post-2012

Structure

Contemporary methodological approaches to print culture

Use approach of review abstracts - articulate: thesis, methodology (inc. archive and specific period covered), evidence/argument, relevance/stakes

• reception history toward(?) book history
  • start with Price (referring back to Secord)
  • Secord 2000
• book history
  • Miller 2013
  • Fyfe 2012
• periodicals studies
  • Houston 2014
  • Mussell 2012
  • Hughes 2014
• edge cases
  • Gidal 2015 -- eco-book history
  • Shannon 2015 -- spatial print culture (connection to Houston's network graphs)
• Imperial print culture
  • Hofmeyr & Burton 2014
  • McDonald Jane Eyre chapter(?)
• media theory/studies (cut?)
  • Gitelman
  • Parikka

Notes

• Approaches to print culture post-Leah Price
  • book history
  • media theory/studies
  • periodicals studies
  • eco-book history (Gidal)
  • information/library history
  • history of reading
  • Liz Miller, Leah Price — maybe not so narrow time-wise
  • Priya Joshi, In Another Country
  • How those fields meet and how a book history approach intersects with and is different from reception history
    • Joshi and Gidal are reception history
    • James Seacord Victorian Sensation
    • Price 2012 as "anti-reception history"?
    • Distinct from binding and wood pulp —> literal material history is not so much done (ecological/industrial underpinnings)
    • Wooden Os
  • acid, hazardousness in print industry
• Use this to build an exam list
• Reception history is important but I (am/am not) doing that —> where you want to go and what you want to find

---

• Notes from seminar
  • field-mapping, finding gaps
  • helpful for mapping directions groups of scholars are going in
  • lay out a question not so much a question
    • discrete, localizable question/field/problem
  • relatively narrow: "what are people saying in the last 5 years about political economy in the Vic novel"
  • with classic works referenced - what everyone cites
  • 10-15 books/articles, or 10-15 critics
  • payoff: what are people doing and why does that mater? stakes: what kind of research is persuasive to you?
  • doesn't need to be evaluative unless you really back it up (gap is one thing but "doing it wrong" needs more explication)
  • strategies:
    • constellation of articles around major text
    • read intros of books and say "these are the claims they're making" - take them at their word
      • "this person says x about her argument and that says y about the state of the field"
    • or substantial discussion of 3 books - more evaluative, same for say 5 articles

Knowledge Gaps

• Labor
• Straight up material history
• Reprint culture (Shakespeare, other "classics")
• More granular periodization (cf. Miller 2013 and Leckie 2015)

Reading List

• Price 2012 - Price, Leah. How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain.
• Gidal 2015 - Gidal, Eric. Ossianic Unconformities: Bardic Poetry in the Industrial Age. University of Virginia Press, 2015. Print.
• Ten Books that Shaped the British Empire (which chapters?)

Potential Sources

• Leckie 2015 - Leckie, Barbara. “ON PRINT CULTURE: MEDIATION, PRACTICE, POLITICS, KNOWLEDGE.” Victorian Literature and Culture 43.4 (2015): 895–907. Web.
• Miller, Slow Print
• Mussell, C19 Press in Digital Age
• Worth, Imperial Media
• Shannon, Dickens Reynolds Mayhew on Wellington St
• Toni Weller(?), Victorians and Information
• Hughes, Linda K. “SIDEWAYS!: Navigating the Material (Ity) of Print Culture.” Victorian Periodicals Review 47.1 (2014): 1–30. Print.
• Stauffer, Andrew M. “Victorian Paperwork.” Victorian Poetry 41.4 (2003): 526–531. Print.
• John, Juliet, and Matthew Bradley. Reading and the Victorians. Ed. Juliet John. Farnham: Farnham : Ashgate Publishing Ltd, 2015. Web.
• Gitelman, Lisa, and Geoffrey B Pingree. New Media, 1740-1915. MIT Press, 2004. Print.
• Hack, Daniel. The Material Interests of the Victorian Novel. University of Virginia Press, 2005. Print.
• King, Andrew, Alexis Easley, and John (John S.) Morton. The Routledge Handbook to Nineteenth-Century British Periodicals and Newspapers. Ed. Andrew King, Alexis Easley, and John (John S.) *Morton. Abingdon, Oxon : Abingdon, Oxon , 2016. Print.
• Krajewski, Marcus. Paper Machines: About Cards & Catalogs, 1548-1929. MIT Press, 2011. Print.
• Lee, Maurice S. “Searching the Archives with Dickens and Hawthorne: Databases and Aesthetic Judgment after the New Historicism.” ELH 79.3 (2012): 747–771. Print.
• Mussell, James. “‘Scarers in Print’: Media Literacy from Our Mutual Friend to Friend Me on Facebook.” Gramma: Journal of Theory and Criticism 21 (2015): 163–179. Print.
• Mussell, James. “THE PASSING OF PRINT: Digitising Ephemera and the Ephemerality of the Digital.” Media History 18.1 (2012): 77–92. Web. 15 Jan. 2015.
• Parikka, Jussi. The Anthrobscene. University of Minnesota Press, 2014. Print.
• Parikka Media Archaeology
• Rigney, Ann. “Things and the Archive: Scott’s Materialist Legacy.” Scottish Literary Review 7.2 (2015): 13–34. Print.
• Stauffer, Andrew M. “Ruins of Paper: Dickens and the Necropolitan Library.” Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net: 47 (2007): n. pag. Web. 15 Jan. 2015.
• Young, Alan R. “John Dicks’s Illustrated Edition of ‘Shakspere for the Millions.’” The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 106.3 (2012): 285–310. Print.
• Brake, "On Print Culture: The State We're In." Journal of Victorian Culture (2001)
• Gitelman, Lisa. Paper Knowledge: Toward a Media History of Documents
• Guillory, John. "On Genesis of the Media Concept." Critical Inquiry (2010)
• Howsam, Leslie. Old Books and New Histories. Toronto UP, 2006.
• Palmer and Buckland, eds. A Return to the Common Reader: Print Culture and the Novel.
• Rubery, Matthew. The Novelty of Newspapers: Victorian Fiction after the Invention of the News.
• Stiphas, Theodore. The Late Age of Print: Everyday Book Culture from Consumerism to Control.

Idea B: Victorian Thing Culture

Notes

• Work responding to or in the orbit of Freedgood 2006
  • constellation of articles around a major text (per JOT)
  • or read intros of books and say "these are the claims they're making" - taking them at their word
  • "this person says x about her argument and that says y about the state of the field"

Knowledge Gaps

• how to connect the narrative unconscious and the textual unconscious? A McLeodian and Freedgoodian reading?
  • it's striking that both use the metaphor of the subconscious and of memory
• what about anachronistic things like old books?

Reading List

• Freedgood 2006

Potential Sources

• Freedgood, "Ghostly Reference"
• Barthes, "Reality Effect"
• Stallybrass, "Marx's Coat"
• Price 2012
• Marcus (?) new description/literalism
• Sedgwick Reparative Reading
• Asa Briggs, Victorian Things
• Andrew H Miller, Novels Behind the Glass: Commodity Culture and Victorian Narrative
• Emily Apter, Feminizing the Fetish (about france)
• Apter and Pietz, eds, Fetishism as a Cultural Discourse
• Bill Brown, The Material Unconscious
• ibid., A Sense of Things
• ibid., "Thing Theory"
• Jones and Stallybrass, Ren Clothing and the Materials of Memory
• Spyer, ed, Border Fetishisms (Stallybrass's "Marx's Coat" is in it)
• Schor, Reading in Detail
• McLeod, FIAT fLUX
• Leighton and Surridge, Object Lessons: Victorians and the Material Text, Cahiers victoriens et eduoardiens (that whole issue)
• Cynthia Wall, "The Rhetoric of Description and the Spaces of Things," C18 Genre and Culture, ed. Dennis Todd and Cynthia Wall
• Michael Taussig, My Cocaine Museum
• Bizup, Manufacturing Culture: Vindications of Early Victorian Industry
• Goldhill, The Buried Life of Things

From Google Scholar:

• Ketabgian, Lives of Machines
• Plotz, Portable Property
• Wynne, Women and Personal Property in the Victorian Novel
• Buurma, "Anonymity, corporate authority, and the archive: The production of authorship in late-Victorian England" (VS 2007)
• Rappaport, "Imperial possessions, cultural histories, and the material turn: Response" (VS 2008)
• Kucich, "The Unfinished Historicist Project: In Praise of Suspicion" (counterargument??)
• The Storied Lives of Non-Human Narrators Lars Bernaerts, Marco Caracciolo, Luc Herman, Bart Vervaeck
• Brown, Textual Materialism, PMLA