2017 Conference

Harvard-Yale Book History Conference

April 28, 2017

Robinson Hall, Lower Library, Harvard Yard

9:30-10:10 Arrival/Coffee

10:10-10:15 Opening Remarks

10:15-11:45 Panel 1: Media and Transmission

Panelists: David Nee, Melissa Reynolds, Miles Osgood

Chair: Deidre Lynch

Panelists will consider the effects of transmitting stories, forms, and genres through and between diverse media. David Nee traces the “Pyramus and Thisbe” legend from oral tradition to manuscript to its unstable presence in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Melissa Reynolds argues that the genre distinction between recipes and other closely related writings such as spells and remedies emerged with print culture. Finally, Miles Osgood links Matisse’s illustrations for Joyce’s Ulysses more closely to the modernist heart of the novel than has previously been presumed.

11:45-1:30 Lunch

1:30-2:30 Panel 2: Antebellum: Reading and Writing

Panelists: Sonia Hazard and Sarah Robbins

Chair: David Hall

This panel will address the themes of authorship and reception within the antebellum U.S., specifically what it means for a text to be “read” and how an author goes about revising or rewriting his or her own text. Sonia Hazard complicates our understanding of how a book can act upon a reader and explores the different ways books create performative scripts that invite the bodies of readers to move beyond conventional modes of reading. Sarah Robbins examines the nature of self-revision within the context of African American literary production and investigates how revision functions under regimes of censorship, enslavement, and violence.

2:30-2:50 Break

2:50-3:50 Panel 3: National Projects

            Panelists: Ali John Madani and Louis Lu

Chair:  Kathryn James

This panel turns to the role of editing, criticism, and censorship in the construction of nationhood and national history. Madani looks into nineteenth-century disagreements between American critics and German intellectuals over the identification of Germany with Hamlet, suggesting that attention to the earliest editorial pushback against the “German turn” in Hamlet studies can shed light on contemporary critical debates. Lu offers the first study of Quotations of Chairman Mao as a physical object, investigating late twentieth-century attempts to dispose of the Cultural Revolution’s material remains and the present-day consequences of this effort. 

3:50-4:00 Closing Remarks/Wine Reception