32104

SoSe 20: American Print Cultures from the Colonial Era to the Digital Age: Theory, Materiality, Aesthetics

Alexander Starre

Comments

ONLINE COURSE ----- Print culture studies and book history have been among the most vibrant fields of interdisciplinary inquiry in American Studies in the past decades. This course introduces students to the historical, cultural, and aesthetic analysis of material texts. While the printed book will be the center of interest, students will also investigate the expanded media ecology of print as embodied in pamphlets, magazines, and recent digital formats. The course first addresses theoretical and methodological dimensions; it will then follow a rough chronology of the evolution of print forms and technologies in North America. Each session covers foundational critical works and up-to-date scholarship on topics such as colonial print culture, print nationalism, shifting ideas of authorship and readership, multimodal literature, and the dynamics of race, class, and gender connected to material texts. Students will read seminal works by Robert Darnton, Elizabeth Eisenstein, Michael Warner, and Benedict Anderson alongside theoretical texts by Marshall McLuhan, Niklas Luhmann, and Amaranth Borsuk as well as recent interventions by Jonathan Senchyne, N. Katherine Hayles, and Trish Loughran. Pairing these readings with a set of primary “print objects,” the course explores key moments in American book history as represented in works by Benjamin Franklin, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harriet Monroe, Vladimir Nabokov, Jennifer Egan, and Mark Z. Danielewski. close

13 Class schedule

Regular appointments

Tue, 16:00 - 18:00 13 Class schedule

Tue, 2020-04-21 16:00 - 18:00

Lecturers:
Dr. Alexander Starre