PMLA 121 1

PMLA 121.1 Special Topic: The History of the Book and the Idea of Literature (Jan 2006)

• Essays to read: Price, Des Forges, Hutchison, McCoy, McDonald, Piper (in Piper 2009), Brown, Lerer

Price Reading Matter

• clear rhetorical positioning of book history for literary scholars
• 10 ..."Book history" has come to stand for materialist resistance to theory, to idealism, even to ideas.
• ... Bibliographers' failure to account for the specificity of the literary is all the more striking given how often their raw materials are borrowed from a canon established by literature departments. In 1932, W.W. Greg declared, "Books are the material means by which literature is transmitted; therefore bibliography, the study of books, is essentially the science of the transmission of literary documents."
  • in "Bibliography - An Apologia" -- too literary (he elsewhere corrects)
• 10 Intervention: What if, instead of asking what book history can do for literary criticism, we ask what literary theory can do for book history?
  • l/u Paul Duguid, "Material Matters: The Past and Futurology of the Book"
• 11 ...the question that this issue tries to address: how to reconcile reading with seeing, and linguistic structures with bibliographic objects.
• 12 ...if the book has been invisible (or intangible) to most twentieth-century literary critics, it isn't simply because we aren't trained to analyze material culture; it's also because a commonsense Cartesianism teaches us to filter out the look, the feel, the smell of the printed page.
• 13 In its fascination with the mundane, the material, and the social, the realist novel might appear to provide the easiest testing ground for book history.
  • easiest how? She contrasts with autobiography
• 15 Scholars are now less likely to think of manuscript being displaced by print than to conceive of both as competitors carrying out complementary roles (and freighted with different connotations) at any give time and place.
  • following Febvre & Martin 1958
  • she says same for orality and writing
• 15 The word idea in our title represents a bid to situate the study of material culture as a player in theoretical debates rather than as a bolt-hole from which to wait them out.

Hutchison Breaking the Book Known as Q

• the interpretive significance of the 1609 quarto page break for Sonnet 55
• 34 Implicitly, and perhaps insidiously, Vendler's sonnets argue that material form recapitulates poetic form.
• ...this essay argues for a reading practice that is attentive to both the materiality of the 1609 Shake-speares Sonnets and the effect of that materiality on the early modern scene of reading
• 35 1609 Q is unusual in breaking up sonnets between pages, given evidence of other sonnet sequences from late C16-early C17
• 39 If we are to read Q's breaks as carrying meaning - to recognize them as being worthy of literary attention - we must first suspend the nagging questions of intentionality that Auden's horror raises: "yes but did Shakespeare mean for those breaks to be there?"
• 46 To open up writing would be then (as Roland Barthes famously suggested) to suspend this fixation on authorial intention and return again...to the text itself.
• [The payoff: the type of analysis this framework allows in Sonnet 55] ...this reference to the flimsiness and vulnerability of paper forces us to confront the material presentation of this poem, to think of this vulnerability in terms of the very paper on which 55 is printed. After line 8, Q readers must turn over the page, thus taking fragile paper in their hands. here the thematic that Booth identifies is underscored both by the material presentation of the poem...and its staging of a physical reader-text interaction.... Through this touch, metaphoric paper materializes.
• 62 Not reading page breaks is itself a reading practice, a historically specific, socially determined act in which certain elements of materiality are granted attention and authority while others are not... Espousing instead an approach to the materiality of Shake-speares Sonnets that would take seriously the matter of Q's page breaks, this essay has understood the page and the page break to be units of meaning with urgent implications for the recognition of poetic form and for the interrelations between a history of the book and the idea of literature.