HIST6220 - How to Read a Text

For all Humanities or Social Sciences, reading is a fundamental issue either because historians or literary critics can generally only listen to the dead with the eyes or because anthropologists decipher practices and rituals as “texts” that must be “read”. Whence the necessity to analyze what does it mean go read a text. This Graduate seminar would like to discuss the different theories of reading and to characterize the reading practices in relation with discursive genres and their material embodiment. Focused on early modern period (but not exclusively), associating conceptual analysis and specific textual studies, the seminar will make a large use of the primary materials present in the collections of our library.

The topics of the classes will be (not necessarily in this order) “Poetics of Reception and Reader-Response Theory”; “From New Criticism to New Historicism”; “Bibliography and the Materiality of Texts”, “Textual Mobilities: Attribution, Variants, Migrations” “Scribal Publication and Print Culture”; “Intellectual Techniques of the Renaissance: Arts of Memory and Commonplaces”; “The Stage and the Page: England, Spain, France”; “The Reading Revolution of the Eighteenth-Century: Do Books Make Revolution?”; “Practices as Texts”; “Voices and the Written Word: Transcription and Transmission”; “Texts and Images: Equivalence, Supplement, Substitute?”; “Translations between Hospitality and Violence”, “Is a Score a Text”.