ANNUAL LECTURE IN THE HISTORY OF THE BOOK
Laura Mandell, Professor of English, Texas A&M
In this talk, I will discuss in detail relationships imagined to readers as writers in Pope, Gray, and Wordsworth, and how those relationships changed with the evolution of print from coterie to mass distribution. I will demonstrate three different prototypes for encoding the Dunciads [sic.], Gray's "Elegy", and the Preludes [sic.] that bring into relief the struggles — unsuccessful struggles, I might add — in which Gray and Wordsworth were immersed because of print. I conclude with an analysis of what Walter Ben Michaels misunderstood about Susan Howe's Emily Dickinson, arguing that Howe's understanding of Dickinson's fasicles captures what Michael's misses, a writerly antagonism to mass print insofar as it abrogates the possibility of literary conversation. My hope in encoding eighteenth-century texts is that we can re-open via digital media the writers' "coterie" conversation for which eighteenth-century writers wished. --Laura Mandell
Co-sponsored by LiteracyStudies@OSU, Digital Arts and Humanities Working Group, and OSU Libraries.
