---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Erik L. Johnson <erikj09(a)stanford.edu>
Date: Wed, Oct 2, 2013 at 12:43 PM
The Seminar on Enlightenment and Revolution, 1660–1830, a Stanford
University Humanities Center Research Workshop in Honor of John
Bender, is pleased to announce that its 2013–14 programming will focus
on a theme of special interest to EXLIBRIS members, "The Book in the
Age of Digital Humanities."
Colleagues involved in archival research and other aspects of the book
world or are very welcome to join us at the following fall 2013
events:
1. Wednesday, October 9, 5 pm
Denise Gigante, Professor of English, Stanford University
"The Other Ozymandias: Romanticism and Bibliomania"
Stanford Humanities Center, Board Room
Ozymandias founded an empire in remote antiquity but only his ruins
have come down to us. In Percy Shelley’s poem named after him, they
stand for an unbounded hunger for power that never can be quenched but
in death, a fit monument for what Keats once called “egotistical
sublimity.” For the purpose of this talk, Professor Gigante prefers
the phrase “Sublime Ozymandianism,” a sufficiently greedy aesthetic
that it requires some irony. While we do not normally think of
sublimity and irony as going together—typically, one cancels out the
other—she considers “Ozymandias” as a reworking of the Romantic
sublime in the context of something quite anachronistic to ancient
Egypt, namely, consumerism. And specifically, a form of consumerism
tied to a fascination with the past: antiquarianism. The phenomenon of
Romantic bibliomania was a literary form of antiquarianism, and the
Other Ozymandias in the title of this talk was the bibliomaniac.
2. Thursday, October 24, 5 pm
Claude Willan, Ph.D. Candidate, English, Stanford University
"The Return of the King: The Faces of Jacobite Poetry in Manuscript"
Stanford Humanities Center, Watt Room
In this talk, English Ph.D. candidate Claude Willan explores the
extent and the character of Jacobite poetry in manuscript between 1689
and 1745. More than half of these poems, which agitated for the return
of the house of Stuart to the throne of England or Britain, were
circulated in manuscript and have never been printed. The poetic
remnants of this vibrant culture are now scattered across the archives
of libraries in the US and the UK. Willan’s research shows how
Jacobite poetry circulated, among whom, how Jacobite poets tailored
their work specifically to manuscript, and how the forms of these
covertly circulated poems reflect the emotional and political
experiences of daily Jacobite life.
3. Thursday, November 14, 5:15 pm
Andrew Piper
Associate Professor, Department of Languages, Literatures, and
Cultures (German Studies), McGill University
"The Instrumentality of the Book"
Stanford Humanities Center, Watt Room
Co-sponsored by Stanford's German Studies Colloquium
What kind of knowledge instrument is a book? This talk will revisit
the instrumental nature of books – the way they shape readers’
knowledge of their world – by focusing on the changing nature of
instrumental environments during the Romantic period. Whether through
a reader’s personalized relationship with a book or the book’s passage
through a broader circuit of communication, books are most often
understood as singular, bound objects, ones that delineate material,
subjective, and epistemic closures. These closures arguably came to be
constitutive of the moment we call Romanticism. Piper explores what it
would mean instead to understand the book’s place within a larger
material ecology of instrumentation. How does an understanding of the
book within a broader horizon of epistemic things and our gestural
interactions with those things give us new insights not only into the
history of the book’s meaning as an instrument of knowledge, but the
knowledge environments in which it participates? How can we imagine
the book as part of, or as opposed to, the history of scientific
instrumentation?
Refreshments provided at all events; most events run 90 minutes
including time for discussion.
The Stanford Humanities Center is at 424 Santa Teresa Street,
Stanford, CA, on the main campus near Tresidder Student Union and the
Faculty Club.
Directions can be found at
http://shc.stanford.edu/about/contact-us/
Feel free to write me at erikj09(a)stanford.edu to join our mailing
list, or with questions about any events.
I hope to see some of you there!
Best regards,
Erik Johnson
-----------------
Seminar on Enlightenment and Revolution, 1660–1830
A Stanford Humanities Center Research Workshop, Stanford University
Graduate Student Coordinator: Erik Johnson, erikj09(a)stanford.edu
Faculty Coordinators: Denise Gigante and Blair Hoxby, English,
Stanford University
--