Chartier 1994

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.
  • the use of periodizing to include the old canon— St Clair 2004, Underwood 2013, Bowen 2009
• 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"
  • Knight 2013, esp Knight 2015
• 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?