32104

SoSe 22: Material Text Studies and American Print Cultures

Alexander Starre

Comments

Print culture studies and book history studies 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 expansive media ecology of print as embodied in pamphlets, periodicals, 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 Derrick R. Spires. Pairing these readings with a set of “print objects,” the course explores key moments in American book history as represented in works by John Eliot, Benjamin Franklin, Phillis Wheatley, Pauline Hopkins, Harriet Monroe, Shelley Jackson, Jennifer Egan, Mark Z. Danielewski and others. close

14 Class schedule

Regular appointments

Wed, 10:00 - 12:00 14 Class schedule

Wed, 2022-04-20 10:00 - 12:00

Lecturers:
Dr. Alexander Starre