In this three-part series, Peter D. McDonald addresses the challenge of uncovering, and then relating, the fugitive history of reading’s inwardness.
This event has already occurred
Hosted by: Kislak Center
Registration information: all three lectures will be held in person and also streamed virtually, via Zoom webinar. Please register separately for each lecture (see below).
“The difficulty lies with reading itself,” the leading book historian Robert Darnton remarked in 1996. “We hardly know what it is when it takes place under our noses.” Detailing its “external circumstances” is one thing; capturing the more elusive process of “inner appropriation” quite another—in fact, he thought the latter “may remain beyond the range of research.” Darnton was thinking mainly about the difficulty of recovering what readers in the past made of the books they read, but his doubts about our ability to describe “the ultimate stage in the communication circuit” remain as relevant for multimedia readers today.
In this three-part series, Peter D. McDonald addresses the challenge of uncovering, and then relating, the fugitive history of reading’s inwardness.
The Rosenbach Lectures are the longest continuing series of bibliographical lectureships in the United States. Rosenbach Fellows typically present three lectures over a period of one-two weeks.
The Workshop in the History of Material Texts is a weekly seminar with presentations by scholars on a wide variety of topics in book history, bibliography, manuscript studies, history of reading, publication and printing, and related topics.
Peter D. McDonald is Professor of English and Related Literature and Fellow of St Hugh’s College, Oxford. He is the author of Artefacts of Writing: Ideas of the State and Communities of Letters from Matthew Arnold to Xu Bing (Oxford, 2017); The Literature Police: Apartheid Censorship and its Cultural Consequences (Oxford, 2009); British Literary Culture and Publishing Practice, 1880-1914 (Cambridge, 1997); and co-author of PEN: An Illustrated History (Interlink/Thames & Hudson, 2021).
Featured image: Collage from William Kentridge’s 2nd Hand Reading project (2014), using the 1936 revised Oxford English Dictionary (with permission of Kentridge Studio)