Christopher Brown interviews Jeffrey Schnapp about The Electric Information Age Book: McLuhan/Agel/Fiore and the Experimental Paperback.
In The Jewish Bible: A Material History, David Stern explores the Jewish Bible as a material object―the Bibles that Jews have actually held in their hands―from its beginnings in the Ancient Near Eastern world through to the Middle Ages to the present moment. Drawing on the most recent scholarship on the history of the book, Stern shows how the Bible has been not only a medium for transmitting its text―the word of God―but a physical object with a meaning of its own. That meaning has changed, as the material shape of the Bible has changed, from scroll to codex, and from manuscript to printed book. By tracing the material form of the Torah, Stern demonstrates how the process of these transformations echo the cultural, political, intellectual, religious, and geographic changes of the Jewish community. With tremendous historical range and breadth, this book offers a fresh approach to understanding the Bible’s place and significance in Jewish culture.
You have been reading books since first grade if not earlier, but how much do you actually know about the physical object you’ve been reading—the book, the material artifact? Drawing on a great deal of recent scholarship and the incredible treasures in Houghton Library’s Special Collections, this course will study the history of the book in Western culture from its earliest stages in cuneiform tablets through ancient scrolls, hand-written medieval manuscripts of all types, early and late printed books down through children’s books of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and modernist artists’ books of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries including recent ones utilizing digital technology. The heart of the course will be weekly assignments in which students in groups of three each will be asked to intensively examine books in Houghton’s reading room and then report on them in the weekly seminar. Books studied in class will include papyrus fragments of Homer and the Old and New Testaments; Hebrew scrolls; early Qur’an leafs; Greek and Latin codices; Books of Hours and many other illuminated and decorated medieval manuscripts; the Gutenberg Bible; Copernicus, Galileo’s and Vesalius’ scientific works; censored books; the First Folio edition of Shakespeare; Alice in Wonderland; and Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés. For the final paper, each student will choose a book from Houghton’s collection and write a biographical study of its “life.”
Founded as a graduate program in 1904 and joining with the undergraduate Literature Concentration in 2007, Harvard’s Department of Comparative Literature operates at the crossroads of multilingualism, literary study, and media history.
© 2023 President and Fellows of Harvard College
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