Roger Chartier TDS Seminar/Lecture

• see Chartier 1994

Lecture

• "Memory and Forgetting in Don Quijote"
• in tradition of French histoire du livre, history of the book as social history
• l/u Ricoeur 2000, dialectic between memory and forgetting
  • memory as struggle against forgetting
  • his intervention: no sense of socio/historical difference
• 2 modalities: memory as mental evocation (passive/active), memory and writing: memory embodied in material writing forms
  • the latter in DQ: librillo de memoria, erasable tablet for reuse
    • the relationship between memory and writing is ambivalent and fragile
      • traces are erasable
    • the librillo de memoria as material embodiment of the polarity between backup-forgetting and forgetting through effacement, just such an archive of memory
      • backup-forgetting as key to memory: Heidegger -- forgetting makes memory possible (Being & Time); Ferud: remembering doesn't happen without mourning
• 2 forms of writing surface: paper and slate
  • paper preserves but is exhaustible
  • slate has unlimited reception but not preservable
  • Freud: magic pad which keeps residue of inscription as a material analogy for apparatus of psychic structure
• words are never safe from oblivion and interruption in DQ, and Cervantes uses a common object of his own writing culture to highlight this fundamental tension
  • Piper 2009: literary works as engagements with the bibliographic imaginary of their time
• Borges's Funes: absolute memory, "memory as garbage disposal" - he can't think
  • "To think is to forget, to generalize, to abstract," not remembering
  • inverting Freud's psychic structure
• personal memory / collective memory: DQ remembers his experience on the one hand (not very well, or from before the novel starts), and his reading on the other
  • mobilizing quotes in his memory
  • labor of memory furnishing quotes to allow him to overcome circumstances, give meaning to the world
  • collective framework of personal recollection
• Borges, "Shakespeare's Memory"
  • erasure is necessary but traces remain
• Reading Don Q with categories from 400 years later -- Febvre (Febrve & Martin 1958) was against
  • deliberate anachronism
  • virtual intentions activated by latent potentialities inscribed in the work itself
  • articulating historical identity of a specific object articulated by Cervantes' fiction with transhistorical categories, spontaneously mobilized
  • is this latency inscribed or by the exchange with interpretation? Act of violence or of activation? Unclear
• Aristotle, memory as quest
• Libraries
  • externalizations/prostheses of memory
  • inscribed in series - library
  • memory as mental > in the Renaissance, constructed prostheses of memory (library, archives)
  • looking in each historical situation at the devices uses to tame the fear of overload and forgetting - what were the practices?

Seminar

• recs for library history:
  • 4 vol. Histoire Bibliotheque Francaise
  • History of bibliographic classification in German
  • Ricoeur, but you need someone inbetween
• Translation and the untranslatable
• mobility and plurality of texts for same work
  • authorship/anonymity
  • materialities: feuilleton, fascicle
  • horizons of expectation
• immigration of same work between languages and between genres
• it's too easy to imagine the book market succeeding patronage system - at least from the invention of print they exist simultaneously and ebb and flow between each other
  • the relationship does change as post-C18 when the work itself is commodified - see Chartier 1994 37
• "Chronogeography" of translation of DQ
  • the "noncontemporaneity of Europe" - Moretti, Atlas of Euro Novel
    • Shakespeare unknown except in the UK and Germany until the late C18
• Transmediation of Don Q - festivals, etc. - could be useful for Dickens
  • DQ in beatification ceremonies - "lo picaresco" - for St Teresa de Avila, Ignatius of Loyola
    • St Teresa in Middlemarch (Eliot, 1872) - imbrication of the novel form with her story from early on
  • circulation of fragments, not part of novel's horizon of expectations
• To follow editions, translations, and appropriations is to follow permanent reinvention
  • not just circulation: mobility, instability, inventivity
  • agents: publishers, playwrights, etc etc
• not comparative histories but connected histories (Sanjay something - l/u)
  • not separate and comparable but inseperable
• l/u Swiss book about Tang poetry translation